Think you're ready to start up? Put yourself to the test. Check out the five crucial keys to knowing it's time.

Andy Palmer has started at least five companies by my count--and I’d guess he has invested in dozens of others. Based on that experience, I’d consider him an expert when it comes to deciding whether you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

After graduating from Bowdoin with a major in English, History, and Computer Science, the passionate Rugby player was injured and decided to become serious about a career. So he got an MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School.

From there, Palmer went on to be part of the founding team of five start-ups: Austin’s Trilogy; pcOrder.com, a Trilogy spinoff for buying PCs and software online, that was spun back in; Bowstreet, a “portal-based tool provider,” that IBM acquired in 2006, Infinity Pharmaceuticals, a cancer drug developer that went public 2000; and Vertica Systems, a database company that Hewlett Packard bought in 2011.

Now Palmer spends half his time on life sciences and half on tech start-ups. He has invested an average of $75,000 in some 30 ventures; is a founding board member for six companies; and works on more altruistic projects--such as collaborating with MIT’s Broad Institute to help develop a genomics information system.

Here are five thoughts Palmer offered on what he would tell a young person considering whether to become an entrepreneur.

1. Know how good you really are.

Palmer pointed out that potential entrepreneurs must know where they are on the “bell curve.” As he said, “Some people like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates are destined to be entrepreneurs and nothing will stop them. Others are one standard deviation out of the bell curve. They could be entrepreneurs under the right circumstances. But most people are just average when it comes to their entrepreneurial potential.”

This self-assessment has important implications. If you are destined to be an entrepreneur, there is no need to ask anyone else’s opinion. You will start companies. If you are one standard deviation out, then you need to find the right circumstances--meaning you must pick the right opportunity to target and figure out which key entrepreneurial talent you bring to the party and partner to find your missing piece.

2. Be willing to team up.

This brings us to Palmer’s idea that the idea of the hero entrepreneur--Larry Ellison against the world--is outmoded. He looks at Google as a model which is run by a troika of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt. Each of them have different strengths and they are willing to work together to apply those strengths to helping the company grow and adapt to change.

For most technology start-ups, there are two skills needed at the beginning, business (which includes sales, marketing, and handling capital raising and accounting) and technology development. If you are excellent at one or the other of these skills, you should find a partner who excels at the other skill.

For example, when Palmer started Vertica, he was in charge of the business side and he partnered with a database expert, Michael Stonebraker.

3. Share the right values.

How the business person know which technology person to partner with and vice versa? Palmer believes that values make all the difference. He argued, “It is a big responsibility to be developing a new product for a customer. As a business person, I want to make sure that potential customers do not get an overly optimistic view of where we are in our development process.”

Palmer wants a partner who shares his belief in the importance of setting realistic expectations. “Simply put, I want to partner with a technologist who shares the value I place on giving potential customers an intellectually honest set of expectations. It is too easy in high tech to exaggerate your accomplishments.”

4. Have unquenchable passion.

Palmer argues that an entrepreneur must know why he is starting a venture. “When it comes to figuring out where you are on the bell curve, it is essential that you ask yourself honestly why you want to start a company. If you are doing it to get rich, you should not proceed. The best reason to start a company is because you are passionate about it,” said Palmer.

This passion was something that drove him to join the start-up team at Infinity. As Palmer explained, “By the time I joined Infinity, I was feeling that the software companies I had started were not going to make the world a better place. But when I went to work for Infinity, I believed that I was helping to solve a big societal problem-curing cancer.”

5. Fit your operating style to the opportunity.

Palmer has seen two kinds of start-ups: blessed and bootstrapped. And they demand different operating styles.

A blessed start-up has access to the most capital, the best investors, the best executives, and top talent at all levels. “Before I started Vertica, I was an executive-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins. Ray Lane told me that he was expecting me to build it into a billion dollar company. If you’re in a blessed start-up like that, you have to get used to the enormous pressure to achieve excellence and react accordingly,” said Palmer.

But a bootstrapped start-up is very different. It makes “every dollar an investment that yields a five-fold return” quipped Palmer. “In one start-up we had a conference room that contained all our servers, and it was hot in there. And our other conference room had a big glass window so it was always cold. We channeled the heat from the server conference room to warm up the cold one.”

If you can pass these five test, you may be ready to start-up. Otherwise, think again.

It's official: Mark Pincus is stepping aside as CEO of Zynga. It's hardly surprising: Founders rarely make good public-company CEOs.

Mark Pincus has left the building.

Well, sort of. In a statement issued earlier today, Pincus, the founder and CEO of Zynga, the troubled gaming start-up that's been struggling to maintain its relevance ever since its IPO in December 2011, announced he's fired himself, and hired another industry veteran--Don Mattrick, a former head of Microsoft's Xbox division--as his replacement.

