Business Lessons: 150+ startup mistakes and

entrepreneurship lessons shared by 55 successful

founders

Founder Interviews: The art of learning from other's mistakes.

By: Herby Fabius
Table of Contents
Introduction
About the Author
How to Use This Book
The Million Dollar Questions
Chapter One
Why Try Something New?
Why Mistakes and Failures?
The Feeling of Failure
Chapter Two
My Top Three Mistakes
Everyone Fails at Some Point
Chapter Three
Why Business Interviews are Awesome

Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Top 30 Startup Tips for Newbie Entrepreneurs
Top 20 Reasons Your Startups Will Fail:
Chapter Six
Final Thoughts
Thank You!
 Introduction
“Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones
learn from the mistakes of others.” ― Brandon Mull, Fablehaven
About the Author
Herby Fabius is an entrepreneur, social media expert, blogger, and
podcaster residing in Connecticut. He founded BillionSuccess.com, a
startup interview site where he shares weekly founder interviews. Over the
years, BillionSuccess.com has featured some of the most successful
founders in today's industry.
BillionSuccess.com was created out of pure necessity to motivate new
entrepreneurs and teach them how to launch new businesses. Over the
years, the site has featured successful entrepreneurs like Brian Scudamore,
founder of 1-800-GotJunk, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends,
Rand Fishkin of MOZ, Neil Patel of KISSmetrics, and Michael Chasen,
cofounder of Blackboard which was acquired by Providence Equity
Partners for a whopping $1.6 billion dollars.
Aside from speaking with amazing entrepreneurs, Herby was also the
cofounder of Triplefy, a tech startup out of New Haven, CT. Triplefy was an
online platform created specifically for small business owners which allows
them to sell online gift certificates.
Herby dedicates himself to sharing a positive message and sharing business
stories to help others succeed. He is a startup enthusiast, a business
motivator, and some have even called him a “promoter of
entrepreneurship.”
Key Accomplishments:

− Cofounded Triplefy – gift certificate platform for small business

owners.
 − Founded BillionSuccess.com – Popular startup interview site
educating new entrepreneurs.

− Startup Weekend organizer at Fairfield University – Fairfield, CT

− Entrepreneurship Foundation – An active member in Fairfield, CT
working directly with president Mike Roer.

Featured & Mentions:

Herby has been featured on some of the most popular startup magazines
and podcasts for his work, including top tech startup magazine Tech.co,
small business publication Small Business Trends, and Faces of
Innovation. He also is an active contributor to some of the top business
publications on the net including: YFS magazine, Under30CEO, The Phat
Startup, and Noobpreneur.

Connect with Herby Fabius:

herby@billionsuccess.com

Instagram @BillionSuccess

Twitter @BillionSuccess

How to Use This Book

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” ―
Thomas A. Edison
Over the past five years, I have interviewed over two hundred
entrepreneurs. I had the opportunity to speak with some of the most
inspiring and successful entrepreneurs all over the world. I learned a ton
from these chats, but today I am sharing this here so that everyone can have
the same opportunity.
As an entrepreneur, the last thing that I want to do is reinvent the wheel. I
believe that there's a lot to learn in this world and education doesn’t
necessarily mean you have to be in school.
I absolutely love doing these interviews. I find it easier to learn when I ask
specific questions. To me, a specific answer from an experienced individual
holds more weight than some general answer from a text book. Since the
beginning of my entrepreneurship journey, I always thought it was best to
learn from other's mistakes versus making your own. I believe there is just
as much to learn from failure, as there is to learn from success. It is with
that thought that I've decided to write this book sharing the top 150
mistakes and lessons entrepreneurs learned from launching a business.
Honestly, there are a ton of places on the net where you can go for
entrepreneur interviews, but I can almost guarantee you that most of them
will be just another success story. Very rarely does anyone focus on the
struggles and obstacles entrepreneurs face on their journey to success.
This book is a compilation of the answers that I've gathered over the years,
coming from entrepreneurs of all sorts – the people who have shared the top
three mistakes they made launching their businesses. At the time of the
interview, most of these companies were in their startup stages, but there
are quite a few big, multi-million dollar companies included as well.
Founders from companies like 1-800-GotJunk, KISSmetrics, and
Blackboard have all participated. I am grateful.

The Million Dollar Questions

What were the top three mistakes you made
launching your business?
This is the exact question that I asked the entrepreneurs to answer in the
interview. Now, please understand that while some of these answers may
seem somewhat similar, I guarantee you that they're all unique. They all
come with great explanation to the entrepreneur's situation at the time, and
most of them even offer tips on how to avoid making them.
The purpose of this book is for you to learn from and also understand that
failure is a part of your journey. As an entrepreneur, you will make
mistakes. There's no way around it. The goal here is to help you learn from
them and to help you prepare yourself for the rocky roads ahead.
 Chapter One
Why Try Something New?
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything
new.” ― Albert Einstein
Einstein said it best. If you have never made mistakes, then you simply
have not tried anything new. This book is my something new. For my very
first book, there are a number of topics that I could have chosen to write
about, but as I previously mentioned, we'll focus this one on past
experiences of entrepreneurs.
And here is why …
I believe that experiences are the building blocks of our future. I mean,
think about it. We make decisions about our future based on past
experiences. So wouldn’t you say that it is smart to have as many of them as
possible? As much as everyone would love to fully experience everything
in this world, that is unfortunately not possible. We simply don't live long
enough to experience it all. My solution to this problem is to be a doer, take
chances, and most importantly … learn from others as much as you can.

Why Mistakes and Failures?

As a business fanatic, nothing gets me more excited than reading a good
rags-to-riches story. But as someone who wants to progress and achieve
great things in life, I find that success stories don’t always tell the whole
story. They make it all seem too easy. So in that sense, it is actually more
beneficial for me to focus on the mishaps. You know – the blood, sweat,
and tears of building a business rather than just the fame and glory.
Failure is such a defining moment. This is where you and only you can
decide what happens next. It is the moment where true entrepreneurs and
visionaries get separated from the so-called "wantrepreneurs." It is where
you prove to yourself and those around you just how badly you want it.
 “We learn from failure, not from success!” ― Bram Stoker,
Dracula
Everyone fails at something. If you were to choose any successful
entrepreneur and do a quick online search about their life, I can almost
guarantee you that you'll discover a significant failure in their past that
pretty much shaped their success today.
Most people think of failure as something they tried that didn’t work. I
think it’s actually the other way around. To me, failure is mostly the stuff
that we didn’t try at all. The truth is, you can only fail at something when
you stop trying and also when you don’t learn from your mistakes. So if
you make a habit of always completing your work and you continue to give
your absolute best until the end, then the chances of you feeling like a
failure are very minimal.

The Feeling of Failure

When you really think about it, failing is not the worst thing here. What
kills us the most are the feelings that it comes with. It's crazy how someone
can feel like a total failure even when they haven’t tried anything at all. The
feeling of being disappointed, unaccomplished, unsuccessful, and unworthy
when we compare ourselves to others is what we fear the most. As humans
we want to be accepted so we hate it the most when we're disappointing
other people.
Everybody wants to win, even when they act like they don't. The "losing"
feeling is something that no one wants to be associated with. It’s a fact. We
all want to win. The irony here is that winners are usually people who are
just tired of losing.
 Chapter Two
My Top Three Mistakes
This book wouldn't have been right if I didn’t share some of my mistakes
with you. However, it is now that I realize how hard it is to choose just
three since I've had so many. I am sharing the top three that I think hurt my
progress towards success the most. The following are some of the things
that I wish I had done differently.

#1 - Starting too late

"Time is Our Most Precious Commodity" ― Unknown
This is by far my most regrettable mistake yet. I simply took too long to
take action. I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur; I just didn’t
know where to start. I always thought that I'd have to come up with some
crazy, unique invention to start a business. With that broken mindset, I
wasted way too much of my time doing nothing.
I know you might be thinking that "time" is not such a big loss, but you
should know that "time" is a resource, and it probably is the most precious
one in this world. Our time on this planet is very limited. In other words, it
is very expensive. Losing time is losing money so as entrepreneurs, we
should make the best of it.
#2 - No focus and no direction
"F.O.C.U.S. - Follow One Course Until Successful" ― Robert T. Kiyosaki
When I finally got my first business going, I didn’t take it seriously enough
for it to become a success. I was doing things as they came. I never really
had a real direction for building a company. Since I didn’t know where I
was going, there was no way for me to figure out how to get there. With no
plan and no direction in place, I ended up going back and forth on multiple
ideas when I should have chosen a single path and stuck with it.
#3 - Caring too much about other's opinion
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't
matter, and those who matter don't mind.” ― Bernard M. Baruch
One way to fail for sure is by worrying about what other people think. It is
absolutely no way to live and it is very unhealthy. This thinking crippled
my business and productivity for a very long time. Concerned with other's
opinions of my work, I failed to promote it. I kept my business quiet for the
first couple of years and as a result, I ended up working on projects that I
never published. I would start working on projects and then later convince
myself that people wouldn’t care, so I would stop in the process and jump
on the next.
Once again, I ended up wasting time and resources with this vicious cycle.

What This Means

As an entrepreneur, you have to learn to get comfortable with being
uncomfortable. The good news for me now is that it is all in the past, but
the lessons I learned will stay with me forever. You should never let the
opinion of other people cloud your vision. Also remember that no matter
what business you're running, never be shy to promote yourself.
I had the opportunity to share some more of my mistakes on the
publications below.
YFS Magazine: Top 5 Business Mistakes and Regrets Shared by
Successful Entrepreneurs
Under 30 CEO: 5 Quick Reasons Why Your Startup Failed
The Phat Startup: 3 Simple Lessons Learned from Running a Failed
Startup

Everyone Fails at Some Point

Some of the most successful people we hear about in the news are big time
failures. We don't hear about this in the media because failure is just not as
attractive as success. It is not something that people generally want to hear
about so that’s why there's very little to no media coverage for the people
who failed.
Let's take a look at some of the failed projects that you might not have
heard of from well-known entrepreneurs.

Bill Gates – Entrepreneur (Microsoft)

"It's fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of
failure."
We all know Bill Gates and what he has accomplished with Microsoft, but
did you know that prior to Microsoft he had a company called Traf-O-Data
which went nowhere? Although that project was a failure, it was the
knowledge and experience he acquired working there that paved the way
for him to successfully create Microsoft.

