One of the most important aspects of marketing your company or product is its position in the market. This is often overlooked because positioning isn’t as sexy as getting Facebook Fans or Twitter Followers. However, it’s the best way to separate yourself from the competition, especially if you are in a crowded space.

I have seen far too many companies build their product or service, and then leave the product’s positioning to the marketing department. The position of the product needs to be designed and engineered into the product itself, and not be seen as an afterthought.

Below are four ways any company can position their product in an ultra-competitive marketplace.

Target A Specific Group Of People

Email marketing and list managing services have long been dominated by the likes of Mailchimp, Aweber, and Constant Contact. Those are just three of the dozens of services to choose from when beginning an email marketing strategy.

If you throw in the marketing automation software solutions such as Marketo, Infusionsoft, and Hubspot, the industry is flooded with highly competent and well funded companies.

However, that didn’t deter the folks at Campaign Monitor from building their own solution.

According to David Greiner, the founder of Campaign Monitor:

“Campaign Monitor really was born out of necessity… We decided to clear our schedule and have a go at building our dream email marketing tool… We made a few modifications to the software so any design firm could use it and started spreading the word. In less than six months, thousands of designers were using Campaign Monitor to send email newsletters for themselves and their clients.”

As David says they didn’t build the product and then try to sell it to designers. They positioned the product by building specific features designers would love.

Marketing Take Away: If the competition is selling to one niche, you can build your product or service so that it is perfectly suited for a niche that the competition is ignoring.

Do One Or Two Things Very Well

Every successful company has to keep track of its money. In the accounting software world, the 800 pound gorilla is Quickbooks.

However, I’ve never once met an entrepreneur, or CFO, or small business owner who actually likes Quickbooks. The most common complaints to are:

• “It has too many features. I only need it to do three things, not all this other stuff”.
• “It takes too long to learn, and I just don’t have the time to learn it.”
• “It’s too expensive. I’d be better off using Excel, or pen and paper.”

In steps a company called inDinero. Jessica Mah, the founder of inDinero went into the world of small businesses and startups to understand exactly what it is they need in accounting software. Then Jessica and her team stripped out the bloated features of Quickbooks and focused on two core competencies: Financial automation and budgeting.

Jessica also understands that the biggest problem plaguing small business owners and startups is a lack of time and a lack of money. So the product needs to have an extremely small learning curve and needs to be inexpensive.

As a result, inDinero was one of the most talked about startups in 2011, despite being in the mundane accounting software product category.

Marketing Take Away: When everyone seems to complain about the 800 pound gorilla in your industry, find out why. If it is because there are too many features, and it takes too long to learn, make sure your product or service focuses on doing one or two things very well.

Tell A Unique Story

A third way to position your company is to tell a unique story.

One of my favorite stories on the web comes from a tea brewing company called 52Teas.

52 Teas is just another tea brewing company, until you realize that each week, they brew a completely new tea.

With teas such as the Red Hot Cinnamon Chai Tea, the Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Black Tea, and the Cranberry Black Tea, 52Teas is telling a unique story to the hard core tea connoisseur.

One of the most impressive parts about the story that 52Teas tells is that they let their customer participate. They brew new teas based on suggestions they get from Twitter and emails.

Most businesses aren’t going to be able to change their product every week to accommodate the taste of their customers. However, if an industry as old as tea brewing can have a new twist, then chances are your company can as well.

Marketing Take Away: If your competitors are all telling the same story, whether that is that they have the lowest price, or are the most innovative, then you need to be telling a different story. Do you offer the best service? Or are you the easiest to use? Or are you like 52Teas and welcome product suggestions?

Be More User Friendly

We’ve all seen Travelocity, Kayak, Expedia, Orbitz and about a half dozen other travel website commercials on television. These companies are well funded and heavily entrenched in the travel industry.

But one of the most talked about products to hit the market was a startup in this industry called Hipmunk.

A quick comparison between Hipmunk’s homepage and their competitors shows why they can succeed in this space.

Their user interface is extremely easy to use. When you visit the site, it’s extremely clear what they want you to do: Enter flight information.

They don’t confuse or distract you by putting ads on their home page, nor do they try to sell you limited time offers to places you have no interest in visiting.

Another thing you will notice is the size and placement of the web form compared to the likes of Travelocity and Orbitz.

First, it’s by far the biggest object on the screen, and second, it’s dead center on the screen.

Compare that to Orbitz and Travelocity where the ads are centered on the screen and bigger than the actual web form. It’s clear that the entrenched companies would much rather sell you stuff than actually help you find a flight.

Marketing Take Away: Focusing on making the life of your customers easier and not trying to milk them for every last dime will have a huge impact on your success.

Conclusion

In conclusion, if you are going to jump into an industry with well entrenched and better funded competitors, then you need to position your company in order to have success. These are four ways to position your product so that it can thrive in any market environment. Do you have any other suggestions? We would love to hear them in the comments below!

About the Author: Greg Digneo is the author of the new blog Sales Leads in Thirty Days which shows marketing agencies and consultants how to get more clients in 30 Days.