"As I reflect on the past six years, I realize that I’ve had the greatest impact working as an entrepreneur with product teams, developing games that could entertain and connect millions," Pincus wrote.

"I've always said to Bing and our Board that if I could find someone who could do a better job as our CEO I'd do all I could to recruit and bring that person in. I'm confident that Don is that leader."

He adds, "Going forward I'll continue in my role as Chairman and Chief Product Officer."

It's a rosy spin on a likely turbulent departure. Zynga has taken a beating in the press over the last couple of years, mostly over rampant employee turnover and complaints about the company's culture. Suffice it to say the company has a bad rap in the Valley.

But despite what the critics will say about Pincus himself amidst his departure, I empathize with the guy: Founders don't always make the best corporate CEOs of publicly-held companies. In fact, they very rarely do.

Consider the research from Noam Wasserman, a Harvard Business School professor, who has been studying founder-CEO succession for over a decade. Back in 2003, Wasserman published a fascinating report that detailed the succession histories of founders of 202 Internet companies. The paper, titled "Founder-CEO Succession and the Paradox of Entrepreneurial Success," brilliantly details how and why start-up founders tend to find it so difficult to stay CEO as the company grows and becomes more successful.

Of course, not all founders get fired by their board (or decide to fire themselves)--but it's more common than you might think.

He writes:

Early on, Founder-CEOs who are adept at solving such challenges are often able to attract high-quality technical people, to manage the product development process well, and to help their organizations succeed at developing the product efciently. However, once the initial product has been developed, the CEO's job broadens and gets much more complex, for he or she has to begin selling the product to customers, building an organization to support the product, and creating a marketing team.

This dramatic change in the contingencies faced by the rm often results in a mismatch between the skills of the technically adept Founder-CEE--whose skills were the key to success until now--and the new needs of the organization. The fact that the rate of succession increases immediately after the completion of product development suggests that company owners proactively assess the quality of this skills-contingencies t and make CEO changes before a mismatch would cause problems.

Of the last 100 consumer Internet IPOs since 1996, only about 20 percent of the company founders remain as the company's sole CEO. Clearly, leaders like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeremy Stoppelman are the outliers--which is probably why they get so much media attention. But that media attention can create a false echo chamber that might lead you to believe that "most" founders are able to lead a publicly-held company. That's just not the case. Mark Pincus, quite frankly, is the more common example.

The lesson here for founders is important. As Wasserman puts it:

A founder's early passion, confidence, and attachment to a vision are often the magical ingredients that fuel the launch of a startup rocket ship. Visionary founders are usually the most central, irreplaceable players in a startup. Seen as the guardians of the corporate culture and the ones with deep ties to early employees and customers, such founders enjoy being the generals leading the troops.

However, these early strengths can become Achilles' heels if a founder is not aware of the downsides of passion and attachment. The downsides include things that the founder can’t do and things that the founder won’t do. On the "can't" side, founders fail to realize that success breeds a new class of challenges; challenges that require skills they do not have, such as scaling a larger organization or managing functions in which they haven’t worked. On the "won't" side, they stick with their initial ideas for too long, ignoring clear signals that it is time to pivot. They stick with their early employees and executives, even when those people are not up to the new challenges and demands.

When news circulated on Monday that Pincus would be leaving the company, Zynga's stock price jumped about 10 percent, which makes you wonder: What if Pincus had removed himself even earlier? Would Zynga be in such doldrums?

Inc.'s Editor in Chief Eric Schurenberg reveals why the longtime series is always compelling and dramatic read.

I had coffee on a recent morning with an entrepreneur, as I often do. What struck me about this founder, an enthusiastic Ohioan named Austin Allison, was how unremarkable his remarkable story was. He is CEO of dotloop, a maker of cloud-based software that streamlines the maddeningly slow dance of documentation that accompanies any home sale.

Agents, real estate brokerages, and homeowners seem to find real value in dotloop's service: According to Allison, in four years the payroll has gone from two to 120, the footprint from five cities to 700, and revenue from zero to $15 million. Along the way, Allison went through a year without salary, maxed out his home equity line of credit, nearly bottomed out on cash, and gambled what little money he could scrounge on a booth at a real estate conference.

By any standard--economic, business, or human--it's a remarkable, dramatic story. But here's the thing: It's not that unusual. Facing the odds and swallowing risks to create jobs and wealth out of nothing are what entrepreneurs do. It happens all the time.

The "How We Did It" cover story in this issue is our annual attempt to pay tribute to the endlessly remarkable and mostly untold stories of entrepreneurs unfolding all around us every day. You'll find some practical tips here, but, speaking for myself, the main takeaway is inspiration--and a little awe.