Sir Richard Branson – Entrepreneur (Virgin Atlantic)

"Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again."
Okay, so you've probably heard of Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Records, and
Virgin Mobile, but have you ever heard of Virgin Cola, Virgin Brides,
Virgin Car, or Virgin Vodka? Well, most other people haven't either. These
were some of Sir Richard Branson's previous failed companies before
succeeding with the Virgin brand.

Sara Blackley – Entrepreneur (Spanx)

"My dad encouraged us to fail. Growing up, he would ask us what we failed
at that week. If we didn't have something, he would be disappointed. It
changed my mindset at an early age that failure is not the outcome, failure
is not trying. Don't be afraid to fail."
Originally, Sara wanted to be an attorney right up until she failed the LSAT
test; she reconsidered and became an entrepreneur launching Spanx in the
year 2000. According to Forbes, she is now worth over $1.1 billion dollars.

Thomas Edison – Inventor

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
Thomas Edison is one of my personal favorites and possibly the most
inspiring one yet. It was reported that Mr. Edison had tried more than 9,000
experiments before he was successful with the first light bulb. Now, I think
you would agree that this guy could have easily become the most failed
inventor in the world. But with a strong dedication and ability to learn from
the past, he was able to create some of the most important inventions of our
time.

J K Rowling – Author (Harry Potter)

“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to
myself that I was anything other than I was and began diverting all my
energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.”
J K Rowling was fired from the London office of "Amnesty International"
because she kept writing stories on the computer on company time.
J K Rowling also sent her manuscript (Harry Potter) to twelve different
publishers and got rejected by each one before she finally struck a deal with
Bloomsbury, the publishing company. After each rejection, she recalled
losing confidence in her work. But she never gave up. She kept working
hard and continues to pursue her dreams.
Sir James Dyson – Entrepreneur (Dyson)
James burned through his savings of 15 years and tested about 5,126
prototypes before succeeding with his vacuum cleaner. The Dyson brand
became the best-selling bagless vacuum in the United States worth over 4.5
billion dollars (Forbes).

Walt Disney – Entrepreneur (Disney World)

This one is almost too funny. Walt Disney, the guy who gave us the most
imaginary place in the world (Disney World), apparently didn’t have
enough imagination for this one newspaper editor, so they fired him for
lacking imagination. They said he had no good ideas.
The Pattern
I am not sure if you can see it, but there seems to be a pattern here. Every
single entrepreneur that I learned about failed at some point in time. I mean,
it even seems like they only succeeded because they failed so many times
before. So I ask myself, “Why”?
My only conclusion is that success only comes from experiments. With
experiments come failures and failures will, of course, bring experience.
The more you fail, the better you become. The better you become, the better
the next experiment. This process pretty much goes on until you've got a
working formula.
No matter what it is that you do in life, you can only be successful at it by
duplicating a "working formula." No one gets a free pass. If you want to be
successful, you must first do the experiments and be ready to fail.

Becoming an Expert
"It never gets easier; you just get better.” ― Unknown
Michael Gladwell, the author of the bestselling book "Outliers," said that in
order to become successful, one must become an expert. And becoming an
expert requires at least 10,000 hours of exercising your skill. To put this in
perspective, this is roughly about 10 years of practicing.
So it's fair to say that almost nothing works the first time. There is a
learning curve that comes with every new endeavor.
 Chapter Three
Why Business Interviews are Awesome
I believe that everyone knows something they can teach someone else.
Everyone's entrepreneurial journey is different. We are all blessed with very
unique life experiences and I think it is our duty to share those experiences
with as many people as possible.
I believe it is our duty to do what we can to teach other people from our
past mistakes. If we would all learn from one another, a lot of setbacks and
headaches could be avoided. This is my reason for asking participants to
share their top three mistakes or lessons learned from starting their
business.
Now, you must understand that reading a book about other people's
mistakes will not excuse you from making your own, but it will make you
aware of them. With awareness comes precaution so if you were to ever
face a similar situation, my hope is that you'll have a better outcome.
I worked really hard to get participants to share their stories and I learned a
whole lot. I also didn’t want this research to be biased so I did my best to
diversify the answers. I reached out to very successful entrepreneurs as well
as people who are just in their startup stage. The industry varies from
technology, marketing, online retailers, business coaches, authors, all the
way to bloggers and podcasters.

The mistakes and lessons below are shared in the entrepreneur's

own words. It has not been enhanced or modified in any way. In
full disclosure, most of these have been shared on
BillionSuccess.com.
These interviews have helped thousands of readers and new entrepreneurs
across the globe so get ready, grab a pen and pad, and take some notes. Here
are the top mistakes and business lessons learned from entrepreneurs
launching their businesses for the first time.
We'll jump right into the first mistake. Let's see what this wonderful line of
entrepreneurs struggled with in the early days of their journey.
 Chapter Four
The Interviews: Digital Entrepreneurs (bloggers,
podcasters, coaches, expert authors)
(1) Small Biz Trends
Anita Campbell |Founder
Not investing enough in technology support soon enough:Today
you have to offer more than just a standard blog template to compete
with bigger entities, if you want to grow a publishing brand. A site
needs advanced features. You have to invest in custom plugins. And
even if you use standard WordPress plugins, we find that as the site
grows many of the plugins are inefficient at our volume of traffic, and
so one by one we replace them with custom versions simply for
performance. Also, server configuration and database optimization
strategies become so important.
Not publishing enough content:Here’s a simple truth: the more
content you publish, the more your traffic grows. Now… you have to
publish quality content, for sure — but quantity also matters for traffic.
Just last week we compared our traffic year over year. We increased
from an average of 4 posts a day to 6 posts a day over the past year,
and doubled visits and pageviews during that time. In other words, a
50% increase in content yielded a 100% increase in visits and
pageviews.
Our growth skyrocketed once we hired a full-time IT Manager to
handle programming and server administration: Before then we
were buying a block of hours from an outside firm each month, and
were very happy with their services except for one thing: we always
ran out of month in the first week! We used up all of our budgeted
hours quickly and never could get to the big growth plans we had. I
was constantly telling the rest of the team, “That project will have to
wait until next month.”
 Well, tempus fugit — before you know it, 10 months, a year goes
by and you’re still dreaming about that project but it’s not getting
done. Hiring a full-time person required taking a risk — it was a scary
expense for us to take on, but it paid off. Once we stopped that cycle of
budget-forced delay, growth accelerated quickly.

(2) Foundr Magazine

Nathan Chan |Founder
Not thinking big – I had such minimal thinking when first starting
foundr. If I had my time all over again, I would’ve started thinking
much bigger before I started and got traction and would be further
ahead in the journey than I am now! But you can’t know the answers
to everything right?
Not building my email list earlier – Mission critical
When I first started I was only concerned with making money.
Luckily enough I quickly realized that the amount of money you earn
is proportionate to how well you serve your community. So you need
to serve them damn well! Plus I ended up developing a real passion for
helping people along the way.

(3) Small Biz Lady

Melinda Emerson | Small Business Expert
I didn’t have a specific niche customer: I chased any and every
opportunity that came my way for the first three years I was in
business. I wasted so much time and money. Once we focused on the
healthcare industry and became specialists in developing content for
that niche, my life and business became so much better. I should have
done better research up front, on what specific customer or industry I
wanted to serve.
Not building a business that could survive without me: My first
company was a cult personality business. My personal energy made
 everything happen. I worked 7 days a week, and had no life.
Everything was great, as long as I was there telling everyone what to
do. But when I became ill when I was pregnant and put on bed rest for
six months, we almost went out of business. You must hire smart
people and empower them to make decisions, even if they do things
differently than you would. When your business can’t run without you,
your business will never grow. I was not a great delegator. I convinced
myself that no one could do anything as well as I could. It held me
back for many years. After I gave birth, I changed everything about
my business and we soared.
Poor hiring decisions: In the early days,I hired people because I liked
them or because they needed a job. I didn’t do skills tests; sometimes I
didn’t even check references.I hired people because I needed a body in
the seat. Then, I would be slow to fire them, even when it was obvious
they were not a fit. Experience has taught me to be slow to hire and
quick to fire. I use detailed job descriptions, have personality and skills
tests. We use outside consultants to evaluate candidates for key roles
before hiring as well. I also put new employees on a 90 day probation
period before extending full benefits.

(4) Entrepreneur on Fire

John Lee Dumas | Host & Founder
The top mistake I made when I started my business was thinking I
needed to have everything perfectly aligned before I hit the go
button. You will never have everything aligned, so hit the go button,
and adjust on the fly!

(5) Side Hustle Nation

Nick Loper |Host & Founder
Hiring Ineffective Web Developers: This is my number 1 mistake
because of how costly and frustrating it was. In total, I lost more than
$10,000 on incompetent, over-promising, under-delivering web
developers for a large-scale project.
When my site was due for a redesign, I was unhappy with my
current development team. Their communication was horrible and
I felt like they had some technical shortcomings so I shopped the
project around on Elance and some other platforms.

Ultimately I was wooed by a small company in Minneapolis who

assured me they could do the job. I was really excited because
their price wasn’t much more than some of the overseas bids, and
I knew we wouldn’t have to worry about any language barrier
causing misunderstandings or miscommunications.

However there was one MAJOR misunderstanding and that was

that I actually expected the work to get done! These guys were
the absolute worst, making my concerns about the original
developer’s poor communication habits look like nothing at all.

Months went by and deadlines came and went, always promising

an update soon, or next week. Those updates never came and we
ultimately had to part ways, and I had to start the project over
completely from scratch.

The worst part? The owner of this development firm convinced

me to do business with him outside of the Elance platform —
meaning when he flaked I had ZERO recourse.

Huge, painful, stressful mistake that ended up costing almost a

year to fully recover from. And that business has never really
been the same since.

Now I run a site called VirtualAssistantAssistant.com, which aims

to help others avoid the same outsourcing mistakes I made.
Not Hiring / Scaling Faster: Because my business was a side hustle, I
had only nights and weekends to work on it. But business was good
and I seemed to have a profitable system for growth if I only had more
hours to execute on that system.
In hindsight, what I should have done was brought on a team
member and trained them so I could effectively “duplicate”
myself and my efforts. It took me a long time to get over a ton of
excuses for not getting help. I was afraid an assistant or intern
would try to steal my ideas. I was afraid they wouldn’t do as good
a job as me. I was afraid of opening the doors to my accounts to
someone new.