Are you looking to take the leap into starting your own business in 2012? If you’re just starting to think about it, or if you have been planning it for a while, you still may have lots of unanswered questions. The following 101 resources will help you learn more about entrepreneurship, startups, small business, and much more.

Entrepreneurs & Startups

• Entrepreneur.com – Business ideas and trends from Entrepreneur Magazine. The latest news, expert advice, and growth strategies for small business owners.
• Forbes for Entrepreneurs – Read the breaking Entrepreneurs coverage and top headlines on Forbes.
• Inc. Start-up – Advice for founders of start-ups and start-up entrepreneurs on writing a business plan, running a home-based business, naming a start-up business, how to incorporate, financing a start-up, buying a small business, and starting a franchise.
• Mashable on Startups – Essential technology tips for startups.
• Entrepreneurs’ Organization – The Entrepreneurs’ Organization is dedicated to transforming the lives of the entrepreneurs who transform the world representing 40 countries with 120 worldwide chapters.
• About.com for Entrepreneurs – Help and advice for going from the idea stage to business plan to the marketplace and beyond.
• Harvard Business School Entrepreneurs – A video archives that captures insights from leading members of the School’s entrepreneurial community.
• Young Entrepreneur Council – YEC is an invite only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs.
• Ted Talks on Entrepreneurship – Video archive on talks about entrepreneurship.
• Kauffman Foundation – The Kauffman Foundation works to further understanding of the powerful economic impact of entrepreneurship, to develop programs that enhance entrepreneurial skills and abilities, and to improve the environment in which entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
• Global Entrepreneurship Week – Global Entrepreneurship Week is the world’s largest celebration of the innovators and job creators who launch startups that bring ideas to life, drive economic growth and expand human welfare.
• Business Exchange on Entrepreneurship – This topic covers all things relevant to entrepreneurs, including information on the latest new ventures and tools that help them reach success.
• SCORE – SCORE is a nonprofit association dedicated to educating entrepreneurs and helping small businesses start, grow, and succeed nationwide.
• Focus – Focus makes the world’s business expertise available to everyone. At the heart of Focus is a network of thousands of leading business and technology experts who are thought leaders, veteran practitioners and upstart innovators in hundreds of different topics and markets.
• The 10 Best Entrepreneurship Courses of 2011 – University courses in entrepreneurship are better—more useful, more real, more likely to produce actual companies—than they have ever been. Here are 10 we’d love to take.
• Entrepreneur Finder – Entrepreneur Finder works by matching your interests, information and requirements with the individuals or companies that you are searching for. After you create a profile, you will have free access to contact other members and take advantage of the user search and matching features.

Startup Financing

• Entrepreneur.com on Startup Financing – Need help on startup financing? Find everything you need to know about startup business financing and how to get your business the money it needs to get it.
• How Does Venture Capital Work – A simple guide on how venture capital works. firms and funds, and venture capital in a new company.
• Venture Capital on Alltop – The latest posts from top new sources on Venture Capital.
• National Venture Capital Association – As the voice of the U.S. venture capital community, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) empowers its members and the entrepreneurs they fund by advocating for policies that encourage innovation and reward long-term investment.
• Business Loans, Grants and Financing – Fill out this form to find financing for your small business. This form provides a guide to programs for which you may be eligible.

Business Planning

• Business, LLCs & Corporations Center – Starting a small business? Learn about LLCs, business plans, financing, and more. Everything you need to start and run a smart, successful small business.
• Compare Business Types – Use this business structure reference chart to compare common business types. Also see LegalZoom. Both can help you get started with your business filings.
• Bplans – Bplans offers free sample business plans, business plan software, business calculators, and articles on writing a business plan, starting a business, and other small business topics.
• How to Write a Business Plan – Whether you’re just starting out, need funding or want to monitor the health of your business, creating a business plan is your first step on the path to success. Read this extensive how-to to get started on your plan.
• Writing a Business Plan – Now that you’ve decided that you’d like to open a small business, you should put your thoughts down on paper. This way, your business idea is expressed in a plan – a living document that outlines every critical aspect of its operation.

Accounting & Bookkeeping

• Accounting Basics – Staying on top of your small business bookkeeping is important to your business financing. Learn how to manage your business’ bookkeeping and more.
• Basic Accounting – Advice for start-ups, entrepreneurs, and small business owners on basic accounting, including how to calculate and track cash flow, profitability, earnings, Ebitda, gross margin, and a business’s breakeven point.
• 2012 Best Accounting Software Comparisons and Reviews – Compare the top ten accounting and bookkeeping software products for your small business.