It's hard to feel otherwise when you read about David Tran, who arrived here from his native Vietnam without any money or English and one month later launched what would become the wildly popular Huy Fong Foods brand of sriracha sauce. Or when you read Bert Jacobs's story of how his Life Is Good team rallied to support an employee (and other victims) who had been wounded in the Boston Marathon bombings.And then there's a whole different kind of inspiration to be gained from the story of our cover subjects, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger of Instagram, whose $1 billion sale to Facebook just 18 months after launch set a new high-water mark for the rewards of entrepreneurship.

We've been around long enough at Inc., however, to know that small business is not all upside, to put it mildly. Feature subject Mark Suster has been on a crusade against hype in the start-up scene; Jessica Bruder's story captures a (typically vulgar) piece of his mind. And you'll find features by Christine Lagorio on Uber and Burt Helm on CrossFit, respectively, two controversial businesses that illustrate how much entrepreneurs sometimes have to challenge the rules to make their vision stick.

Over coffee, Allison told me he wants dotloop to be a 100-year company. Statistically, founders are lucky to make it to five. And human nature suggests that if Century 21 or Keller Williams were to show up with a sufficiently generous offer, Allison's horizon might get much shorter. Still, we at Inc. have always preferred the builders to the flippers. They have better stories, and it's our job--and privilege--to tell them.

Did you create your budget in gloomier days? Be aware there's new reason for optimism -- and for making mid-year tweaks to your budget.

A few phantom green shoots a couple of years back aside, it’s been a long time since entrepreneurs had much in the way of positive economic news to celebrate. But while it’s still not exactly boom times, author and business expert Ram Charan may have finally located a reason to feel cheery.

What is it? Turns out many businesses’ budgets for this year are too pessimistic, he writes on the HBR Blog Network.

"There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the economic outlook for the next five years. The shifting energy equation, for example, sets the stage for growth. Shale gas will allow the US to be energy independent, create an export industry, and reduce energy costs. Lower costs are already making some industrial sectors more competitive," he argues, noting with near heroic levels of positive thinking that "even gridlock in Washington has not stopped the economy from progressing."

Which isn’t to say everything is 100 percent hunky dorey. Europe outside of Germany is still obviously a mess and certain industries (sorry Australian commodity producers) aren’t sharing in the cheer. But unless you’re a copper exporter located Down Under, Charan encourages you to let yourself crack a smile and take a fresh look at your 2013 projections in a more optimistic mood.

"If your budget was created for economic headwinds, then now is the time to revisit your assumptions," he writes. So what might you change in your budget halfway through the year if things are looking up? The post lays out eight possibilities to consider, including:

Reset your goals and KPIs. You may have to make some upward revisions as the economic picture changes. Lack of ambition allows mediocre performance.

Set funds aside for growth. Even as you loosen the purse strings, keep some money on hand to invest in marketing or advertising as the market turns. You don't have to spend it ahead of time but be ready to pounce and outspend competitors segment by segment as consumption rebounds.

Rethink outsourcing. Market growth has shifted to the US, and change happens faster than ever requiring smooth coordination. It may be wise now to source domestically or to bring some functions back in-house. Being close to the market, you'll be able to move faster and also protect your intellectual property.

If you’re convinced that Charan isn’t premature in his slightly sunnier projections then check out the post for the rest of his points to reconsider.

Are you more optimistic about the business climate than you were in 2012?

You know bored employees often quit, so why aren't your pausing every once in awhile to assess your top performers' boredom levels?

Sometimes your best employee leaves because he wants to move somewhere sunny or because his wife got a new gig on the other side of the country. Sometimes that uber productive engineer can’t resist the lure of her own startup or your communications ace has decided he wants to be a yoga instructor instead.

When it comes to reasons like these, there’s very little you can do to keep the team you’ve sweated to put together intact. But most employees don’t leave for reasons like these. Many employees leave simply because they’re bored.

And if you let them, know you could probably have prevented their aggravating departure with just a little bit of attention and care, writes Silicon Valley engineering manager and author Michael Lopp on his blog.

In the excellent post, Lopp points out the simple but powerful truth that "boredom shows up quietly and appears to pose no immediate threat. This makes it both easy to address and easy to ignore" before going on to offer a simple three-pronged approach to early detection of employee boredom:

Any noticeable change in daily routine. A decrease in productivity is a great early sign that something’s up, but what you are looking for is any change in their routine. Increased snark? Unexpected vacations? Later arrivals? Earlier departures? Anything that strikes you as out of the ordinary for someone whose day you are familiar with is worth considering. The root cause of this change may have nothing to do with boredom, and the best way is figure that out is…

You ask, "Are you bored?" Even if you don’t have a gut feeling, it’s a good question to randomly ask your team. When I ask, I look you straight in the eyes and if you can’t stare me in the face and answer, I’m going to keep digging until you look me in the eye. Remember, the goal here is to discover boredom before they know it, and the act of a simple question might be just the mental impetus they need to see the early signs in themselves.

