Over the last 10 years I’ve started a handful of businesses. The majority of them failed and lost me a lot of money, but luckily a few succeeded and made me more than what I lost.

While I haven’t figured out the formula for success, I’ve realized that if I avoid a few business mistakes, my odds of succeeding drastically go up. Here are 7 business mistakes you ought to avoid:

You can’t control what your competition does, but you can control what you do. The goal isn’t to perfect your business, but instead you need to perfect the process of moving fast.

If you don’t know about the lean startup, you should get to know it. One of the big mistakes I’ve made when I first started, that I don’t make now, is that I used to move way to slow. Really slow!

Make sure you move as quickly as possible, even if that means you aren’t releasing something that’s perfect.

I used to be a perfectionist, but I realized that nothing would ever be perfect. And more important what sets a great product or service from a good one is that a great one is simple to use.

For example, one of the big reasons that Hulu dominated the online TV streaming space is that their website was much more easier to use than competitors like Joost.

You don’t have to have the most features to succeed, and it isn’t about having a ton of bells and whistles, instead it’s about creating something that is easy to use. If a 5th grader can use your product, you’ve done something right.

Whether you have a finished product or not, it doesn’t matter. You should always be pitching what you are going to have for companies to use. It’s never too early to lock in deals and best of all it will help you cover your costs.

Money doesn’t grow on trees and you can’t always rely on investors or family to bail you out. If you can’t make money you won’t be in business long. And more importantly, you need to get to profitability.

At least half of the time, you should be working on closing deals. And if you can’t do that, at least one person on your team should be dedicated to increasing the company’s revenue.

No matter how good your business maybe, there will be bad times. It could be a lawsuit, or an upset customer that goes to the press or a crashing economy.

Because these bad times happen, you need to be prepared for them. You can do so by:

• Keeping your overhead low.
• Never deplete your bank account and have a healthy reserve (at least a few months if not a year).
• Don’t waste money on unnecessary things like a fancy office.
• Offer employees stock options so you don’t have to give them as much cash, plus this allows them to make more if the company sells.

What do Microsoft, Google and Apple have in common? Well of course they are all tech companies… but what else do they share? They were all founded by more than 1 person.

Having a co-founder helps, especially in the early days. There isn’t enough time in the day for you to do everything, and there isn’t enough money for you to hire all of the people you need.

If you don’t have a co-founder yet, you better start looking for someone. And don’t just jump right in as it’s like a marriage. It’s hard to get divorced and if you don’t have the right partner, you won’t be happy.

A good business partner is one that you get along with, isn’t afraid to speak their mind, and most importantly brings something to the table that you don’t have.

It’s hard to scale a company if you don’t have processes in place. You need to create them. Whether it is for engineering, sales, or marketing, every department needs processes.

These processes will allow you to bring on new employees quicker, train them faster, and get them up and running without them making too many mistakes.

When creating these processes you can’t just expect new employees to create them for you. You to need to actually try to do their job yourself and figure out what roadblocks they will run into and how to solve them. Once you have processes set in place, it will be easier for you to manage your employees and make them more efficient.

The best thing I did from day one, is to build up my network. From getting to know venture capitalists, to becoming friends with designers and developers, you can never have a big enough network.

The more people you know, the more companies you’ll be connected to. And who knows, one of them may send a million bucks your way through a big contract or better yet, one may acquire you.

If you look at some of the most successful companies out there, they didn’t do well because they have a great product or service, but instead the co-founders or CEO were well connected. And they were able to leverage these connections to ensure that their business makes money.

 
Conclusion

You can’t predict that your company will succeed or fail because you can’t control things like timing and luck. But if you avoid the mistakes I mentioned above, you’ll increase your odds of succeeding.

Do you know of any other business mistakes that you ought to avoid? Feel free and share them by leaving a comment.

About the Author

Neil Patel is the co-founder of 2 Internet companies: Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics.

Through his entrepreneurial career Neil has helped large corporations such as Amazon, AOL, GM, HP and Viacom make more money from the web.

By the age of 21, Neil was named a top 100 blogger by Technorati, and one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal.

You can find Neil on Quicksprout.com, Facebook or Twitter.