Employees

• SBA on Hiring – When you’re ready to hire employees to work in your business, you’ll need to perform a few key steps to be in compliance with employment laws, and to ensure that your new employees understand the work for which they’ve been hired.
• Inc. on Recruiting and Hiring Employees – Advice for small business owners and entrepreneurs on recruiting and hiring employees,
• NOLO on Hiring Employees – When you hire employees, you need to know the rules on job descriptions, interviews, background checks and more. Find out how to gather the information you need and choose the right employee — without violating the law.
• Open Forum on Employee Management – Current archive of over 230 posts on employee management.
• About.com on Human Resources – This section of About covers HR management, workplace communication, job descriptions, policies, leadership, and more.
• Entrepreneur on Managing Employees – Managing employees can be a difficult task. Here is an online guide to managing employees.
• Fast Company on Hiring Employees – These features can help you identify the skills you need your employees to possess, find the employees you need, and how to link them up with the teams that will best bring out their potential.

Taxes

• Small Business Tax Center – When you’re running a business, you don’t need to be a tax expert, too. But you do need some tax basics. IRS Small Business Advantage gives you the information you need to stay tax compliant so your business can thrive.
• SBA on Taxes – This section helps you with every aspect of the taxes you must collect from your customers, including strategies for tax record-keeping.
• Small Business Tax Strategies – Tax planning is a year-round event if you want to minimize your business’s tax bill. Whether it’s surviving an audit, capitalizing on business deductions, or finding tax-friendly ways to run your business, this Inc.com guide can help reduce your tax obligations and make paying taxes less anxiety provoking.

Online Marketing

• KISSmetrics Marketing Guides – This page will get you started with marketing guides for social media (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Digg), Google AdWords, email marketing, PPC, and more. All it’s missing is the Beginner’s Guide to Google+ and Content Marketing.
• The NOOB Guide to Online Marketing – If you’re new to online marketing, this post and infographic explains everything from analytics to social media marketing.
• The Beginners Guide to SEO – This online guide has 10 chapters covering search engine optimization from how search engines operate to tracking success.
• Introduction to Blogging – WordPress’ guide to blogging. Also don’t miss these 70+ Resources for Starting a WordPress Blog.
• Copywriting 101 – This tutorial is designed to get you up and running with the basics of writing great copy in ten easy lessons. Afterward, you’ll get recommendations for professional training, plus links to tutorials on SEO copywriting and writing killer headlines.
• Getting Started – If you are new to social media or you’re not sure you’re doing the right thing, this page is for you. It contains a number of videos and articles to help bring you up to speed.
• Getting Started with Google Analytics – Google Analytics is a free analytics tool to track your website’s visitors and traffic. Take a moment to configure your account and use this checklist as a reference to getting the most out of Google Analytics.
• The Smashing Networks – Need resources on web design? The smashing network includes over a dozen blogs dedicated to web design, CSS, WordPress, and much more.

Essential Software

• 2012 Best Antivirus Software Comparisons and Reviews – Compare the top ten antivirus software products for your small business.
• 2012 Best CRM Software Comparisons and Reviews -Compare the top ten customer relationship management solutions for your small business.
• Microsoft Office – Everything you need for Microsoft Office including learning resources, templates, graphics, and more. Not ready for Microsoft Office? Try Open Office or Google Documents as free alternatives.
• 2012 Payment Gateway Services Comparisons and Reviews – Compare the top ten payment gateway services for your small business.

Small Business Blogs, News & Guides

• OPEN Forum – A wealth of resources for business owners – videos, articles, blogs, podcasts, and expert advice to boost your business, sponsored by American Express OPEN.
• NYT Small Business – Find breaking news & money news on mortgage rates, mutual funds, the stock market, bonds & notes, company research, earnings reports and market insight.
• Mashable on Small Business – Essential technology news and tips for small businesses.
• Inc. – Get advice, tools, and services that help your small business grow.
• BusinessWeek on Small Business – Get information for small business startups and entrepreneurs. Find helpful resources about small business management, financing, marketing & technology.
• Small Business Trends – Small Business Trends is the premier source of information, news and advice covering issues of key importance to the small business market.
• CNN on Small Business – Latest financial news on small businesses, including tips for small biz owners, small business loans, management, startups and entrepreneurs.
• Wall Street Journal’s Small Business How To Guide – WSJ small business guide covering how to fund, start, run, buy, sell and manage your small business.
• Reuters on Small Business – Reuter’s blog section for small business and entrepreneurial advice.
• Alltop Startups – Alltopstartups is dedicated to profiling startups, reviewing new and top internet and mobile products.