Eventually I got over those fears and was able to bring on some
outside help, but it was definitely scary at first. Had I done it
earlier, I could have capitalized on a unique period of opportunity
in the business, focused my attentions on higher-level strategic
projects, and earned more money.
Pursuing Projects I Didn’t Really Care About: My entrepreneurial
resume is filled with abandoned, failed, and other half-assed / half-
brained projects I started but never really gave full attention to.
One example is a poorly researched site on handbags and
luggage. If I’d done my homework, I might have found that the
competition was too widespread and the technical aspects too
difficult to create a truly valuable resource.

Later, I tried to build a wine-related site. The problem was I know

nothing about wine other than I live in California and like to drink
it. That lack of passion for the subject matter showed in the
content and the site really had no “reason to exist.” It was a lame
attempt to sell wine gifts but didn’t really add any meaningful
value to anyone’s shopping experience.

After some soul-searching, I uncovered something I really DO

care about — and that’s part-time entrepreneurship. It’s a lower-
risk brand of starting a business than you’ll typically read about in
Inc. and Forbes, but it’s something with a broad appeal and how I
 got my start in business.

The side hustle economy is HUGE and something I’m excited to

be a part of, helping people accelerate their financial fortunes
through part-time businesses they love.
(6) Entrepreneurs Journey
Yaro Starak | Founder
The top three mistakes I made when I was starting out were the following:

I didn’t have a real strategy behind what I wanted to do: Instead I

chased money making opportunities simply because I needed to make
money.

As I gained more clarity I was able to see the kind of business that was
best for me and go after it. It’s hard to know this without
experimenting first, but if I had my time again I would have picked a
business strategy more suited to my strengths from the beginning and
saved myself many years of anguish.
I was slow to adopt email as my core communication device: I spent
a lot of time just playing around with websites not realizing that I
could have done a lot better if I focused on building relationships via
an email newsletter from the beginning.
I spent too much time playing around with website design: I like to
look at beautiful websites. Unfortunately you can spend months trying
to make something look amazing when you really just need something
that does the job. Functionality and conversion trumps good looks
online.

(7) Suitcase Entrepreneur

Natalie Sisson | Founder
Not believing in myself:I kept thinking `Who am I to offer these
services and build these products? I’m no expert. Sure I know my stuff
but will people pay me for this? It’s something many entrepreneurs
face especially when starting out. The thing is the old `fake it til you
make it’ really does ring true. This doesn’t mean deceive people by
promising on things you can’t deliver, but it does mean project the
outward confidence and belief in your abilities (even if you don’t feel
it) to inspire confidence in your customers. Just by working with them
and putting your very best self forward, and getting them the results,
they will ensure that you grow into your shoes and become what you
aspired to be.
Not developing my Why:I recommend everyone readSimon Sinek’s
“Start With Why“and read it now. In a nutshell his message is this,
people don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it. The thing is no-
one starts out knowing their why. Very few people figure this out from
the get go. They have grand ideals of how they want to change the
world but quickly forget those and get stuck in day to day operations.
So go back to why you started out. Get back to what it is that drives
you and inspires you to create, build, launch and serve your customers.
Once you have clarity on this, everything else will fall into place. The
way you market, the message you deliver and even your business
model.
Being unfocused and catering to everyone:Biggest recipe for failure
is not knowing who you serve and narrowing your niche. You simply
cannot please everyone, nor should you want to. The more exclusive
and targeted an audience you serve, the much more focused you can be
on exactly why you do what you do and how. Everything you do on a
daily basis will be judged against this one question `Is this moving me
closer to achieving my goals?’. If it’s not, you stop doing it or delegate
it. You focus only on the strategies and objectives you’ve identified
that will ensure you reach your goals and meet your targets. It’s hard to
do, especially with all those bright shiny objects, but absolutely critical
if you want to succeed.
(8) Schaefer Marketing Solutions
Mark Schaefer | Author
My first mistake… well, it was kind of a mistake and kind of an
advantage. When I started, I did absolutely no studying, no reading,
and no benchmarking. I just dove right in. The downside was that I had
a steep learning curve and struggled for quite a bit. Months, in fact.

But the upside was that I took a very fresh approach to everything and
that earned some attention I think. When I really started getting active
in 2008 there was a small group of thought leaders and everybody was
trying to copy them. I did not even know who the thought leaders
were, so that was probably a plus in an environment that rewards
originality. I think if I didn’t go through this learning curve, I probably
wouldn’t have writtenThe Tao of Twitter, which is, at its heart, a story
about my social media journey. It has helped thousands of people by
keeping them from repeating my mistakes!
The second mistake:I made was startingblog that was separate from
my website. As I have already established, I really had no idea what I
was doing and started the blog as an experiment. Well, the thing took
off. Now, all that SEO benefit I was generating was landing someplace
other than my website. Eventually, I had to bite the bullet and shut
down my blog and move it to the website. Rookie mistake!
The third mistake:was that I got off to a slow start recognizing how
important social media could be to my business. I grew up in
traditional marketing roles in large companies. I really didn’t
understand at first how transformational this new technology could be
and how important it could become to a business. It took me nine
months to understand that social media is not an afterthought. It
became core to my business and has delivered many important
business benefits, including sales, new markets, and key business
partners.
(9) Vasavi Kumar
Vasavi Kumar | Life Coach | Author
Not being selective about who I wanted to serve: When I first
started my business I wanted to help everyone and anyone. While that
may seem like a very noble concept, I ended up working with people
who weren’t truly committed to transforming their life and taking the
necessary actions to create long lasting change. This left me burnt out,
resentful, and hating my “job.” It was only after I got crystal clear
about who my ideal client was, that I was able to be more strategic and
targeted with who I was marketing to. Do I still want to help everyone?
Of course I do. But, now that I’m more targeted I can drill deep and
wide into my market and help support my ideal client in designing
their life and business. This is how I see it, the more I can impact my
target market AND have fun in the process, the more space and
freedom I have to create programs for other markets.
My advice:It’s ok to niche yourself, drill deep and wide, become
successful in that market, and then branch out into serving other
markets.
Focusing on money first, value second: I would be lying if I didn’t
share this. When I first started my business, I had it all backwards. I
focused on how much I could get, rather than what can I give. I was
desperate to make ends meet, was coming from a place of scarcity and
lack, and thus, was not giving as much value as I could. This wasn’t
intentional, or because I am a bad person, it was simply because my
mindset was rooted in scarcity. The shift was easy to make. My father,
an Indian immigrant gave me great advice that made a long lasting
impact on how I now run my business. He said to me, “Focus on
giving as much value as you can, and the money will chase you.”And
just like that, I made it a point to work on my relationship to money,
detach myself from the end result, and stay focused on what I could
give. And, the question that I ask myself to check myself is, “ Am I
 withholding?” It’s a powerful question to ask when you find yourself
resisting your natural inclination to give.
My advice:Ultimately, we are the happiest when we help another
human being, and we help without attachment. That is the
greatest gift you can give yourself and another human being.
Having bright, shiny, object syndrome: I’m a creative idea junkie. I
love creating ideas, programs, courses, and retreats, anything that will
be the solution to someone’s problem. And while that characteristic
has been beneficial in my ability to create content rich, valuable
programs for people at affordable prices- in the beginning, I was
constantly looking at what everyone else was doing and thinking to
myself, “Oh! I should do that” or “What I’m doing isn’t good enough,
I need to do THAT.” I’m all about being inspired and creating new
things, but when I first started my business I had NO strategy or clear
vision because I was constantly jumping to the next big thing. Granted,
it came from a place of wanting to be the best and put out great content
and programs for people, but ultimately what happened was that I
ended spending way more money than I needed to because there was
no strategy- just straight up execution of tasks that were not actually
leading to an end goal. Now, everything that I do has a meaningful
intention and a clear strategy.
My advice:Trust yourself, and know that where ever you are right now
in your business is part of the journey.

(10) Insurgent Publishing

Tome Morkes | Founder

Taking on projects that were too big in scope for me to deliver: We
all have great ideas. One of my earlier projects was a business
magazine for bootstrapping entrepreneurs. This was the first magazine
I ever worked on and had no previous magazine publishing experience.
It was a challenge for sure and I learned a lot…but never got enough
 traction to get it off the ground. After two issues, we cancelled the
publication.

There’s nothing wrong with baby steps – take it slow.

Trying to scale too fast: In the beginning, I was obsessed with growth
/ scaling / getting to the next level, to the point where I often spent
more time developing scalable marketing and sales tactics than
actually going out and closing the sale. I’ve sinced reversed the
priorities and, ironically enough, things are scaling dramatically.

Scale is irrelevant if you don’t have something worth selling. Focus on

building something people will pay for first, scale later.
Trying to do it all myself: I started off building
InsurgentPublishing.com by myself. I’ve since hired a team of four to
help manage and grow the business. Things work much more smoothly
and it’s a lot more fun.

Working on your business (not in it) is a cliché, but true. Focus on

building an asset you can someday sell and your business mindset
will change, and so will your actions (in a good way).

(11) TrepTalks

Sushant Misra |Founder

Create something people want: Fundamentally, a business is about
Demand and Supply.

There is no shortage of problems in the world. Can you help a group of

people solve a problem, meet an unmet need, or make their quality of
lives better in a way that no other business is doing?

Can you do it with the resources that you have at your disposal? Are
people willing to pay you for it?
For a first time entrepreneur, it is usually better to start small, validate
your idea (i.e. ensure that people are willing to pay for your product or
service), and grow the business from there.

If you can’t get people to pay for your solution, product, or service, it
likely means one of the following:

Don’t fall in love with your idea and create a product just for the sake
of creating a product. Create something people want.
Create a culture of testing: Try to isolate a few key metrics that are
directly linked to your business’ bottom line and take a systematic
approach to test different approaches, strategies, and tactics to find
optimizations and maximize your return on investment (ROI).

For example, for an online business owner, some key metrics could be:
1. Traffic to the website (per day/week/month/year)
2. New leads as a percentage of traffic
Number of sales per lead:
1. Cost per new lead/customer acquisition
2. Profit margins etc.