They tell you. And you listen. The reality is that someone is going to tell you they’re bored quietly and when you least expect it. They’ll tell you halfway through your 1:1 and they won’t use the word bored. They’ll say something innocuous like, “…and I really don’t know what to do next,” and you’re going to blow right by the most important thing they’ve said in a while because you’re worried about your next meeting.

While these techniques might not sound like earth-shattering innovations, as Lopp points out at the end of the third point, just because something is simple and effective, doesn’t mean you’re not too distracted to actually do it. So what if you pause long enough to ponder whether your team is bored and listen to what they’re actually saying about their level of engagement and come to the uncomfortable conclusion that these days they’re not exactly finding their work scintillating?

Lopp’s post has suggestions. A half dozen solid ones, in fact. They range from letting bored employees experiment to aggressively removing the noise from their workday and simply "telling them what the hell is going on." Check out the post for details.

Are you "too busy" to stop and notice your top performers’ boredom level?

You say you believe in your idea. In your people. In your plan. Then run your business that way, and you'll have no regrets.

The startup-childbirth analogy ranks among our most overworked business clichés. We talk less about the deathbed vigil that accompanies failure. But as this recent Tumblr post attests, that metaphor is just as apt. Founders watch helplessly as their companies expire, comforting themselves with memories of early promise. Ultimately, though, they descend into recriminations (directed at themselves and others); regret over opportunities squandered; resolutions to do right by survivors; and--above all--personal desolation. Post-mortem, their grieving traces the arc described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five-stage model. Though perhaps “acceptance” is made easier by the investment community’s lionization of failure.

I read the Tumblr post, titled "My Startup Has 30 Days to Live," during a break at a conference for entrepreneurs from emerging economies, sponsored by Michael Porter’s AllWorld Network. In the session before the break, Alan Lewis, chairman of the $700 million travel company Grand Circle, had asked attendees to raise their hands if their revenues exceeded $25 million. No hands rose. (It was early in the morning. The larger-company CEOs must have been coffee-ing up.) Lewis seemed disappointed as he looked around the room. “Eighty percent of you won’t be here in five years,” he said, “because you are not able to grow.”

Lewis wasn’t urging attendees to climb aboard “the VC rocket-ship,” as the 30 Days post calls it. He was talking about momentum and taking risks and bringing on people who naturally set their sails for the next level. But his words touched off the same kind of insecurity felt by the Tumblr writer. Mentors and investors had advised that mournful soul that there is but one goal--to get big--and only one way to get big--to do it fast. So he made a series of against-the-gut decisions that led to his start-up’s impending demise.

That post released an avalanche of comments on Y Combinator’s Hacker News, debating--among other things--the nature and purpose of a start-up. Some of it devolved into Valley-centric semantics. Is a bootstrapped start-up really a start-up or just a small business? Imagine a pause, and then a Seinfeldian “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

The Tumblr entrepreneur suggests that had his company eschewed the accelerator and accelerator principles, it could have succeeded. Of course that supposition is impossible to evaluate. Another speaker at the AllWorld conference was Ken Morse, managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and a serial entrepreneur. Morse railed against incubators, which he contends both isolate and insulate start-ups in unhealthy fashion. But Morse also offered a panegyric for ambition, exhorting attendees to create billion-dollar babies.

High tech is a rarified, occasionally wacky world that values innovation above all. Yet it treats entrepreneurship as a formulaic enterprise, in which companies strive to create unique value propositions while pursuing identical goals and operating from identical rulebooks.

What’s sad about the Tumblr post is that it confesses not only failure, but also lack of courage. The entrepreneur loved and trusted his idea and his people. But he didn’t love and trust them enough to resist the presiding fast-growth culture. He believed in his creation’s distinctiveness. But he didn’t believe in it enough to pursue a distinctive path. He dreamed of success. But he hesitated to insist that his personal definition of success had value.

There is glory when you succeed on your own terms; satisfaction when you succeed on someone else’s terms; and regret tempered with growth when you fail on your own terms. When you fail on someone else’s terms, there is only failure.

Not all incubators are created equal--and with more of them out there, you need to choose where you apply wisely.

The age of the accelerator is officially upon us.