Books for Small Business & Entrepreneurship

• Best 2011 Books for Entrepreneurs – Some of these are unusual choices that don’t fit neatly into the “business book” genre. But being an entrepreneur involves a lot more than nuts and bolts and outcomes, so this list includes books about leading people, making decisions, the broader
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t – Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t.
• EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches – Whether you’re sitting at the CEO’s desk, the middle manager’s cubicle, or a card table in your living-room-based startup, EntreLeadership provides the practical, step-by-step guidance to grow your business where you want it to go.
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It – In this first new and totally revised edition of the 150,000-copy underground bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business.
• Breakthrough Entrepreneurship – Using examples of companies large and small (Zipcar, Parenting Magazine, Wal-Mart, Google), Burgstone and Murphy teach readers to find and fill an unmet customer need, plan for profitability, strive for sustainability, establish credibility, gather necessary resources, lead and manage effectively, and maintain balance. (Publication Date: March 2012)
• Midas Touch: Why Some Entrepreneurs Get Rich-And Why Most Don’t – Through two of the world’s most successful and influential entrepreneurs’ real life stories of success, failure, perseverance and purpose, you’ll discover how they do it and whether or not you have what it takes to drive your own entrepreneurial success.
• Tim Tebow Your Business: Lessons From The QB’s Unlikely Success – The basic complaint about Tebow is that he shouldn’t be winning. And yet, the Broncos keep winning. After starting the season 1-4, the team is now 6-5, just a game out of first place in their division. So how is this possible? And what lessons can be learned for business?
• 12 Business Lessons from Your Favorite Cartoons – As we grow older and more wise, it becomes clear that these cartoons taught us how to not only be good people, but also good business people.
• 20 Business Lessons Learned from Monty Python – Skeptical that there are indeed lessons to be learned from Monty Python? These 20 pearls of Pythonic wisdom will show you the light.

Business Lessons

• 60+ Unexpected Business Lessons – In business, you can learn something new and unexpected at virtually any time or any place. With that in mind, the CarolRoth.com contributor network of entrepreneurs, advisors and experts have shared their most unexpected or unusual business lessons.
• 5 Best Business Lessons From Warren Buffett – Small-business owners can learn a lot from the leaders and innovators in big business, especially the Sage of Omaha.
• 10 Business Lessons From a Snarky Entrepreneur – Here are 10 positive lessons I learned from more than 12 years as an entrepreneur.
• 3 Business Lessons From The Godfather – So what can you learn from The Godfather? Here are some valuable lessons.
• 14 Inspiring Life and Business Lessons From Richard Branson – If there’s one guy I’d want to trade lives with for a day it would probably be Richard Branson. He’s made a fortune, has had a blast doing it, and still seems to be going strong. These are just 14 incredible life and business lessons from him that really inspired me.
• Top 10 Business Lessons from Bill Gates – He’s retired from his role as Microsoft’s CEO and instead devotes himself full-time to philanthropy through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Below, you’ll find 10 business lessons from the life of Bill Gates.
• 12 Most Compelling Business Lessons from Rock Stars – Business is a lot more fun when you learn from rock stars instead of text books. If your ears are open, you’ll find that many essential business lessons are coming through your speakers.
• 11 Business Lessons Steve Jobs Taught Me – Although I’m young and haven’t been following Jobs’ career as intently as others, he has taught me a lot about business in the last five years. Here are 11 things I’ll never forget that Steve Jobs taught me.
• 14 Business Lessons For Every Entrepreneur – A quick and easy read with 14 tips for every entrepreneur.
• Top 30 Inspirational Entrepreneur Quotes – The following is a compilation of various motivational quotes from famous entrepreneurs and are in no particular order, nor are they a definitive list of the best quotes ever.

Social Entrepreneurship

• What is a Social Entrepreneur – Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.
• 12 Most Damaging Myths About Social Entrepreneurs – They’re the answer not only to our economy but to issues such as obesity, institutional racism, poverty, sustainability, and other social concerns. Unfortunately there are many misperceptions about social entrepreneurship that are keeping many people from embracing this growing trend.
• Forbes’ List of the Top 30 Social Entrepreneurs – For the first time in Forbes’ 94-year history, we’ve assembled the Impact 30: a list of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs. We’re defining “social entrepreneur” as a person who uses business to solve social issues.
• Skoll Foundation – One of the leading foundations in the field of social entrepreneurship.
• Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship – The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship provides unparalleled platforms at the regional and global level to highlight and advance leading models of sustainable social innovation.
• Business Week on Social Entrepreneurship – Social Entrepreneurship is still in its infancy and has a lot of growing up to do before it will have major impacts. Read updated news, blogs, and resources about Social Entrepreneurship.
• Social Entrepreneurship on Alltop – The latest posts from top new sources on Social Entrepreneurship.

Top Entrepreneurs 2011

• Top Young Entrepreneurs 2011 30 Under 30 – Inc.com’s annual list of the top young entrepreneurs in America. See featured profiles and video in this year’s 30 Under 30.
• Top 10 Female Entrepreneurs – From healthcare to baby food to technology consulting, these female entrepreneurs have forged their way to the top of their fields.
• Top 10 Black Entrepreneurs – These 10 Black entrepreneurs from around the country bootstrapped their firms and built fast-growing enterprises, earning them a spot on the Inc. 500.
• Top 10 Latino and Hispanic Entrepreneurs – With family roots that trace back to Spain and Central and South America, these Latino and Hispanic entrepreneurs have built some of the fastest-growing American companies.
• Top 10 American Indian Entrepreneurs – From IT solutions to military services, these are the top small businesses run by CEO’s of American Indian heritage.
• Top 10 South Asian Entrepreneurs – From IT services to industrial supply, these are the top small businesses run by CEOs of South Asian heritage.
• Top 10 East Asian Entrepreneurs – From mobile accessory designer to media outlet, these are the top small businesses run by CEO’s of East Asian heritage.
• Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2011 – For our annual survey of the most promising technology entrepreneurs, Bloomberg Businessweek’s editors and writers weighed input from venture capitalists, angel investors, and other representatives of startups.