If you are new business with limited resources, you can only choose
few metrics for testing. Make sure you choose something that is linked
to your business/financial objectives and start testing and optimizing.

Use the 80/20 rule and stick with the few strategies and tactics that
provide the bulk of the business results.

Even choosing one metric and optimizing it is far better than running
your business on wild guesses and autopilot. You can always add more
metrics for testing as your business grows.
 The idea is to engrain the testing mindset into your company culture
from the very beginning.

Learn how to sell: Here, I am using the word “sell” as an umbrella

term for everything that is required to make a sale (Public Relations,
Marketing and Advertising, Sales as well as Customer Service and
Customer Retention).

It is a fallacy to think that if you have a great product (that people are
willing to buy) then you don’t have to sell.

People are inherently lazy and would much rather delay the buying
process even if the product or service is something that is beneficial to
them. The sales process is meant to be a proactive approach to help
your prospective customers make the buying decision NOW.

Learning sales is about learning buyer psychology and all the ways in
which you can make your offer attractive to your prospects so that they
make the buying decision NOW rather than some arbitrary later date.

If your product can really help your customers to solve their problems,
then wouldn’t it be your moral obligation to make sure that they take
advantage of it as soon as possible?

(12) Welborn Media

Zeb Welborn |Founder
Treating Threats as Threats: One of the biggest mistakes I made was
thinking someone was a threat to my business and then treating them
accordingly. I would avoid talking to them and would clam up when
they came into a room. It was not the most effective business strategy.

After losing a client because I treated a threat as a threat, a new threat

in another business came into the picture. Instead of treating this
person like a threat, I treated her like a colleague and a friend. We
 struck up a friendship, I interviewed her for my podcast, she wrote the
intro and outro music for my podcast and has referred me numerous
times to her family and friends.
Waiting for Other to Take Action on Me: I left a career in teaching
and traveled the country to look for a job right at the beginning of the
recession. No one was hiring. I found myself emailing my resume to
hundreds, if not thousands of job postings with an almost non-existent
response rate. I think I had less than 5 responses to all the emails I sent
out looking for a job.

When I made the decision to start a business, I knew everything relied

on me. I began taking action instead of waiting for others to decide
whether or not I was worthy enough to be affiliated with them. Taking
action toward the things I wanted was a valuable learning experience
for me in the beginning stages of my business.
Not Recognizing Others: I've done a pretty good job at recognizing
others' contributions to my business, but at times I become so busy I
forget to thank people when they refer me business, say something
nice for me, do something for me or continue to use our services for a
lengthy period of time. It's becoming easier to forget to thank people
for helping me.

As a result, I've put systems in place to help me remember to thank

people when they do something nice for me or when they deserve
recognition. Recognizing others for their positive contributions is a
great way to build trust and establish relationships.

(13) The Overwhelmed Brain Podcast

Paul Colaianni | Founder
Not having a product ready: And I don’t mean something to sell.
Thought that would be a good idea too, but anything. I had no eBook,
no free resource, guide or kit, nothing. It’s vital that you create a
magnet for people to want to sign up on your email list. For the last 6
months or so my subscribers have been trickling in, but if I had
something more to offer than just the weekly personal growth tip, the
numbers would have soared. So now I have some catching up to do.
Not starting sooner: I spent so long as a 9 to 5er; well I got
comfortable being uncomfortable. At 43 years old, I finally made the
move to start creating my business from the ground up. I feel like I
should have done this 10 or 20 years ago. In fact, I had opportunities I
didn’t pursue in the past because; I just kept going back to all the daily
grind of working for someone else. I am not against working for
anyone else, but now that I’ve had a taste of entrepreneurialism, I wish
I had started much sooner.

I’ve learned to take action now and no longer procrastinate.

Not staying focus on what worked: One of the biggest mistakes I
made had to do with narrowing my focus. I wanted to be on Twitter ,
Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, my mastermind and guest posting
on blogs, let along on taking care of my own website and posting
there, on top of creating content for my podcast.

There is something to be said aboutPat Flynn’s be everywhere strategy.

Where you offer something for the listeners, watchers and readers,
trying to do all of that at once at least by myself, I mastered nothing
and I became staggered with my focus

The hiring a virtual assistant is my next step for sure. And in the
meantime after months of trying to do it myself, I went back to what is
most important, creating content for my show. As long as I have
content, I have leverage and as long as the content is evergreen, it will
be timeless and I can use it and promote it at any time. So I had to cure
myself of the shiny object syndrome and start focusing on what drives
everything in the first place, content. Everything else is still important,
but without good content my business will not last.
 The Interviews: Tech Entrepreneurs (apps,
software, digital products)
(14) KISSmetrics
Neil Patel | Founder
Not having enough focus: When I started my first business I kept on
trying to do too many things and expand the business even before we
had a bit of revenue. This caused me to output mediocre work instead
of great work. Eventually clients suffered from it and we lost revenue.

My advice:If I had to do it all over again, I would just focus on one

model within my business. As the revenue growth declines, I would
then expand, but not until then.
Hire B players: Just like most entrepreneurs I didn’t have a lot of cash
when I was starting out. So I hired B and C employees because that is
all I could afford.

Sadly the results from these employees weren’t great, which meant
that they needed to be micromanaged. Not only did this take a lot of
my time, but it caused customers to be unhappy again.

My advice:If I had to do it over again I would have given up equity in

the business to hire A players. This would have made the business a lot
larger.
Letting the foot off the pedal: Once things started to look up and I
was making a decent amount of money, I slowly started taking my foot
off the pedal because I was enjoying life. I should have never done this
because I eventually was losing customers faster than I was adding
them.

My advice:Always keep pushing hard and never slow down when

 things are good. You can lose everything much faster than it took you
to build the business.

(15) ShortStack
Jim Belosic | Founder
First, I would have focused on the UI of our product more. We told
our users that we were easy to use, when in reality there was a learning
curve.
Second, I would have designed our service to be more “platform
agnostic” from the beginning. Being tied to someone else’s platform
(in our case, Facebook) can be stressful.
Third, I would have offered our product with multiple languages
“baked-in” to the app. Now we are trying to add multiple-language
support and it’s tough at this stage. Bottom line: don’t forget that there
are way more people in the world who don’t speak English but can
potentially use your product.

(16) DITTO
Kate Endress | Founder
The worse mistake I made was underestimating how long it would
take to build real technology. I must have heard this a thousand times
at business school but I figured that my company would be different. I
sat alongside my engineer team and put together a “conservative”
game plan for product development.

We ended up being 6 months behind schedule and I spend money

scaling up other parts of our business before we needed to which
wasted precious dollars. Tough lesson learned.

17) Lingua.ly
Jan Ihmels, Ph.D. |Co-Founder & CEO
Too many product features: It’s probably the classic startup situation
but we built a product that could do everything and then realized our
users were mainly using it for two or three specific things. Since then,
we’ve started to rely heavily on analytics to see which of Lingua.ly’s
features are the most valuable to the current user base, which in turn
helps us determine what to build next.
Not enough onboarding: In the beginning we offered our users a lot
of choice and quickly learned that the best way to get someone to give
up on your product is to leave them without any direction. We’ve
gotten much better at onboarding and user tutorials since then.
An overly ambitious development schedule: Developing a quality
product takes time and you always have to factor plenty of testing and
bug-fixing into your development schedule. As most of what we do at
Lingua.ly involves integrating new technology and acting on the latest
mobile trends, there’s always a learning curve, even for experienced
developers. We’ve since learned to factor this in to ensure timely
launches and quality releases.

(18) Handwrytten
David Wachs |Founder
Thinking that being in the app store would be enough, and
marketing wouldn’t be necessary: The app store is crowded. Having
a solid ASO (app store optimization) strategy is key, along with a great
marketing strategy.
Also, launching without a functional web site: While having two
functional apps is great, many people still search for the functionality
without downloading the app. While “apps first” is a fine strategy, we
need to back ours up with a functional web site as well. We are
working on that now.
 And lastly, not having a strong PR partner in place from the
beginning.

(19) Snip.ly
Michael Cheng |Co-founder
We made the mistake of underestimating the value of our own
product. We released our product for free and it took a while before
we introduced a pricing model. To our surprise, our users were very
willing to pay for our product. Never underestimate the value of your
own product. Putting a price on what you do will allow you to see the
true value of what you have built.
Another mistake we made was spending time trying to secure press
coverage. We put a lot of effort into getting media attention with
minimal results, so we decided to just focus on building our product.
As of today, we have been featured on over 100 blogs and we never
pitched to a single one of them. We learned that you don’t go to the
press; the press comes to you, so just focus on building something
great.
Last but not least, we used to think that marketing costs money. We
are now serving several million visitors per month and we still have no
marketing budget. When it comes to growth and marketing, creativity
is more valuable than a big budget.

(20) Chippmunk
Brian Nickerson |Co-founder
Spending Too Much Time Fundraising:Raising investment capital to
fund the business is a full time job, even ifyou have traction.
Incentives for investors are to wait as long aspossible before actually
committing capital, and as an entrepreneur it canbe challenging to
 create the momentum to get the first money in. Set deadlines, research
your investors, and move as quickly as you can to “yes”or “no”.
Delegate Tasks:Time is your most precious commodity, and you must
manage it verycarefully. As soon as you can, offload time-consuming
tasks that don’tgenerate returns for the business, and focus your time
on big initiativesthat can massively impact the business. To leverage
your time, think likean editor, not a writer.
Celebrate Victories:Startup life can be hard, with multiple ups and
downs every week andsometimes every day. You and your team work
hard, very hard, and there isalways a new mountain to climb. Make
sure to stop and celebrate, even forsmall victories, so that you stay
energized.