Joshua Davis is an American web designer, author and artist in new media. He was an early pioneer in the use of Macromedia Flash as a tool to generate Art. He is the author of Flash to the Core (2002) and was featured in the seminal book New Masters of Flash (2000).

About the Author

Open technology is cheaper, stronger, more reliable, more fun and more rational than closed technology. Open source is most well formed in the web software industries, and HTML5, the brand for open web technology, has built enormous business value on top of this approach to commercial software.
Table Of Contents:

• Standards Drive Down the Cost of Production
• Standards Are for Common Problems
• Engineers Like Open Source
• The Open Source Workflow
• HTML5 Brings New Business Value
• The Web of Open Software
• There Is Always A Reason To Spend Money On Open Web Technology

Standards commodify technologies. When one approach to solving a problem is standardized, and one programming interface for interacting and consuming this solution is idiom-ized, the cost of using that technology (hiring programmers that know it, finding companies that support it, and so forth) becomes less expensive.

Open source software allows for standards to emerge within a given industry or problem space. Because open source software is free to use and free of intellectual property restrictions, stakeholders from competing organizations consume and develop the technology, improving the core of the open source project

In order to standardize a technology, standards bodies (like the W3C, ECMA, and others) make these technologies free (as in beer). That is, all members and contributors are required to forfeit essential claims to relevant patents.

When technology is open sourced, major stakeholders feel safe using and contributing to these technologies. This is in contrast to proprietary technologies whose stakeholders may choose to troll and sue their users for nearly arbitrary reasons.

Open sourcing the solutions to common problems in your software is cheap, and returns a lot of value.

The release-early-and-often always-be-shipping mantras of today’s startup culture actually grew out of the earliest healthy open source community: linux. In his 1997 essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Steven Raymond describes Linus Torvalds’ style as “release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity”.

The lean startup movement loves this approach, because it gets customer feedback early, and mitigates the risks associated with product development in a bubble. The same is true for libraries and frameworks; open sourcing these components early and often lets you delegate bug finding and fixing to your users. You get the benefit of early feedback..

Another often overlooked benefit to using open source is that engineers like it. In addition to speed and resource saving, engaging in open source affords engineers an opportunity to be included in and recognized by a community of peers. Engaging in open source is also a way for engineers to find and learn new technologies. Learning new things is hugely important for engineer quality of life. Kiran Prasad, LinkedIn’s mobile development lead, recently told Venture Beat “getting to play with a trendy new technology is like candy for most developers” and that this was one of the reasons they used Node.js on their new mobile product.

Open source software is one of the major ways that we learn about compelling and elegant solutions to problems from our peers.

In the preface to his book, The Hacker Ethic, Pekka Himanen describes the hacker ethic as “a new work ethic…”, one motivated “…by a desire to create something that one’s peer community would find valuable.”

Developers, engineers, programmers, or what ever you want to call us, are creative people. We are more like artists than we are like scientists. We do our best work in ‘the zone’. We each have our own aesthetics for code organization and syntax. We strive for elegance in programs. In this way we are hackers; tinkerers. We often care more about learning new things and being recognized by our peers than we care about money or vacation days. We love to use new technologies because it gives us a chance to learn new things.

The open source workflow has emerged in it’s own right as a strong choice for distributed and/or large teams. The workflow that Zack Olman describes in his well received How Github Uses Github to Build Github presentation is an increasingly common workflow for the fortune 10 and the lean startup product alike.

fork > branch > commit commit commit > push > pull request > discussion/code review > commit commit > push > discussion/code review > commit > push > … > merge is the workflow in my office, and one that our customers’ teams are benefiting from on their own.

This asynchronous workflow has grown out of the age of distributed open source collaborations between teams and individuals from different companies and time zones, but it is also conducive to the deep uninterrupted focus that programmers want.

Today’s open source workflow was invented by the Linux community and perfected on the web. In the web software industries we have structured celebrity around the release of new open source projects. Recruiters look at github profile repo counts as a new metric, and industry conferences are littered with talks about new microframeworks.

Almost every web application team uses open source software, and they all use Open Web standards. The web software industries represent the most well formed example of open source workflow.