We know there are many more resources for entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses out there. Please share your favorites in the comments!

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing, including social networking strategies and blogging tips.

Over the past 10 years I’ve created many businesses. If you looked at my business life on a timeline you would see that my first few businesses didn’t do too well, however, as the years went on I slowly became more successful.

Why? Because I’ve learned from my mistakes.

One mistake I learned to avoid is that you have to move fast when it comes to a product launch. Dragging your feet will kill your launch. Here are six common mistakes that lead to procrastination, and how to avoid them.

1. Not Working Fast Enough

Not meeting your product launch deadline can be deadly. A lot of people are anticipating the launch, including the press and your investors, and if you fail to meet it and don’t have a really good reason, people may doubt your ability in the future.

Even if you and your team think that six months or nine months or whatever time you’ve promised seems like a long time…don’t waste it! Get to work right away as soon as you can. It’s much better to finish before your deadline than it is to finish after.

I think we are all probably guilty of wasting time when we think we have a lot of it. Here’s my recommendation to avoid doing that:

• Give your team an internal goal – this is the goal that you are not sharing with the public. The purpose of this goal is to keep your team motivated early on.
• Give yourself time to re-evaluate – Your internal goal should be far enough from the real deadline to give you time to evaluate. As things may not go well.
• Give yourself meaningful landmarks to hit – Your internal goal should be made up of five or six landmark goals that gauge your progress in a meaningful way. For example, you could set a goal for prototypes, user testing round one, etc.

Also, try to avoid one of the most common mistakes that new entrepreneurs make: never make promises you can’t keep.

2. Unsure About The Problem

A slow product launch might be caused by you and your team not understanding the problem your product is supposed to fix. This could lead to a number of problems:

• Confusion – Not everyone is on the same page, so when you communicate to your team what you want, they hear one thing because they understand the problem differently.
• Conflict – There’s a chance if you and your team don’t truly understand the problem that you’ll end up fighting. It may even come across in subtle ways, like not putting in long hours or turning in sloppy work.
• Control – In a really bad situation you may find yourself fighting for control of the product with other team members. This will surely sink any kind of effort.

What I’ve learned from my experience and mentors is to over communicate! If you don’t feel like your team understands the problem, ask them how they see it. Do they have it right and do you have it wrong?

It’s important to always ask questions and never assume. It can be easy for entrepreneurs to ignore people or advice, and forge forward without taking in consideration what the people around them are saying. Remember, arrogance diminishes wisdom.

Besides, communication is just as much about listening as it is about speaking. Here are some tips on listening better:

• Allow people to speak first.
• Pay close attention to what they are saying. Don’t think of your response while they are talking.
• When they are done talking, repeat back to them what you thought they said and ask them, “Is that what you said?”
• Before you answer, ask yourself, “Where’s the truth in what they said?” Find the common ground.

3. Fear Of Users

Seriously, you’d think that if you were launching a product you’d be in love with the thought of engaging customers. But not every one behind a product launch is the out-going type. Heck, if he or she is an engineer, they like tinkering with the toys and not talking to the customer.

This can lead to putting off not just the launch but necessary prototype tests. Ignoring users can lead to a product that users don’t want.

If you’re the kind of person who isn’t big on dealing with users, then you need to find someone else to do it for you. If you can’t for some reason, or really want to do it yourself because you believe that’s a great learning lesson for you, then follow these tips:

• Treat the interaction with users like a game – Create a goal that’s personal to you and will help motivate you to engage with your customers. This could be as simple as “talk to 10 users every day.”
• Ask someone to join you – I know people who feel uncomfortable talking to strangers, so to help them get over that they always bring someone along who isn’t uncomfortable. After spending some time with this person and learning from them, then you can try it on your own.
• Put a barrier between you and the user – Sometimes you don’t need to talk to the user face-to-face. It may be through surveys, emails, a dashboard or even phone call. If you can control the situation, go for it!

4. Fear Of Failure

Starting a business, especially one that will get a lot of attention, can cause some people to procrastinate because they are afraid to fail. They don’t want to launch their product because they think people will look down on them or their product won’t measure up to the competition.

It can be tough if you are bringing a product to market that’s supposed to beat a current customer favorite. This is why you have to be tough-skinned and a little bit of an egomaniac as an entrepreneur.

Bill Nguyen is an interesting serial entrepreneur who claims he makes the same mistakes over and over again with each launch. If you think about it, this flies in the face of conventional wisdom. I wouldn’t recommend his approach, but you have to hand it to him…he’s got guts!