(21) SpotRocket
Payal Divakaran |Co-founder
Given the time constraints of our course, we rushed into picking with
of our top two ideas we wanted to pursue. We learned that the idea is
not as important as is the ability to execute on the idea. The idea
that we pivoted to has the arms and legs it needs to work within our
constraints whereas the first one did not.
This is not so much a mistake as something we are learning on an
ongoing basis: how to pitch the startup and its value proposition.
We continue to tighten up our language so that it is clear what the
solution is, who it is serving, and why it matters. It is essential for the
team to be on the same page about this message, and we feel we have
done a good job of that.
Sometimes our team can get caught up in all of the work,
deadlines, and meetings that we forget to have fun! We learned that
our team functions and delivers much better when we have levity, so
make sure to add this to our routine. For example, we play a game at
the end of every team meeting to leave things on a fun note.
(22) P4RC
Jason Seldon |Founder
In the founding of our business, I made a couple mistakes with
respect to equity. In the initial enthusiasm with early partners, equity
flowed generously to all members of the founding team, but the reality
was that not everyone was ready to be a founder.
Eventually, those who were truly committed stepped up while others
went away, but I then needed to clean up the cap table and claw back
equity, which can be a fairly painful process. So the lesson is that you
need to make sure that all members of the founding team are ready to
put their time and money on the line in a meaningful way before the
equity split is decided.
The second mistake was closely related to the first as instead of using
stock options, the initial founding team was given actual stock.
While this may seem like a way to make everyone feel like partners, it
makes it quite a bit more complicated if people do leave the company.
So stock options are a far easier from a management perspective.
I would say that a third initial mistake was a product focus on
function over form. Even though many people talk about just getting
a minimum viable product out there, products are still judged fairly
harshly based on how they look regardless of how well they work. So
in hindsight, I should have also spent a bit more time and money on
the aesthetics of our first product. We did learn our lesson, however,
and for our new SaaS product, we hired a professional design firm to
develop a highly attractive look and feel.

(23) TINYhr
David Niu |Founder
 Obsessing about selling or going public: For my first company,
NetConversions, people would ask me and my co-founder what our
plans were for the business. We’d always say selling to a
complementary player or going public. In hindsight, we were just
dumb MBA dropouts. Instead, the answer should’ve been, “We’re
going to delight our customers who will then pay us. If we have
enough of these clients then we’ll have lots of great options.” That
should’ve been first and foremost. We learned this lesson through a
near death company experience, but we were able to pull out of the
death spiral to actually sell the business.
Hiring more for skill than fit:In the past, all things being equal, I’d
always err on hiring for skill rather than fit. Now my approach is
flipped. All things being equal, I’ll hire for fit and train for skills. As
someone once told me, if you want a happy, smiley culture, then hire
happy, smiley people to start.
Not focusing enough on culture: In the past, I’d always have vision,
mission, and values because that’s an exercise that every founder
should do. But after I completed the exercise, I’d share it and then tape
it up in the breakroom. But no one knew what they were. So
essentially, it was a big waste of time. Now, we role play decision
making based on our values, give recognition based on our values, and
constantly revisit our mission and vision. We even share our values in
our job descriptions to ensure that candidates resonate with them
before they even apply.

(24) Pubslush
Amanda Barbara |Co-founder
When we first launched Pubslush in September 2011, our platform was
different. Pubslush was the publisher, and if an author reached 1,000
pre-orders in 30 days, we published the book. Ultimately, we felt that it
closed our doors from working with many great people. After realizing
that the platform wasn’t the best it could be, we reworked our idea to
develop a more effective Pubslush process for all.
 I learned that just because the initial idea didn’t work, it didn’t mean
the company had failed.

(25) Early Shares

Stephen Temes | Co-founder
For one, I definitely assumed I knew more than I did at an early
age – which I think is very common among young entrepreneurs. I was
also too aggressive and too ambitious too early in my career; I wanted
to always be pushing forward on projects when I should have sat back
and waited until I was sure I had it right.
And I pushed myself to branch out into more and more projects in
more and more areas all the time, when I should have focused my
energy more directly on one thing.
Learning from those mistakes has been a matter of experience.
With EarlyShares, my management team and I are completely focused
on getting it right, even if that takes time and patience.

(26) Nimble
Jon Ferrara| Founder
I would be very careful about outsourcing product development. A
misstep there can cost you precious time and momentum.
Team building is more about the culture fit and the passion for
social business than it is about anything else. We found the best
team by searching for people who shared our culture, values and
passion for social business — in particular those who appreciate and
use social tools as part of their daily lives.
No software platform can be all things to all people. You’ve got to
narrow focus, and evolve in a specific and focused way. After all, as
 hard as it is to believe, social selling is still new to most people. They
need a tool they can adopt with enthusiasm.

(27) LeadSift
Tapajyoti Das | Co-Founder
What gets measured gets done!– Measure everything you do in your
company from product to sales and marketing.
Never give away your product for Free!You’ll never get any
feedback or recognition. Giving a heavy discount is fine, but always
make sure you charge something. If the clients don’t have any skin in
the game they won’t care for your product
Learn to Market your product:There is no point in being the best
software if no one knows about it. We obsess over having the perfect
product without worrying too much about marketing it/letting the
world know about it.

(28) Stride (currently Proper Works)

Andrew Dumont | Founder
I didn’t put enough thought into the pricing model up-front:This
caused some issues down the line with how we tied the pricing model
structurally. We had to do a lot of unnecessary backtracking because of
it.
I waited too long to begin marketing the product:I hesitated
because it wasn’t “perfect” in my eyes. In time, I learned that the
product would never be perfect, no matter how much you tweak and
adjust it, so you can’t hesitate on marketing it.
We started with too large of a team:There were 4 co-founders at
Stride when we started and a total of 5 people working on the company
prior to the acquisition. It made us move slower and made strategic
decisions more difficult.
(29) Locket
Yunha Kim | Founder
Hired the wrong engineer because of his resume and track record:
Look at his commitment and passion first. His resume and credentials
come after.
Spent one month launching a new feature: Locket’s October
Swipestakes. Choose the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to test out a
hypothesis. Do not spend too much time making a perfect product. Get
it out there ASAP, test out for reaction and then improve the product. If
anything takes longer than a month, you are probably not using the
best shortcut.
Hired the wrong intern and didn’t let her go early enough: Interns
can be very expensive because you need to spend the time to train and
manage them. Don’t hire interns because they are cheap. Hire only the
ones that you know are committed and proactive. I went through
couple of this and now I think I am proud of my track record of hiring
the best interns – our interns rock!

(30) Thuzio
Former Pro Baller Tiki Barber |Co-founder
As with any business, you have the supply side and a demand side.
We’ve learned something from both.
First, we assumed that talent would be readily accessible. Even
when going through their former teams, contact information was
difficult to come by, so we couldn’t fulfill the supply side early.
You’ve got to build an expertise in accessing talent, mostly through
referrals and partnering with the agencies.
The secondwould be starting with a smaller market by focusing on
individual consumers and then making our way through corporate
America. We ended up delaying our own growth early, but fortunately
 enough, we’re an innovative company that has been able to parallel
grow (B2B and B2C) at the same time.

(31) Maz
Paul Canetti | Founder
There have been so many mistakes; it’s hard to even pick three! But I’ll try
(in no particular order):

Make sure you have agreements in place with founders, employees,

contractors, advisers, even very early on! No one ever thinks it is
necessary at the beginning, but it really is. When you need those docs,
and don’t have them, it is not fun. So suck it up and get those
agreements in place.
Don’t spend a lot of legal fees: We blew our first $30k on a big fancy
law firm to draft up our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. They are
very good quality docs, but they were overkill at the time, and we
could have used that cash in so many other ways. Treat legal just like
every other part of your business and stay scrappy!
It’s okay to say no: There were so many times when we would bend
our will to please people in one-off scenarios, but ultimately we took
time and energy away from our main focus. You need to be flexible of
course, but it’s also okay to put the blinders on and just push forward,
even if it means saying no to people. It’s a mistake I still make way too
often: you cannot please everyone!

(32) Swipe
Horia Cernusca | Co-founder
Launching” before we had a fully working app:We launched at a
huge conference in Europe, but our complete product was nowhere
near ready. The big lesson there is that it’s a fantastic thing.. People
were waiting and got very excited when they finally got in. As a result,
 they referred others and tweeted, shared, etc. A mistake, but a good
one.
Wasting time with big investors too early: We talked to big fund
VC’s very early on and had meetings after meetings after meetings.
They tend to lead you on, tell you how wonderful you are, but never
seem to make the offer because they don’t know where you’re going
yet. They’re fighting for exclusivity early on. We ended up going with
a tiny fund and awesome people, because we believed in them and
they believed in us. It only took one meeting – and we knew what we
were going to do right away.
Not quitting my job earlier: I worked part-time for the majority of
the first half year of building Swipe. In retrospect, both my co-founder
and I should have quit the day after startup weekend. It’s easy to say
that now, and maybe we should have done it. It still worked out though
and it did make working on Swipe look way more fun compared to the
boring day job, which is also important.

(33) GraphDive
Shahram Seyedin-Noor | Co-founder
Our biggest mistakes?First, we launched a few features too early
before they were “battle tested” through beta deployments. Although
it’s good to release fast and often in the consumer space, in the
enterprise space that can be a mistake.
Another mistakewas to pay a few “platform partners” to be part of
their ecosystems. My experience has shown that any company that
charges for membership in their platform usually has no real value add
– otherwise they would do a straight revenue share.
The third mistake? We did a project for free early on for a prominent
Fortune 500 company just to use their name as a customer. That was
unnecessary – they would have paid (and are now). At the end of the
day, if your product has value, you need to charge for it.
(34) Viralheat
Raj Kadam | CEO
The firstwould be to talk to your customers. As a product person, it is
really easy to deduce what your customer would like to see built but
it’s likely you are wrong. So, talking to your customers is key.
The second, is when making any B2B product, you need to have
customer sooner than later. Having your staff making sure the
customer is seeing the ROI from your product helps retention and
leads to faster growth down the line.
Lastly, price right. If you price to low, it will sap your business by
killing its growth potential. If you price to high, you create unrealistic
expectations for a business of your size.