Here is but a glimpse into the proliferation of start-up programs in the U.S. and Europe as reported by U.K. research firm NESTA:

Since 2005 there has been year-on-year growth in the number of companies taking this route through their early-stages. Y Combinator has taken on more and more companies each year, but the main driver of growth has been that new programs have been created. Techstars now operates in four U.S. cities and is growing a global network of peers. In Europe, the number of programmes has risen from just one in 2007 to over 10 in 2011.

Simply put: there are a ton of incubators and accelerators to which you can apply. But not surprisingly, as the quantity of programs has gone up, the quality of the aggregate has arguably gone down.

So if you're thinking of applying to an accelerator or incubator, know that they're not all created equal. It's your job to figure out not only which one is best, but also which one is best for you.

In a panel Thursday at the PreMoney conference in San Francisco put on by 500 Startups (an accelerator itself), four leaders in the world of start-up accelerators came together to discuss the business models of their respective companies. It also turned out to offer some pretty good advice to entrepreneurs on what they should be looking for.

The panel included Christine Tsai, a partner at 500 Startups; Thomas Korte, the founder of AngelPad; Garry Tan, a partner at Y Combinator; Sam Teller, managing director and co-founder of Launchpad LA; and Katie Rae, managing partner of TechStars Boston.

Here are five basic principles to keep in mind:

1) Location is key. "Back in the olden days, if you were a scholar of any sort, you would go to Rome and Athens," said Garry Tan. "If you're serious [about tech start-ups], you come to Silicon Valley." It's also worth noting that you should be in the best place for your particular industry. So if it's media or fashion, New York may win out over California. The point is to choose the location wisely--it can have a material impact on the success of your company in its early stages.

2) Look at the growth--and cohesion of the companies who have graduated. Katie Rae, a partner at TechStars Boston, says she judges the success of her classes based not only the growth of the firms that graduate, but also whether or not the teams were able to stay together in the long run.

3) The IRR of the firm. The internal rate of return on a given incubator might not be the easiest figure to come by, but from a financial perspective, it's important to see if the program has a proven track record of producing "winners." Beyond IRR, look at the quality of the engineering talent on-boarded by graduates of the program. That can be a good indicator of the program's eventual success.

4) How much capital raised by portfolio companies. This is a metric you should track, but not obsess about. "We do not tell them to focus too much on fundraising," Garry Tan says. "People get so focused on fundraising that they don't focus on the business."

5) Can the accelerator expand your network? Ultimately, the most valuable thing about an accelerator is the people. Check out who else is involved--both advisors and other entrepreneurs entering the class--and then make them your best friends.

This young entrepreneur started Merchandize Liquidators in his one-bedroom condo with $375. Here's the advice he used to guide him to success.

Yosef Martin founded the fast-growing Merchandize Liquidators in his one-bedroom condo in 2003 with nothing but $375--and these three pieces of advice.

When I was an international student working toward my BA, I took a risk and jumped into the closeouts market. I founded Merchandize Liquidators in 2003, working with high-end department stores and manufacturers to buy their overstock and damaged goods, and then selling them in secondary markets. I set out to solve the small profit margin problem that retailers faced when buying from traditional wholesalers.

Merchandize Liquidators consistently ranks as one of the fastest-growing companies in the nation. I credit this success to my willingness to diversify the business and sell in every logical category--and by only hiring salespeople who have a passion for the business and know how to be legitimate team players. Without these three pieces of advice, however, I'm not sure where I'd be.

1. Create new opportunities.

For a business to really succeed, you need to create something out of nothing. McDonald's didn't invent the burger, but it did bring convenience and affordability to the restaurant industry. When I launched Merchandize Liquidators, I had $375 to my name. My mission was to create substantial buying power in a market where there really wasn't any.

Once I was able to achieve prices that were far more affordable than those of my competitors, I saw the business take off. I got smart about diversifying and taking overstocked goods that others weren't interested in. Then, I created something called the Bank Program, which gives wholesale buyers three months to pay off the merchandise they're buying from us. There's a minimum buy-in of $250,000, which lowers the risk, and it gives us a huge edge over our competitors, who only work with upfront payments. I implemented a solution that changed the industry--and created an opportunity for myself.

2. Learn to delegate.

Your business is only as good as your employees. Yes, it's a big challenge to delegate to and train employees properly, but it's a short-term goal with endless rewards. The role of a company founder is not to handle every tiny task, but rather to make something out of nothing and hire a competent and passionate team to then carry the vision forward.

There's really no task too large or small that I wouldn't consider delegating to a trusted team member. If someone on staff can do something better than I can, it makes sense to hand over the challenge. That being said, I only delegate what's critical, because I need to play an active role in Merchandize Liquidators in order to anticipate its evolution. Before I delegate, I weigh the time it will take to train for the task versus tackling it myself, analyze the skillset of myself and my teammates, and take a close look at the task itself. It's not hard to see what's best in each scenario.