Are you afraid of being judge or failing? Here are some tips to help you overcome that fear:

• Ask yourself what’s the worst thing that can happen if you fail. Can you live with that? You probably can.
• Remind yourself that failure is a good teacher.
• Remember that thousands of successful people have failed multiple times.
• Find successful people who’ve failed and ask them to talk to you about how they dealt with it.
• Hang out with people who support, love and encourage you.
• Never give up.
• Remember that you have as much right to launch a product as anybody else.

If you do these things you may not get the same guts as Nguyen, but you’ll get a jolt of self-confidence that can carry you to that launch.

5. Being Distracted By Too Many Things

This is a real killer for entrepreneurs. You probably love to work and solve problems, and when you do this, if you’re like me, you may end up getting involved in a lot of things. Entrepreneurs are overachievers, which is a good thing, but it can spell trouble when it comes to launch time.

How do you avoid working on too many things? Simply focus. Your task for the next few months should be nothing but get your product ready for launch. Here are some tips to help you focus:

• Create a minimal viable product, so things move faster.
• Plaster your product launch date everywhere so nobody forgets.
• Remind yourself and your team all the time of their singular focus.
• Eliminate anything that’s a distraction, whether it’s too many dinner dates or even press interviews. Sure, it’s important to build momentum up, but a failed product launch will kill any kind of attention you get.

6. Perfectionism

Perfectionism is simply re-working a product over and over, trying to fix every single bug and erase every single bad design element so the customer gets a perfect product. That’s really the traditional, big corporation idea product launch.

Unfortunately it’s very expensive to operate that way because your idea may not be the customer’s idea of perfection, leading to a product that users don’t want.

You don’t probably have deep enough pockets to make that mistake even once.

These days it’s pretty common to get a product to 33% launch-ready before releasing. That’s an acceptable, proven practice, but you can still suffer from perfectionism when it comes to beta testing.

How? There are two ways:

• Define exactly what 33% is – Do you and your team have a clearly defined picture of 33%? Did you work this into your business plan? Do your investors understand that picture, too?
• Who’s responsible for identifying 33%? – An important aspect to a good team is someone who can hold you accountable. If you have a partner, he or she should hold you accountable. If you are a single founder, then you should appoint someone, maybe a mentor, to hold you accountable. If you don’t have this person, you can fall into perfectionism.

It’s important that you communicate clearly what stage your product is in when it launches. Everybody knows that the first generation of Apple products is going to be buggy. That’s why only innovators and early adapters are the only ones who typically pick them up.

Conclusion

You have to work hard to be a successful entrepreneur. You have to put in 80 hours a week and sacrifice time with family and friends. Don’t let a delayed product launch flush all that work down the drain!

What other things can stall a product launch?

About the Author: Neil Patel is the VP of Marketing of KISSmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.

Revenue is the most important metric when it comes to starting a business. But it’s not the only metric you should be concerned with.

Of course some companies have gotten very creative when it comes to justifying their business model to investors, but I don’t think those are the kinds of metrics you should be paying attention to, especially if you want to succeed.

In the end, it’s watching and learning from the traditional metrics that will help you grow your startup into a real business. Here are the 9 most important.

Startup Metric #1 Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC is the metric that matters the most if you are in the early stages of your startup growth because if you want to survive you need users. But it costs money to acquire customers. The question is how much, and is it profitable?

To calculate your CAC cost, divide your sales and marketing costs, including overhead expenses in these departments, for a given period by the number of customers you picked up during that period.

A high CAC cost means you are spending too much money to acquire new customers. To lower it you need to optimize your sign up and landing pages. Optimizely is a great tool to use when testing different variables on a web page.

We’ll talk more about what’s a viable CAC cost for a startup when we get to the Life Time Value metric.

Startup Metric #2 Retention

I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs get so obsessed with customer acquisition that they forget about customer retention. I’ve actually been guilty of it myself!

Unfortunately you need to break out of this obsession because if all you do is focus on acquisition you end up neglecting your current customers, which can mean they might eventually get frustrated and leave.

One of the most important things that I learned about retention actually helped me break my single-minded focus on acquisition, and will probably help you too. For me, it costs 6 to 7 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep a current client.

In addition, it costs me 4 times more to close a deal with new customers than it does to upsell a current one. That means you cannot neglect your current clients!

So who exactly should you focus on? There are three kinds of customers you need to think about:

• Current – what can you do to make these customers more satisfied? If you don’t know, simply ask. People love to talk and give their opinion, so you won’t be bothering them.
• Inactive – customers who’ve stopped using the product or slowed their use of it should be asked why. Again, they are a great source you should take advantage of to help you improve your product and customer service.

…We’ll talk about the third customer in the following section.

Startup Metric #3 Churn

Churn, or attrition, is another really important metric you should keep your eye on. This is a measure of how many customers stop paying you for your product.

Some startups measure churn at 30 days. Others wait 90 days so as not to confuse an inactive customer, who may start using the product again in the future, with someone who doesn’t intend to come back.

It’s important to realize that you will lose customers. There is no getting around that. What you have to do is find out what a profitable level of loss is to you.