(35) Mobile First Entertainment

Saif A. Rahman | Founder
Perhaps the largest one was that I was not a tech founder. I have a
background in entertainment. I love tech, and have a high
understanding of mobile, but I am not a coder. It was a huge barrier. It
took us months until we found someone amazing to come on board
and really get down to the brass tacks of coding what was was needed.
Another huge mistake was not getting enough money together to
have an MVP. It’s so important to show someone that your idea is
actually real, by making it real. That was a real difficult time, because
up until then the idea of individualized video apps was literally a
bunch of mockups and drawings.
Our last error was time. We severely underestimated how long it
would take to get a project so large off of the ground. We estimated
it would take a few months, and hear we are almost two years later. We
learned that when you make errors, adapt quickly and don’t let it stop
you from your larger goal.
(36) App Institute
Ian Naylor | Founder
The biggest mistake I’ve made with previous businesses was not to
bring in seasoned advice, in the form of a non-executive
director/chairman. Someone who ideally has industry experience, but
more importantly can provide advice from a different advantage point
of your business, a step away from the day-to-day. It's all too easy to
get sucked into the detail, and not see the wood for the trees; a NED
will help with this.
Not scaling quickly enough and taking external funding: Bootstrapping
is good whilst you’re proving the model, but once you’ve proven the
concept and it's time to scale, you really need to look to external
investors to grow properly.
Not investing in culture: Any business really is the sum of the people,
to attract great people, and make great workers you need to foster core
values people can believe in. Expecting employees to get your passion
and give their all, without clearly communicating and investing in the
business culture, is a hiding to nothing.

(37) ASAP54
Daniela Cecilio | Founder
Worry too much with what could go wrong– you can’t predict, so
you might as well deal with it when it comes.
Prepare for success, as we are normally prepared for failure and we
underestimate how hard is to deal with success – in term of team,
structure, etc.
Be wise with your time; don’t say yes to everything, as the focus in
the beginning should be the product and training the team.

(38) Alumnify
Eghosa Aihie | Co-founder
Starting a business without customer validation, starting a business
without any domain expertise, and not preparing ourselves for things
to go wrong.After spending a substantial amount of time and money
on development for a product we never used, we realized havingacool
idea doesn’t always make a good or great business.

Therefore, you must base your product/service on the needs and wants
of your customers.It is most important to make the effort to speak with
clients face-to-face in order to found out what they value.
Next, without some expertise in the industry, many entrepreneurs
become limited and reliant on outsourcing like we were during our
early stages. My partner and I would get extremely frustrated when
developers we contracted with wouldn’t deliver a product that we had
imagined and expected.
If you want something done you need to do it yourself. My partner
joined a coding boot camp in Silicon Valley where he learned to code
and can now properlyassessand evaluate programmers’ coding
asopposed to assuming everything is fine. There have been
manysituationswhen we were certain something great was going to
happen but doesn’t work out the way we planned. It’s important not to
get emotions involved and hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

(39) Learn to Program

Mark Lassoff | Founder
This is my third business. I am making “better” mistakes then I did with my
first business but I still make mistakes.

Hiring too quickly:Interviewing well is not the same skill set as

working well. Don’t fall in love with someone at an interview. Do
better due diligencebefore hiring and don’t go with your gut. Team is
 critical and an employee who under-achieves– even if they talk a good
game– is going to bring down your whole team
Not Firing Fast Enough:When you make that poor hire, rectify it
quickly. Having others on your team steaming about an employee not
pulling their weight is a bad situation. Rectify it quickly.
Messy Books:I am an awful accountant. Mostly because I am
impatient. However, noting paying enough attention to the books will
come back to bite you later. Spending the time to keep your books
correct is a lot better than paying a CPA to do it!

(40) Staff.com
Liam Martin | Co-Founder
Figuring out critical scale points, writing code before testing our
assumptions based off that code “find out if your users actually want a
feature before you code it”, not systematizing as much as you can in
the beginning so you don’t have to go back and manage it.

(41) GameSim
Andrew Tosh | Founder
Manage cash flow | Understand company’s financial needs before
taking on new projects: We needed to ramp up the number of
employees as we took on larger projects. It would have been valuable
to take the time to understand cash flow management in advance. This
ended up being a major issue. I ultimately had to move a lot of
retirement savings into the company to make payroll. Eventually, we
were mature enough to get a line of credit, but I would have saved
myself that stress early on by more closely looking at the financial
needs of the company.
Don’t focus on revenue projections | spend your time productively:
I spent a lot of time trying to predict sales, which turned out to be a
complete waste of time. In my opinion, it\’s nearly impossible to
 predict growth in technology start-ups, and the focus should instead be
on putting your time and efforts into more useful outlets.
Know Your Customers: I don’t think enough time was spent
understanding the customer needs prior to starting IR&D effort. A lot
of assumptions were made as opposed to spending the time to really
understand and examine their use cases. Really listening to your
customer can help you develop better products, market more
effectively and provide more thorough service in general.

(42) Skimlinks

Alicia Navarro | Founder

Raise more than you think you need:You’ll spend more and projects
will take longer than you think they will. We did however become very
good at doing a great deal with very little, especially in the early days,
so it was in the end a blessing and a strength of ours.
Take care of yourself:It is easy to be cost-conscious and burn both
ends of the candle, but ultimately, you need to be healthy and happy, so
make wise investments in this. I now do this, but for a long time I was
travelling too much and eating unhealthily, and this will always have
repercussions which impact the business.
Trust your gut with hiring:Cultural fit is more important than
experience or skills. We made a few mistakes in the past, and we now
are religiously strict on the cultural fit angle.

(43) Yesware
Matthew Bellows |Founder
In my previous company (which Cashman and I also co-founded) I
once tried to subcontract out a lucrative contract, only to have the
sub-contractor try go direct and cut me out of the deal.
 There were all kinds of lessons to be learned from that exceptionally
painful experience. But the biggest one is to be honest and above-
board at all times, especially with your customers. We salvaged the
customer relationship finally, but the situation took a big toll, and a
long time to rebuild trust.

(44) Gesture
Jim Alvarez | Founder
Not having a marketing budget: I will never start another company
without a million dollar marketing budget.
Trusting too many people: I trusted some close friends in the
beginning, and once they realized how great my idea was they screwed
me (I have not learned from this one, and I will continue to lean on my
friends. I did learn that no matter how good of friends you think you
have, money changes things.)
Not tracking things better: We went full throttle from the beginning,
and if we would have tracked things better at the start we would not
have to spend weeks/months going through these trying to figure out
what happened.

(45) SaleHoo
Simon Slade |Cofounder
In my business’ early days, I didn’t seek enough advice from
outsiders. Now, I regularly receive input from third parties.
Second, we didn’t track metrics in the very beginning, but now we
track and measure key statistics on a daily basis.
Third, I didn’t take a break early in our companies’ launches to
stop and look at the big picture. Now I take a holiday every six months
to reassess our business without any of the day-to-day distractions to
cloud my view of the big picture.
(46) Dreamojo
Axel & Boris | Founders
At the very start, we rushed into the hiring process a little quickly,
as we were so eager to get started. We should have taken our time and
made sure we got the best possible people on our team, even though
waiting to get started was agonizing.
We were sometimes too focused on small details. Remember:‘done
is better than perfect.’
We went to too many useless and expensive start-up and tech events!

(47) Get Your Guide

Johannes Reck | Founder
We made a lot of mistakes along the way, but fortunately we learned from
our mistakes relatively quickly, which allowed us to survive.

My top mistake is clearly not making decisions quick enough. As an

entrepreneur, you have a huge degree of uncertainty in any decision
that you take, but not taking the decision makes the problem often
worse over time. Hence, I had to learn to tackle the tough decisions
head on and feel comfortable with the outcome. There is no looking
back, but you should assess your decisions all the time and iterate fast.
Another key mistakethat I have made is not fully running the
company on data. Everyone says that they are running on data, but
actually very few companies really do. When we made the real switch,
it unleashed a complete new dimension of productivity.
My third big mistake was to hire the wrong people:Every manager
has gone through it and it feels terrible. But again, you have to make
decisions quick and you need to iterate fast. Over time I got a lot better
at hiring and building talent, but you will always make mistakes in this
domain.
(48) Pluralis
Hagi Erez | Founder
Raise enough funding
Recruit only top level employees

Since Pluralis is already thesecondcompany I am founding, I have

learned to avoid many mistakes.

Nevertheless, there is one mistake that I want to share. It relates to two

different issues and themistake is that founders don’t always give those
issues the level of importance it deserves:
Raise seed fundsenoughto reach a milestone that will take you to the
next founding round in regards to scaling and traction. POC milestone
is not sufficient today.

Recruit ONLY A level employees. They cost more, but it is something

you can’tcompromisefrom day one.

It is not easy to avoid it, but without it your chances to reach your
goals are much lower.

The Interviews: Entrepreneurs (junk removal,

food, moving, events & legal work)
(49) 1-800-GOT-JUNK
Brian Scudamore | Founder
People: In the early days of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, I made the mistake of
not hiring the right people or putting good people in the wrong roles. It
came to the point where I knew that for my business to really go to the
 next level, something drastic had to happen. I decided to fire everyone
and start from scratch and I vowed never again to compromise on the
quality of people I brought into my organization. It’s been tough at
times when you think you’ve got a great candidate but you need to
hold out for the “right” one. Then everybody wins.
Trust: It's one thing to hire the right people, but it’s also very
important to trust the right people. It’s a balance and you need to get it
right. With any successful company, there comes a point where control
over certain key functions and operations of the business need to be
transferred to a management team that you put in place. This requires
trust in the people that you hire. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever
made was placing my trust in someone that I shouldn’t have and I
almost lost my business.
Systems: I didn’t have any experience when starting out my business,
just a lot of passion, instinct, and vision of where I wanted to be.
Needless to say, I made a lot of mistakes but I learned from every one
of them. I realized the best way for me and my team to avoid making
the same mistakes was to document and systematize every aspect of
my business. All it was at first were one-page best practice summaries
for each activity required to grow and operate a 1-800-GOT-JUNK?
Franchise. But I challenged each “best” practice as I documented it
and we continue to challenge those practices to this day. We’re
constantly fine-tuning our business, looking for ways to better service
our Franchise Partners and customers.
The successful systems we built at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Have allowed me to
quickly build and grow my 2nd and 3rd brands, WOW 1 DAY
Painting and You Move Me).

"If I could start over I would manage the growth of 1-800-GOT-

JUNK differently"
After we began franchising, we quickly entered a stage of hyper-growth.
We were selling franchises like crazy and weren’t taking the time to make
sure we had the right franchise partners in the right areas and that we were
giving them the tools they needed to succeed. We were so focused on
selling franchises that when the economy tanked we had to shift gears
quickly to focus on profitability of existing franchises rather than growth.