3. Be willing to fail.

Entrepreneurs are not very different from elite athletes. Can a gymnast avoid risks and still excel? Not a chance. The same is true in business: no guts, no glory. I never anticipate failure, but I don't fear it either. It only makes us smarter. Just like you have to accept that you're not always right, you have to make friends with failure.

The great thing is that you can fail multiple times, but you only have to "make it" once. I once walked into my warehouse and found it completely flooded, but I had no insurance and no profits to cover the losses. Half the merchandise was lost. But half was not. I then experienced a surge of adrenaline and motivation, and the incident inspired me to restructure the business and sell the remaining goods in more creative ways. The mistake made my business stronger.

I still employ these tactics today, which really were born out of failure. I believe in making lemonade, in never ending on a negative note. Failure is not an ending, but a beginning.

Yosef Martin founded Merchandize Liquidators. In 2010 and 2011, Inc. named it one of the fastest-growing companies in the nation. The company has experienced 732 percent growth over the pase three years.

Are start-ups getting carried away with crazy perks? Maybe not, responds one VC, who offers a nuts and bolts rationale for this obsession with morale.

The internet is full of tales of startups going to extreme lengths to get company culture right and keep morale high. From paying employees to vacation to moving the company to Morocco, we’re not talking about simple office foosball tables here. Have you ever stopped and wondered why?

Working from sunny locales and eating fab food on the company’s dime certainly makes for happier workers (and in the latter case longer hours at the office), but start-ups are bound by the same fundamental rules of economics as larger firms (eventually anyway) and it’s hard to understand sometimes how the boost in productivity from these extreme perks could possibly make financial sense for young firms. Is this simply keeping up with the Joneses Silicon Valley edition?

Christina Cacioppo, formerly of VC firm Union Square Ventures, has another idea. On her blog recently she floated the possibility that high morale is more important for start-ups hoping to retain and motivate talent because the financial payout of their work is less clear. She writes:

Might employee morale matter more at startups than at public companies? Here’s one argument in favor: compensation tends toward a mix of cash and equity in startups and public (tech) companies. Cash has a known value. In a public company, equity has a knownish value: there’s that day’s market price, which might be different tomorrow but probably not be drastically so. At a startup, no one really knows what their equity is worth. VC valuations only happen every 12-36 months, and they’re wonky. (Though company performance loosely enters into VC valuations, a high valuation doesn’t foreshadow a lucrative exit.)

When employees of both startups and public companies evaluate the value of their equity, they could consider what they can see: their day-to-day sentiment, fellow employees’ experiences, how the management team sees to be performing, whether the company’s strategic direction feels right. These judgements are mostly subjective. Public-market feedback provides a check on employees’ feelings; if the company’s stock is performing well, you might think more highly of the management team’s performance, and the value of your equity, than you otherwise would. (You might also be more down on a seemingly-strong team leading a poorly-performing public company too.) Private companies don’t have this outside check, and so the employee-perception datapoints could matter more.

Of course, lavish perks don’t necessarily translate into improved employee morale if the employees get the distinct impression that management is recklessly burning through cash to the detriment of the business.

But the impulse to create a rosey picture of the company’s prospects and the benefits of working there to keep employees with unsure financial compensation tied to the firm seems like a sensible explanation for the drive towards lux benefits and an obsession with culture.

What do you think, are extreme perks a sign of froth and recklessness or a sensible way to deal with talent in the competitive and uncertain work of start-ups?

Remember same-day delivery services that failed spectacularly in the dot-com crash? They're baaaack. But they say this time is different.

Same-day delivery services (think Webvan and Kozmo) crashed and burned in 2001. But a new crop of start-ups claims this time is different.

Why It Might Work

Today's GPS-enabled smartphones can track couriers and goods much more efficiently. More important, fleets of vehicles and professional drivers are no longer required. Start-ups such as Deliv and Postmates crowdsource that work to a pool of vetted part-time drivers.

"That's the disruption," says Daphne Carmeli, CEO of Deliv, which is running a pilot in San Francisco and Chicago in which retailers foot the delivery bill. Postmates, in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City, charges consumers $6.99 and up for within-the-hour delivery.

Why It Could Flop... Again

The competition is stiff: Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Google all either are in the game already or will be soon. To survive, start-ups must deliver reliably (no easy task) at a price consumers will accept--$5 to $10, says Kris Bjorson, a retail expert at consulting firm Jones Lang LaSalle.

Face it, sometimes you're going to mess up. Here's how to do wrong things the right way.

Winston Churchill famously said success is defined by the ability "to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."

The world's most most interesting entrepreneurs certainly lived that reality.