By the way, did you know that you are 2 times more likely to close with a lost customer than you are to acquire a new one? That should be a good incentive to motivate you to find out why certain customers have stopped paying for your product.

If you have customers who are leaving your product, then try to conduct as many win/lose interviews with them. You can do this by phone or email, though I recommend you do as many as you can on the phone. Make them feel like a real person.

Another great way to keep churn low is to use data to anticipate churn and then create personalized retention plans.

Startup Metric #4 Life Time Value (LTV)

What exactly is the LTV? It’s how much you expect to earn from a customer during the time they are with your company.

That means you first have to know how long most customers stay with you. It could be six months, 12 months or longer. Then you multiply the monthly revenue you expect from that customer and you get the LTV.

Keep in mind that you should include any expenses related to installation or maintenance of your product.

You don’t need a college education to see that a business will fail if the CAC is higher than your LTV. This is why David Skok calls CAC the startup killer.

Here are two guidelines David suggests you might find useful:

• LTV > CAC. (It appears that LTV should be about 3 x CAC for a viable SaaS or other form of recurring revenue model.)
• Aim to recover your CAC in < 12 months, otherwise your business will require too much capital to grow.

Obviously what you need is a CAC a lot lower than LTV.

Startup Metric #5 Product Metabolism

Product metabolism is a metric created by Dustin Dolginow, and it basically measures the speed at which you and your company move and make decisions.

Like the human metabolism, product metabolism is usually high in the early stages of a startup. As the company begins to mature, however, that metabolism begins to slow down.

Dustin argues that this is good since it could be damaging for a large company to make lots of gut-level decisions that may hurt customer retention, and because of the larger size of the company, they cannot respond quickly.

Netflix is a company that’s recently made some rather dramatic changes to how it operates, namely raising prices and branching off one of its divisions into a full-fledge company. Not everyone agrees that this was a bad decision, but it’s still early so time will tell.

Like a lot of these metrics, maintaining product metabolism is a balancing act. If you move too fast you create instability. If you move too slow you might irritate your customers.

One of the best ways I’ve found to measure product metabolism is to use KISSinsights and ask my customers two simple questions: Are we moving too fast or too slow? Why?

Startup Metric #6 Viral Coefficient

This metric measures the organic growth of your company. Usually a startup will start with inviting friends to use the product. If it is a good product, then these beta users will then tell their friends and so on.

Other ways that make your product viral is through social pushes like share buttons, email invitations and promotions on Twitter or Facebook.

Here are your inputs when calculating the viral coefficient:

• Initial set of customers
• Number of invites sent to each new customer
• Percentage of invites that convert

That conversion rate over several cycles is your viral coefficient. A positive viral coefficient rate means four things:

1. You are giving your customers a positive user experience
2. You’ve found a good product/market fit
3. You have a low cost of acquisition
4. You will probably have high profitability

One way to improve your viral coefficient is to build incentives into your products.

The business app Hashable is a good example of this. As people use the app they are pushed up the leader board in rankings, and as they move up they are encouraged to share their progress with their network, leading to more users.

Startup Metric #7 Revenue

This is one of the most important metrics to pay attention to because it’s all about profitability. In other words, are you making money?

Revenue is the income that your company brings in. It’s usually reported as “sales” or “sales revenue” that comes when customers purchase your product, but revenue can also include other income like interest or late fees.

Revenue doesn’t come easily, and you’ll be paying out a lot more money than what is coming in if you are a SaaS since customers usually pay in small increments.

One way to avoid this is by offering longer contracts and requiring advanced payments.

If you have a good product, you should have a high conversion of users who are not paying that eventually become paying customers. To increase revenue, focus your efforts on turning “activated” users into paying customers, the focus of our next metric.

Startup Metric #8 Activation

Activation is a measurement of the conversion rate from when a visitor or prospect moves to becoming an active user, the signal being some kind of sign up or download.

A high conversion rate means that the visitors had a good first user experience. A low activation rate usually means that your product isn’t interesting enough or they found it difficult to get started.

SaaS products usually use activation as a way to attract and gain a following in the early stages of their business, hoping that the good user experience will entice people to pay for additional benefits.

This is true with the web-browser productivity tool ToDoist.

Activation begins with entering a username and password. The free plan allows people to build a list of projects they can track, including all the sub-tasks. But you have to become a premium member if you want more robust tools like alerts and notes.

Startup Metric #9 Referral

This metric is sort of a spin-off of your viral coefficient metric, but it’s truly too important not to measure as a standalone.

To calculate your referral rate just figure out the percentage of users who come from existing customers.

A good way to determine a referral that’s viral versus a recommendation from an existing customer is simply to ask when a user is signing up, “How did you hear about us?”

As you might expect, the higher your referral rate, the lower your CAC is going to be and the more profitable your company will be.

A great way to encourage referrals is to program occasional reminders into your products. You’ll see this often with phone apps that show pop ups from time to time asking you to send a recommendation to a friend.