(50) Kernel Season’s

Brian Taylor | Founder
Lack of focus: Instead of channeling all my efforts to grow and perfect
the popcorn seasoning business, I got sidetracked by my own
entrepreneurial spirit. In the early days of Kernel Season’s™, I found
myself becoming impatient and eager to do more as we waited for the
movie theater business to fall into place. In a quick attempt to try and
generate extra revenue, I tried starting a vending machine division in
conjunction with the popcorn seasonings. Long story short, those
vending machines never made it into the theaters and have been sitting
in my mom’s basement ever since.

While you would have thought I learned my lesson then, a few years
later I tried once again to branch out. This time, I launched a licensed
brand of seasonings that consumed valuable time, money and
resources that, in hindsight, could have been used to grow my
ownKernel Season’s™ brand.
Experienced employees: I should have hired more experienced
employees early on. Given my lack of knowledge and understanding
of the business at the time, I may have been able to grow the company
quicker with some skilled professionals and senior staff members by
my side.When I finally did hire industry veterans, about 5 years after
starting Kernel Season’s™, business really took off thanks to the
insight and guidance they were able to offer.
Measurable marketing investments: Over the years, I’ve made a lot
of marketing investments without a quantifiable return. Now, having
lived through those missteps and finally making wiser, more
 measurable investments, I realize that money could have been spent
more productively to grow the brand quicker.

(51) CorpNet
Nellie Akalp | Founder
Following the Same old Business Model: Since this is my second
business in the same industry, it was easy for me to want to go back to
my origial business model I used to use. I mean, why not? It brought
me success! However, I soon learned that it’s a new time and the
industry is very different than it was when I first started back in 1997. I
found that when I started turning new corners and exploring new
spaces, I changed my business model along the way to better fit with
the clients of today instead of those of yesterday. Our new business
model has brought Corpnet.com to the forefront of leading online
incorporation services out there and I hope to bring us all the way to
the top soon.
Hiring Based on the Person and Not the Position Being Filled: I am
a people person. Always have been and always will which s why I love
each and every day going to work and helping entrepreneurs in their
business journeys. One thing I had to learn along the way, however,
was to put this aspect of my personality on hold when hiring for my
company. It’s so easy to interview someone, and like them as a person
but know they are not a good fit for the position at hand. Sometimes in
the past, I would overlook that gut feeling and hire them anyway. Now,
I make sure that the person I hire is a good fit for the position, my team
and as an added bonus, I like them on a personal level.
3Resistance to Change: As I mentioned, I have been in this industry
since 1997 when I started my first business, which sold to Intuit in
2005. When I started Corpnet.com in 2009, it was a whole new ball
game and it took a few bad experiences to learn that if I didn’t change
my ways to keep up with the new era, I would fail. It was a hard lesson
to learn but now I know that it is absolutely vital to keep your business
up to date and change whatever is necessary to get there. If I had to
 start Corpnet.com over again, I would have started it off with a strong
social media presence as I do now. I think that has helped us stay
ahead of competition and would have helped even more when we first
got started.

(52) College Hunks Hauling Junk

Nick Friedman | Co-Founder
1. The worst mistake we made was trying to expand too quickly. A
while back, we tried to offer a retail side of our business. We figured
we could make more money by selling some of the items we picked up
on jobs. We took the idea pretty far. We even leased space in a
warehouse.

The problem was that we had no idea how to operate a retail business.
We were in way over our heads and, in the end, the idea failed and we
lost some money. From that failure, though, we learned that, while
experimentation is good, you need to scale your experiments and build
slowly. Since then, we’ve undertaken multiple supplemental revenue
streams, but each one was built slowly to curb the potential risks as
much as possible. The tortoise beats the hare in the long run and that’s
where our focus is: on the long run.

(53) The Phat Startup

James Lopez | Co-Founder
Not starting earlier!I was afraid and thought I needed to know
everything before starting. Now I learned that you have to start before
you even get the slightest clue of the next steps.
Not talking to customers 1st. Everyone thinks they have the best idea
but that doesn’t matter, what matters is your customers. If they don’t
want what you are building you are wasting precious time
 I was worried about the haters.At 1stI needed people to like me, big
mistake. No one will understand your mission or be there to support
you when you begin. Focus on your product all else falls into place
later.

Anthony Frazier | Co-Founder

Know your paperwork.I made mistakes early on with terms with my
investors for my first startup. Do your homework.
Not listening.I’m not talking about my coworkers and family. I’m
talking about my customers. By not listening to my customers I once
wasted 3 months of development time on something nobody wanted.
That’s money wasted as well.
Not working on myself.I read a Jim Rohn quotes years ago where he
said“work harder on yourself, than you do on your job”I just figured
out what he meant by this in 2013. I started to take more care of
myself. Exercise, meditate, read more inspiration, etc. It made me
more creative and better at my job in return.

(54) Trinky Things (Formally Punch Street)

Keisha DePaz | Founder
Unrealistic expectations that we would just launch our website and
people would come:Without connections in the business and a large
budget, there is a lot of ground work to put in.
Running the company with no road plan:We learned a lot “as we
went along.” Most recently I won a business pitch with Count Me In
and one of the prizes was being chosen for a spot in a business
accelerator course with People Biz Inc. This course has taught us so
much about business fundamentals and getting the basics in place so
that we are prepared and ahead of the next step.
Spending money on items outside of our core product:Some
examples of this were: Flying to attend networking conferences with
 no direct relation to sales and purchasing promotional tshirts when we
had a shoe string budget. We have learned that money that has more of
a direct correlation to sales (like paying to exhibit at a local tradeshow)
is the only money well spent when bootstrapping.

(55) Publicize
Conrad Eghosa
The top 3 mistakes I made were scaling too quickly before finding
product-market fit, waiting too long to recruit the best people, and not
doing a good enough job of seeking negative feedback.

From this I learned that everything starts with product-market fit,

however once you have this you shouldn’t be worried to find the best
people and grow.
I know what you're thinking … that's a whole lot of “could've, would've,
and should've,” right? Well, you're right, but this is the life of an
entrepreneur so you have to get used to it. We experiment and sometimes
things go wrong. We don't always know the outcome of our decisions;
however, we do know that there is always a better way of doing things. And
our mission is to find it.
 Chapter Five
"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product,
you’ve launched too late." – Reid Hoffman
For newbies, starting a business can be hard and overwhelming. There are
plenty of things to do and lots to learn. I have gathered some of the best
advice for you below to get started. Take time to go through them all and be
sure to take notes.

Top 30 Startup Tips for Newbie Entrepreneurs

− Launch fast: If you have an idea, just go for it. There won't be a better
time. The only perfect time is right now.

− Fail Fast: If you’ve learned anything from this book, then you know
that mistakes and failures are inevitable. If you're going to fail, do it
fast and move on. As long as you learn from it, you'll survive.

Learning:

− As an entrepreneur, you will make mistakes: You might even fail

completely. But that is okay! It is part of the process to becoming
great. Don't give up!

− Learn from others: Unfortunately, we don't live long enough to make

all the mistakes in the world. So to be successful, you not only have to
learn from your mistakes, but you must also learn from others.

− Just ask: This rule is simple. If you don't know something, ASK. If you
need help with something, ASK. If you're not sure, ASK. There is no
shame in asking for help. It is the only sure way to know you're on the
right path. The worst that can happen is you get a NO answer.
− DON'T waste time: STOP focusing on shiny and pretty things that
don’t matter. STOP reading so many articles about things that don't
apply to you or your business growth. Focus on the task at hand. Only
take in information related to the current task.

Ideas:
− Finding ideas: Ideas are everywhere. You can literally turn anything
into a business. If you already have something that you're passionate
about, start with that rather than finding something new.

− DON'T reinvent the wheel: This is a big NO. We sometimes get in the
habit of creating things that already exist. This is a waste of time.
Instead, you should find problems with existing products and offer a
better solution.

Raising Capital / Funding:

− Raising money: If you're going to raise capital, raise more than you
think you will need. The truth is you will always need more money. It's
a no brainer. More is better.

− Bootstrap first: If you have the means, it's usually a better idea to use
your own money to launch. As the founder, you must be very hesitant
to giving away equity. Plus, when it's time to actually raise funding,
investors will be more interested knowing you put up your own
money.

− Crowdfunding: Use crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo

to raise money for your business. Quirky is awesome for inventors. Go
here for the full list of crowdfunding sites.
 Go Here for 300+ of The Best Business Tools & Resources:

300+startup tools & resources

− Equity: If you're going to give away equity to partners, be sure to use

"time vesting equity." This is how you're going to make sure that team
members only get what they work for and no one gets away with
underserved equity.

Team-up & Partnerships:

− Teams: You will need a cofounder. You can't do it alone. Just make sure
you find someone who is just as dedicated as you are or, otherwise, it’s
not worth it. Studies show that companies with one founder and no
partners are more likely to fail.

− Make friends, not contacts: Most people call this networking, but I
like the term "making friends" better. From day one, you should find
the influencers in your niche, the people who are already turning heads
in your industry, and connect with them.

− Always support others: This is very important. You must support

others if you want others to support you. Simply put yourself in that
person’s shoes and really do your best to help them succeed. Share
their work and promote them. Most will return the favor.

Productivity:

− Focus on your strength: Do what you know how to do. Why waste
time trying to learn something when you can easily hire a professional
to do it better than you? These days, it is very easy and affordable to
outsource work. Check out Fiverr.
− Be resourceful: These days, almost everything can be done more easily
and more effectively with technology. Be resourceful; take time to
discover the right tools to help you get the job done.

− Be productive: This is very important. You must be productive. You

have to get things done in a timely manner. Remember, everything
with a deadline gets done and short deadlines are always better than
long deadlines.

− Main focus: In the beginning, your main focus should first be about the
product and then about finding people who are interested in it. Having
a business card and shiny website is great, but if you don’t have a
product to sell, those are just time wasters.

− Don't sweat the small stuff: Work out a plan to execute the most
important things and leave the rest for another time.

Time-wasters:

− Stop consuming unnecessary content: With all the podcasts and blogs
out there it's very easy to fall into the habit of just consuming content.
You should only focus on the things you're currently working on. For
example, if you're working on a marketing plan, then there is
absolutely no reason to be reading articles about coding and
programming.