The Open Web Platform, or, HTML5, lends itself to open source software. HTML5 is increasingly becoming an abstraction on top of the operating system, and open source JavaScript libraries act both as a way to add even higher levels of abstraction on top HTML5, and to reform those abstractions and articulate them back to the standards groups.

HTML5 exposes new features to the web application developer that allows us to truly build desktop-style applications in the web browser. Exposing these features to the web browser allows programmers to build the software they have already been building for the desktop, but with the benefits of the open web; easy deployment, instant software updates, no install process, linkability, virality, and more.

This also affords teams the ability to build more maintainable cross platform/device products with a single integrated code base instead of having to maintain separate Mac, PC, Linux, Android, iOS, etc versions of their software.

As the category of web software industry grows with new industries joining every year, and web developers look to those other industries to learn about their software design principles, patterns and approaches, so, too, should those industries look to web development to learn about healthy software workflows. There is always a good reason to spend money on open source.

About the Author

Boaz Sender founded Bocoup, the open web technology company where he does open web research, and runs the Bocoup Gamelab, a venture backed HTML5 games incubator.

Boaz cares deeply about keeping the open web, and this is the focus of his work at Bocoup.

Photo by “Cowboy” Ben Alman

In the early days of the web, some of us were young and naïve enough to believe that links needed to be blue and underlined. As the browser default, it looked as though any deviation from this standard just created problems for the user.

It was, of all people, an astrophysicist who set the defaults in the first browsers. And everyone just followed suit.

Little did we know how much trouble we were causing because we picked blue, underlined links. Links are the most important parts of any web page, yet these attributes are the worst possible choices.

The color blue is the hardest for you to see. Because of a shortage of color receptor cones in your eyes, your brain has to work extra hard to perceive the color blue. As we get older, those few blue cones we have start to deteriorate quickly. Men older than 45 years, slowly lose the ability to discern different shades of blue. (It happens to women, but at a later age, because women are better made.)

Of all the text styling options in common use, underline was also a poor choice (as compared to something like bold or italics). Most humans (except those suffering from neuro-optical issues like dyslexia) read entire words or phrases at a time. The brain looks at the shape of the word to discern what it says. Underlined text changes the shape of the word, cutting off the descenders, forcing your brain to work extra hard.

Who would’ve picked this particular combination of blue and underline to highlight the all critical link? Well, it wasn’t a trained ergonomist, perceptual psychologist, or human factors specialist. Nope. It was, of all people, an astrophysicist who set the defaults in the first browsers. And everyone just followed suit.

Links can be any color they want, but they need to be distinct from the other stuff on the page to work.

 

Fortunately, we’ve learned that we can leave behind blue and “underlines”, introducing colors and text attributes that deliver delight and beauty to our web pages. We regularly find links that are green, black, and white, along with every other color in the spectrum. Our brains don’t mind, and we have no trouble navigating the site

On the John Deere Site, we find non-underlined links in the corporate green, along with white and black. The page looks professional and is easy to navigate.

However, all is not perfect when it comes to how we color our links. There are choices that make life harder for our users. It’s not related to a specific color, but the relationship between how we style the links and everything else on the page.

On the LA Times, it’s hard to discern what’s a link is what isn’t.

Look at this page from the LA Times web site. In the top story at the top, what’s a link? Is the headline a link? Is the subhead? The blue “Discuss” marker? The bullets? Is the photograph a link to something? How about the caption?

We can’t tell what’s there for us to read and what leads us to more about this story. The problem is more than just a choice of color. For the LA Times, it’s a lack of a visual language that helps the user know what they can do on the page.

Links can be any color they want, but they need to be distinct from the other stuff on the page to work.

The BBC uses the color red predominately on this page. By styling many of the links with a bullet, it becomes easy to figure out what you can click on.

This version of the BBC News’ headline page has a strong use of red. To compensate, the designers have chosen to put bullets in front of many of the headlines. The language becomes clear to the user quite quickly: the links are the things with the bullets.

When coming up with a visual language, styling and color can be your friends. The trick is to be consistent about it.

United’s Check-in Process uses blue to indicate what’s a link. Unfortunately, they also have black links and blue text that isn’t a link.