"If we're not making mistakes, we're probably not growing," said Bo Menkiti, founder and CEO of The Menkiti Group and CEO and founding partner of the city's fastest growing residential real estate brokerage.

"As an entrepreneur you're going to make a mistake," agreed Joel Holland, founder and CEO of Video Blocks, a subscription-based stock footage firm. "You can either let it crush you or motivate you."

Recently, Menkiti, Holland, and Naomi Whittel, the CEO and founder of natural supplements company, Reserveage Organics, revealed their best mistakes to Inc. during an event held in Washington D.C., sponsored by Capital One.

How do you separate the good mistakes--like, say, intentionally misspelling a word in a headline to garner attention--from the bad ones? And if you're going to make mistakes, what kind should you make?

The kind that inspire you

When Whittel went to sell her first company, she thought she'd done everything right. She hired a business broker, courted suitors, and settled on a family company with an 80-year business history. She developed a relationship with the company's head, even visiting him at home before closing the deal.

The only problem, she said, was that the buyer turned out to be "a very sophisticated con artist." After he'd gained her trust, he convinced her at the last minute to restructure the deal. The change left her holding stock that was essentially worthless.

Whittel went to court over the matter, but in the meantime, she said her husband convinced her to "frame the stock certificate" as inspiration.

It worked.

When she launched Reserveage Organics, she used her bad experience as motivation to grow big fast and keep control. The result? She reached $70 million in sales in her second year and was named Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year in Florida.

The kind that reveal new opportunities

Holland was always an entrepreneur, dating back to when he collected and sold used golf balls as a kid. But he said an early mistake he made in trying to launch a business offering "life advice to teenagers" led to a realization.

Holland did a great job of rounding up celebrities and respected people for videos in which they'd offer inspiration and advice. The problem was that the resulting videos he produced were kind of "boring," he said, and lacking quick edits or fun graphics. "It was like Charlie Rose for teenagers," Holland admitted.

That realization led Holland to discover how few options there were for people who wanted to make videos with stock footage and better production. Eventually, he founded Video Blocks, distributors of 1,000,000 clips of royalty free stock video and audio every month (and one of Inc.'s 30-under-30 young entrepreneurs this year).

The ones other people make

This one is easy, but also easily overlooked. Why not gain the benefit of other people's missteps without actually having to go through the painful experiences yourself?

At the start of his businesses, Menkiti said he experienced six months of missteps, which he attributed in retrospect to having recruited some of the wrong people. Even as he corrected his strategy and focused on building a team that was committed to his vision, he recognized it might make more sense to learn more consciously from other peoples' efforts.

Now he seeks out "people a little bit ahead of me, and I learn from their their mistakes," Menkiti said, in part by constantly reaching out to new mentors.

"Most entrepreneurs are extremely curious and probably really lonely," and thus willing to share their time and expertise, he said. "Call them!"

Like this post? Check out Bill's weekly email.

Are you a member of the texting generation who's more than a little awkward on the phone? VC Mark Suster has tips for you.

No one uses the phone anymore, the New York Times declared a couple of years ago and millions of young people shrugged.

Texting? Sure. Chatting online? Of course, but for a certain generation of young business people currently entering the world of work, actually dialling a number is mostly for moms and telemarketers.

But however much the phone may have fallen out of favor for personal use, professionally, the fact remains that every now and again you’re actually going to have to put headset to ear and chances are, with so little practice, you might be a bit rusty at this simple but essential skill.

So how can you make your telephone calls less awkward and more efficient? VC Mark Suster recently offered some tips on his blog that are worth reading in full for every digital native with a slight phone phobia. He’s not talking about anything specialized like interviews or sales call, "I’m talking about simple and quick calls to your business peers, VCs or other players in your ecosystem," he writes. Doing this well is trickier than it appears for many people, he continues, but you can up your chances of getting your business done smoothly and quickly by following this advice:

Prepare! Write your set of bullet points on paper before the call. Write out the reason you’re calling, your key points and “the ask” in advance and your time allotment so you can always refer back and make sure you’re tracking to your plan.

Start informally with banter: Two things to watch for: 1) if you’re trying banter to build rapport but not "feeling it" then quickly shift to business. Some people just aren’t "chit chatters" and prefer to get on with things. I find that kinda boring, but I know some people are just wired that way. 2) some callers take this banter too far It starts to border on disrespectful of the person’s time or wasteful of your 15 minutes. Don’t be that person. How long you go for is really a judgment call because there’s no right answer.

Let them know why you’re calling: When you’re ready to pivot the conversation your next line should be some derivative of, "listen, the reason I’m calling is … blah, blah, blah" 25 percent of people or less actually do this. They just talk and I’m not really sure why they called. If you’re calling for a reason, the sooner the recipient knows the sooner they can help.