Conclusion

Isn’t it amazing how all of these metrics are connected? But it can be difficult to measure and monitor all of these metrics as a small startup. You just don’t have the time.

I recommend you start small and focus only on the ones that affect your bottom line, namely revenue, CAC, LTV and churn. After that, pay attention to retention, referral, your viral coefficient, activation and product metabolism.

This is why I’m became the Co-founder of KISSmetrics. I felt the time was right to make an analytics package that helps track these important metrics for startups.

I want to hear from you: What other metrics should startups focus on?

About the Author: Neil Patel is the VP of Marketing of KISSmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.

When LivingSocial launched in 2007, the co-founders thought it would be interesting to match a user’s location with their interests. The model has evolved to selling vouchers to users for local experiences, and LivingSocial now serves daily deals to over 30 million subscribers. Want to know how they did it? Earlier this month, Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com interviewed LivingSocial co-founder Tim O’Shaughnessy. In the interview, Tim reflects on the early days and shares the strategies LivingSocial used to fuel its explosive growth. This post includes five of those strategies.

1. Build Connective Tissue

Tim believes LivingSocial’s over 30 million customers are “establishing that connective tissue with us, where we send [them] a great thing to do every single day”. How can you reach as many people as LivingSocial does? Tim explains, “to do that, we have to know what your email is”, so “we just made it as blatant as we possibly could”.

By requiring first-time visitors to provide an email address, Tim says you help those people who “would want to subscribe and wouldn’t really know how to do it”. Don’t miss out on this opportunity, because as Tim points out, “email is one of those things that people keep open as a tab in their browser all day long. So if you have a compelling value proposition, then it can work”.

Take Away: Email is still a powerful way to directly communicate with your users and it can amplify the viral spread of your messages. In certain businesses it may be more effective than social media.

2. Help Your Customers Find Lunch

Have you ever thought “Hey, I’m going out with one of my coworkers, we’re going to grab something to eat, where should we go to lunch today?” Tim realized, “right now, there’s really no way for merchants to compete for your business or try to compel you to go there when you’re in the market”. So the LivingSocial team created Instant Deals, which Tim thinks, “is one of the big, new places that the space can go”.

Instant Deals work by providing real time offers with all sorts of different merchants. Tim describes Instant Deals as being “like an offline Google search. If you went to Google and typed in ‘nice blue handbag,’ they’d give you a great set of results. If you typed in ‘where should I go to lunch today,’ they don’t”. Tim says Instant Deals is “really providing the answer to that” and that “it’s a really compelling experience that we can bring to our members”.

Take Away: Ask yourself: What problem am I solving? Is there a demand for my solution? If you can confidently answer those two questions, then you might be on your way to something great!

3. Learn From Your Failures

As an entrepreneur, Tim believes setbacks are a learning opportunity. When something doesn’t go exactly according to plan, Tim asks himself “What did I learn here, how can I apply that to the things that I do, and what are the things that I enjoy in life?”. For Tim, running a company means having flexibility to try new things.

If these trials fail, Tim says “as long as you have that belief in yourself, that even if it didn’t work for X or Y, you’re going to learn from it”. That way you can extract “things that are great from experiences that didn’t have a level of success that people would normally attribute to it,” and then apply them to experiences that do have that level of success.

Take Away: Your most valuable lessons will come from failures. Ironically, the more you fail the more you will unveil paths to success.

4. Steal Facebook Users

When Facebook opened up their platform in May of 2007, Tim says, “two light bulbs went off”. The first “was that if you had something mildly interesting, you could probably acquire users faster and cheaper than you ever could in the history of the web”, and “the second was that you could get generalized location data on a per user level”.

So Tim and the team started building products to attract users. First was Virtual Bookshelf, one of the larger book-sharing applications on Facebook, which “at one point in time… got more book reviews per day than Amazon.com got.” Next was LivingSocial, and in version one users inputted what they liked to do in real life which the site matched with their location. Even though Tim and his co-founders “didn’t necessarily know how we were going to monetize”, they thought “if we had those data sets, we would have an opportunity to build a product and figure out what the model was later”

Take Away: Get users by going where they are.

5. Step on the Gas!

Reflecting on the early days, Tim says, “we’ll be the first ones to admit… that we didn’t know exactly where it was going. But we built products, we’d started to build a team, we had users on it, we had a little revenue coming in. We were there”.

Tim says, “when you really do see the model and you feel that you understand the model and it how it works, you just need to totally slam the pedal down”. Tim explains that “a lot of putting the pedal down is making sure our brand is known by a lot of people, getting more users, expanding globally, and then taking these products… and really making them something that can fulfill their potential”. If you are shy about things, Tim warns, “other people will come and try to take a piece of your pie”.

Take Away: Once you figure out the model that works for your business, hold nothing back.

These are just five of the many strategies LivingSocial used to build their global market. Do you use any of these strategies in your work?

About The Author: Michael Alexis does video interviews with top bloggers and best selling authors. Check out the show at WriterViews.