On United.com, the designers are almost consistent. For much of the site, text in blue (not underlined) is a link.

However, it’s not uncommon to encounter a page like the one above. Here, the “Print Help: Don’t have a printer?” black text is also a link. And the blue “Boarding Documents” and “Confirmed Flight(s)” headings are not links.

In our studies, users encountering this page show confusion over what they can do. Their attention is grabbed away from why they came to the page (to get their boarding pass) and focused on United’s inconsistent visual language.

Go ahead and change the colors all you want. But make sure you deliver a well thought out visual language to your users, so they know exactly how to get around your site.

Read more of Jared’s thoughts on links.
Do Links Need Underlines?
Lifestyles of the Link-Rich Home Pages
A Link Labeled “Product (or “Solutions” or “Clients”) is a Bad Idea

About the Author

Jared M. Spool is the founder of User Interface Engineering, the largest usability research organization of its kind in the world. If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective and knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers.

Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual UI Conference and Web App Masters Tour, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time. He is author of the book, Web Usability: A Designer’s Guide and co-author of Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work. You can find him on Twitter and at UIE.com. 

About the Author

Social Media is pervasive and is becoming the new normal in corporate marketing.  Brands who get this right are starting to build their own media networks rich with customer connections numbering in the millions. Right now, Coca-Cola has over 34 million fans on Facebook, but they’re hardly alone. Disney follows just behind with 29 million fans, Starbucks boasts 25 million, and Oreo, Red Bull, and Converse play host to over 20 million fans.  If we were to look at other networks such as Twitter and Youtube, we would see a recurring theme. People are connecting en masse with the businesses they support and new media represents the ability to cultivate consumer relationships in ways not possible with traditional earned or paid media.

Sounds great right? This might sound abrupt, but the truth is that we’re hardly realizing the potential of what lies before us. Everything begins with understanding not just how other brands are marketing themselves in social media, but also seeing what they’re not doing and envisioning what’s possible.

We’re already approaching the first of many crossroads that new media will present. Do we take the path of a social brand or that of a social business? What’s the difference? A social brand is just that, a business that is remodeling or retrofitting its existing marketing practices to new media. A social business is something altogether different as it embraces introspection and extrospection to reevaluate internal and external processes, systems, and opportunities to transform into a living, breathing entity that adapts to market conditions and opportunities.

 
It’s a tough decision to make right now especially at a time when all we read about is how much success many businesses are finding without having to answer this very question. With all of the newfound success in social networks, the truth is that we’re only just beginning to learn what’s possible and that’s where you come in. When compared to the investment in time and resources across the board, social media represents only a small part of the mix. But with your help, that’s all about to change.

The CMO Survey, an organization that disseminates the opinions of top marketers in order to predict the future of markets, recently published a report that gave credence to the fact that social media is taking off. One of the most profound takeaways from the report was this gem; “The “like button” [in Facebook] packs more customer-acquisition punch than other demand-generating activities.” With insights like this, it’s easy to see why the race to social is becoming heated.

The report also highlighted exactly where social fits in the marketing mix today and as you can see, despite all of the hype, it’s not a dominant focus yet. As of August 2011, the percentage of overall marketing budgets dedicated to social media hovered at around 7%. However, in 2012 the investment in social media will climb to 10%. And, in five years, social media is expected to represent almost 18% of the total marketing budget. Think about that for a moment. In 2016, social media will only represent 18%?

Queue the sound of a record scratching here. With businesses finding success in social networks, why are businesses failing to realize the true opportunity brought forth by the ability to listen to, connect with, and engage with customers? While there’s value in earning views, driving traffic, and building connections through the 3F’s (friends, fans and followers), success isn’t just defined simply by what really amounts to low-hanging fruit.

The truth is that businesses cannot measure what it is they don’t know to value. As a result, innovation in new engagement initiatives is stifled because we’re applying dated or inflexible frameworks to new paradigms.

Social media isn’t owned by marketing, but instead the entire organization. This changes everything and makes your role so much more important. It’s up to you to learn how to think outside of the proverbial social media box to see what others don’t, the ability to improve customers experiences through the evolution of a social brand into a social business. Doing so will translate customer insights from what they do and don’t share in social networks into better products, services, and processes.