The Leg Work:

− Market research: If you're going to create something new, first make

sure there is a market for it. Make sure that it is something useful,
 something that people will actually pay for.

− Get out of the building: Stop hiding behind your computer screens.
Get your hustle on. It is time to speak with potential customers and get
feedback on your work.

− Build a community: You should start building a community around

your business from day one. Keep potential clients engaged with an
email list or social media. Start early, build trust, and people will
follow.

Business Model:

− Pivot: As a new founder, you must be able to adapt to changes. When

launching a new product, nothing is set in stone. Pivot until you find a
workable model for your business.

− Revenue stream: Find multiple revenue streams for your business. You
really don't want to rely on a single product and revenue stream.

− Pricing: If you’re having trouble coming up with the right price point,
always start with the higher pricing. The reason for this is: 1) People
don’t see value in cheap things. And 2) Even if you decide your
pricing is too high, you can always go lower without the risk of losing
existing customers.

− Marketing: Tell a story instead of pushing your message in people's

face. Just as author Simon Sinek said, "People don't buy what you do;
they buy why you do it." So tell a story. It is much easier to remember a
story.

Time:
 − BE PATIENT: Rome wasn't built in one day and your business won't
be either. It's going to take time so please be patient. The rule of thumb
is you must dedicate at least ten years to run a successful company.

Top 20 Reasons Your Startups Will Fail:

As a new startup, there are plenty of reasons why your company might fail.
So here are the top 20 reasons why your company might be one of them
(list from Fortune.com).

1. No market need: You created something that no one needs.

2. Ran out of cash: Not enough money to keep business afloat.
3. Not the right team: You chose or hired the wrong people to work on
it.
4. Got outcompeted: The competitors beat you to the punch.
5. Price/cost issues: Any issues related to pricing or cost.
6. Poor product: Product is not good enough to sell. No one is willing to
pay for it.
7. Need/lack of business model: Don't know how or where the money
will come from.
8. Poor marketing: Failed to tell the world about your product.
9. Ignored customers: Ignoring customer's feedback. Not giving them
what they want.
10. Product mis-timed: Wrong time to go to market.
11. Lost focus: Just not focused. Getting distracted. Doing too many
things at once.
12. Disharmony on team/investors: No teamwork. Your team needs you
to lead them.
13. Pivot gone bad: Steering the company/product into a wall or one way
street. Impossible situations.
14. Lack of passion: You started your business for the wrong reasons. No
passion.
15. Bad location: Simply chose the wrong location for business.
16. No financing or investor interest: No money, no people with money
interested in your business.
17. Legal challenges: Legal mumbo jumbo problems.
18. Don’t use network/advisor: You think you know it all. Need to get
expert advice.
19. Burn out: Tired, overworked, you just ran out gas and momentum.
20. Failure to pivot: Sticking with the old ways even though they're not
working out. Scared to try anything new.
 Chapter Six
Final Thoughts
When I launched Billion Success, my goal was simple. I wanted to learn
from other people’s mistakes instead of making my own. I was new to
business and I wasn’t sure of what it meant to be an entrepreneur or even
what it would require to start a real business.

So what better way for me to learn than from the people who are
actually doing it successfully?

With the birth of BillionSuccess.com, I found a way to fast-track the

learning curve of entrepreneurship. Not only did I get to learn from these
people, but I also had the opportunity to share the work with others. It is
only now that I realize no matter how much I learned over the years, there
were still things that I would never understand until I took action and
actually followed their advice to start my own company.

There is No Magic Bullet

When it's all said and done, there is no magic bullet to success. I would love
to sit here and give you the exact step by step formula to starting a
successful company, but that would be unrealistic. There is no right formula
because every business is different and no situation is ever the same. Since
we all have different life experiences, our paths to success will be different.
Just as my path will differ from yours, the participant's path will be different
from everyone else’s. However, knowing the different types of problems
they've all encountered will help better prepare you for the struggles ahead.

So if you've already started a business, congratulations! And to those of you

who have not, my only question to you is: what are you waiting on?
 "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but
more useful than a life spent doing nothing." ― George Bernard
Shaw

Thank You!
I want thank you for all your support. This book would not have been
possible without the awesome entrepreneurs who have participated and
offered their expert advice. It took me a while to finally put this thing
together, but it was all worth it. I am grateful for the opportunity to have
connected with you all and I wish each of you nothing but success.

Contributor Acknowledgement:
1. Anita Campbell – (Small Business Trends)
2. Nathan Chan – (Foundr Magazine)
3. Melinda Emerson (Small Biz Lady) (Succeed as Your own Boss)
4. John Lee Dumas – (Entrepreneur on Fire)
5. Nick Loper – (Side Hustle Nation)
6. Yaro Starak – (Entrepreneur-Journey)
7. Natalie Sisson – (Suitcase Entrepreneur)
8. Mark Schaefer – (Schaefer Marketing Solutions)
9. Vasavi Kumar – (Vasavi Kumar)
10. Tom Morkes (Insurgent Publishing)
11. Sushant Misra (TrepTalks)
12. Zeb Welborn (Welborn Media)
13. Paul Colaianni – (Overwhelmed Brain Podcast)
14. Neil Patel – Cofounder (KISSmetrics)
15. Jim Belosic – Founder (ShortStack)
16. Kate Endress – CEO/ Founder (DITTO)
17. Jan Ihmels – Founder (Lingua.ly)
18. David Wachs – Founder (Handwrytten)
19. Michael Cheng – Founder (Snip.ly)
20. Brian Nickerson – Cofounder (Chippmunk)
21. Payal Divakaran – Cofounder (SpotRocket)
22. Jason Seldon – Founder (Pr4RC)
23. David Niu – Founder (TINYhr)
24. Amanda L. Barbara – CEO (Pubslush)
25. Stephen Temes – Cofounder (EarlyShares)
26. Jon Ferrara– Founder (Nimble)
27. Tapajyoti (Tukan) Das – CEO (Leadsift)
28. Andrew Dumont – Founder (Stride)
29. Yunha Kim – Cofounder/CEO (Locket)
30. Tiki Barber – Co-Chairman/Founder (Thuzio)
31. Paul Canetti – Founder/CEO (Maz)
32. Horia Cernusca – Cofounder (Swipe)
33. Shahram Seyedin-Noor – Cofounder/CEO (GraphDive)
34. Raj Kadam – Cofounder (Viralheat)
35. Saif A. Rahman – Founder (Mobile First Entertainment)
36. Ian Naylor – Founder (App Institute)
37. Daniela Cecílio – Founder (Asap54)
 38. Eghosa Aihie – Cofounder (Alumnify)
39. Mark Lassoff – Founder (Learn to Program)
40. Liam Martin – Founder (Staff.com)
41. Andrew Tosh – Founder (GameSim)
42. Alicia Navarro – Founder/CEO (Skimlinks)
43. Matthew Bellows – Founder (Yesware)
44. Jim Alvarez – Founder (Gesture)
45. Simon Slade – Cofounder (SaleHoo)
46. Axel & Boris – Cofounders (Dreamojo)
47. Johannes Reck – Founder (Get Your Guide)
48. Hagi Erez – Founder (Pluralis)
49. Brian Scudamore – Founder (1800-Gotjunk)
50. Brian Taylor – Founder (Kernel Season's)
51. Nellie Akalp – Founder (Corpnet)
52. Nick Friedman – cofounder (College Hunks Hauling Junks)
53. James Lopez & Anthony Frazier – Cofounders (The Phat Startup)
54. Keisha DePaz – Founder (Punch Street)
55. Conrad Eghosa – Founder (Publicize)

Awesome friends and supporters:

Thanks to all of my friends and family who have supported
BillionSuccess.com from day one. Sushant Misra (TrepTalks), Zeb Welborn
(Welborn Media), Scott McDonald (Scott d Macdonald), Adam Witmer
(Businatomy), Jolene Davis (In the Know), John Corcoran (Smart Business
Revolution), Mike Kawula (Self Employed King), Ivan Widjaya
(Noobpreneur) thanks for your friendship and support.

Also, thanks to everyone who has helped me in one way or another to share
my work with their audience. These guys have all inspired me to continue
to work harder and continue to move forward. Thank you to Michael Roer
(Entrepreneurship Foundation), Mike Morris (RecDesk), Anthony Wells,
David Hutcherson (The Power of Part Time), Jared Easley (Starve the
Doubts), Mike S. Brooks (Nuclear Chowder Marketing), Scott Barlow (HTYC) and
to Tom Morkes for including me in the very first edition of "The Creative
Entrepreneur - Insurgent Publishing"

Awesome podcasters for having me on their show:

David Ralph (Join up Dots)
Katie McCarthy (Give Good Podcast)
Anita Campbell (BizSugar & Small Business Trends)
Adam Connell (Blogging Wizard)
Mike Kawula (Self Employed King)
Dave Schneider (Selfmade Businessman)
Tania Dakka (Badass 'D)
– You guys rock!

Business Lessons: 150+ startup mistakes and

entrepreneurship lessons shared by 55 successful
founders

Founder Interviews: The art of learning from other's mistakes.

By: Herby Fabius
Disclaimer
All rights reserved. The material in this book includes information,
products, and services from, or links to third parties. The inclusion of these
resources and links does not constitute an endorsement or agreement with
these parties. The author does not assume responsibility or liability for the
information, statements, opinions, products, or services of third parties
mentioned in this book.
Links to third party resources may be affiliated links, meaning the author
may receive compensation if a product or service is ultimately purchase
from such a link.
No part of this publication shall be reproduced, transmitted, or sold in
whole or in part in any form, without the prior written consent of the author.
The author and the author's business is not responsible for the success and
or failure of your business decisions relating to any information provided in
this publication and does not guarantee financial gain as a result of applying
the principles taught in this book.
All interviews were published on BillionSuccess.com with full permission
and acknowledgment of all participants.
This book is for informational purposes only.

***
Copyright © 2015 Herby Fabius www.BillionSuccess.com
 This le was downloaded from Z-Library project

Your gateway to knowledge and culture. Accessible for everyone.

z-library.se singlelogin.re go-to-zlibrary.se single-login.ru

O cial Telegram channel

Z-Access

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library
ffi
fi