See, customers want something more from their favorite businesses than creative campaigns, viral content, and everyday dialogue in social networks. Customers want to be heard and they want to know that you’re listening. How businesses use social media must remind them that they’re more than just an audience, consumer, or a conduit to “trigger” a desired social effect.

Herein lies both the challenge and opportunity of social media.  It’s bigger than marketing. It’s also bigger than customer service. It’s about building relationships with customers that improve experiences and more importantly, teaches businesses how to reimagine products and internal processes to better adapt to potential crises and seize new opportunities.

When it comes down to it, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Foursquare, are all channels for listening, learning, and engaging.  It’s what you do within each channel that builds a community around your brand. And, at the end of the day, the value of the community you build counts for everything. It’s important to understand that we cannot assume that these networks simply exist for people to lineup for our marketing messages or promotional campaigns. Nor can we assume that they’re reeling in anticipation for simple dialogue. They want value. They want recognition. They want access to exclusive information and offers. They need direction, answers and resolution.

What we’re talking about here is the multidimensional makeup of consumers and how a one-sided approach to social media forces the needs for social media to expand beyond traditional marketing to socialize the various departments, lines of business, and functions to engage based on the nature of the situation or opportunity.

In the same CMO study, it was revealed that marketers believe that social media has a long way to go toward integrating into the overall company strategy. On a scale of 1-7, with one being “not integrated at all” and seven being “very integrated,” 22% chose “one.” Critical functions such as service, HR, sales, R&D, product marketing and development, IR, CSR, etc. are either not engaged or are operating social media within a silo disconnected from other efforts or possibilities. The problem is that customers don’t view a company by silo, instead they see one company, one brand, and their experience in social media forms an impression that eventually contributes to their view of your brand.

The first step here is to understand business priorities and objectives to assess how social media can be additive in achieving these goals. Additionally, surveying the landscape to determine other areas of interest as its specifically related to your business.

• Are customers seeking help or direction?
• Who are your most valuable customers and what are they sharing?
• How can you use social media to acquire and retain customers?
• What ideas are circulating and how can you harness user generated activity and content to innovate or adapt to better meet the needs of customers?
• How can you broaden a single customer view to recognize the varying needs of customers and how your organization can organize around each circumstance?
• What insights exist based on how consumers are interacting with one another? How can this intelligence inform marketing, service, products and other important business initiatives?
• How can your business extend their current efforts to deliver better customer experiences and in turn more effectively unit internal collaboration and communication?

Customer demands far exceed the capabilities of the marketing department. While creating a social brand is a necessary endeavor, building a social business is an investment in customer relevance now and over time. Beyond relevance, a social business fosters a culture of change that unites employees and customers and sets a foundation for meaningful and beneficial relationships. Innovation, communication, and creativity are the natural byproducts of engagement and transformation. As a social brand, we are competing for the moment. As a social business, we are competing the future in all that we do today.
 

About the Author

Brian Solis is principal at Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm and author of the new book on new consumerism and the need for new business models, The End of Business as Usual. Solis is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media.

Digital analyst, sociologist & futurist.

A digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Solis has studied and influenced the effects of emerging media on business, marketing, publishing, and culture. His previous book Engage, is regarded as the industry reference guide for businesses to build and measure success in the social web.

About the Author

Gary Vaynerchuk is the co-founder of VaynerMedia and New York Times bestselling author of “Crush It” and “Thank You Economy.” Considered the rock star of wine, Gary’s informed yet informal approach to wine appreciation has revolutionized the industry by demystifying wine for a new generation and empowering wine drinkers to trust their own palates. After the close of his incredibly successful Wine Library TV, Gary launch a more mobile-focused venture, Daily Grape. He has since retired from daily online video.

Known as the “King of Social Media,” Gary leveraged social media tools to build his brand, attracting over 90,000 daily viewers for Wine Library TV, and becoming the most downloaded podcast on iTunes in the Food category. Gary is one of the first-and one of a few-Facebook users who has maxed-out his friend limit, with over 17,000 pending friend requests. He is in the top 100 people followed on Twitter and has been headline keynote at South by Southwest Interactive conference and the New Media and Web 2.0 expos.