Don’t hang yourself: One of the other big mistakes callers make is going “off to the races” talking about their business without getting any feedback from the recipient of the call. This is bad enough in person but I promise you if you do it over the phone the recipient will start to tune out. If you listen closely you’ll probably even hear the tapping of a keyboard. You can talk for a bit but then seek feedback and make sure the other person is “with you.” When I used to do a lot of recruiting we used to call it “hanging yourself” because people who talk for long periods of time without seeking feedback are generally not self-aware or good at human interaction.

Check out the complete post for several more phone tips and further details on how Suster likes callers to behave.

Do you have telephone anxiety?

A former work addict finds that taking a little time off has transformative power.

As much as I'd like to boast about my ability to see the big picture, day-to-day details have long prevented me from fully observing what was happening around me. I was junkie, a common day work addict that justified her addiction via excuses about doing something good.

I used to think I didn't have the luxury of taking time off for an extended period of time. Any small business owner who does the math knows that it is costly to be absent from the company. The eye of the master fattens the cattle, as the saying goes.

And then I burnt out. I was overworked, malnourished, exhausted. I was no longer able to re-charge my batteries. I took a forced leave of absence, fearing that the next worst thing to death was the breakdown of the essence of a company I had created with my husband through blood, sweat, and tears.

A wondrous thing happens when you have time off. You see the world differently. You leave the routine behind.

During this time off, I learned these three wonderful things:

1. An all-consuming, head-down mentality does not create growth

Intellectually, I've always known this. But I still kept thinking, "If we can just get past this one last hurdle, I'll be able to step back." Truth is, there's always going to be something that keeps you from feeling comfortable about taking that necessary step back. But like a band aid, the parasitic relationship between you and the details of your business need to be ripped off. Abruptly. This jolt of change alone will help you jumpstart your journey into becoming the leader you always wanted to be.

2. Your life is always more important than your work

I feel like a hypocrite for saying this. I kept up the nonstop 12-hour days for six years. I wasn't living; I was merely surviving. I was obsessed. Finally I hit a wall. I was so wired up I was unable to sleep, my mind was fogged. I was a zombie. Via an intervention (I'm not kidding), I was made to realize my life was worth more than another stressful stage in the company. I hadn't been out at 3pm on a Friday in years. I didn't know what direct sunlight on a breezy afternoon meant! Through valuing my life, I grasped a way to make my business thrive without deteriorating my well-being.

3. Experiences make you a better leader.

Life experiences give you perspective, and most importantly, inspiration. If you come into the office inspired and upbeat you are more likely to inspire others, and to generate new ideas. If you come in as a zombie, or in a bad mood because you're tired, you're less likely to be productive or inspire your staff to do so as well.

I took a six week sabbatical and I'm slowly easing my way back into the rhythm of things. Put bluntly, it isn't a cake walk. Things are dinged up, a bit messy, and the cattle isn't as nourished. But I'm back. My mojo is back. My mindset has changed for the better. And we're ready to move forward.

The product development firm, Insight, has launched a new funding model to help start-ups get through a critical stage of development

Incubators are a fairly recent trend in the start-up world. They provide critical tools to a start-up; companies typically get office space that they share with other start-ups as well as access to valuable mentorship and potential investor relationships. But some fledgling businesses need more than tangential support to grow their businesses. They need critical partnerships in key areas to get their business to the next level.

We recently learned of an interesting new model led by Steve McPhillamy at Insight Product Development. Insight is a product development firm that has traditionally worked with big, well-funded corporations. They've always wanted to help startups but struggled with the best model to do so. Product development is a costly endeavor, and most startups couldn't afford it.

Here's the problem.

But Insight finally found an incubator niche, within medical devices, that it may be able to leverage to serve startups in a better way. Insight provides product development services to the start-ups at a discounted rate and, in return, receives an equity stake in the business. It's an 18-month process and, for many startups, it's the critical item that takes the company from technology concept to a product that can be commercialized.

Insight has launched this model with a few initial partners, but if they can make this work on a larger scale, it could be very attractive to startups looking to turn a technology into a product. The benefits accrue to various members of the startup ecosystem:

We think this model works especially well in the medical device space because of its unique characteristics. The interesting thing about this space is that it's possible to sell your start-up to a number of medical firms, without a significant track record of revenue. Plus, venture capital firms are willing to fund pre-revenue technologies, which provides funding for product development. Product development, in this case, is the key gating item to get the technology to the next stage and make the company viable for sale.

We will be watching this space to see if anyone else develops a value-added incubator model for startups outside of biotech. If so, these incubators can be critical partners to fuel startup growth.

Send us your questions on building a business. We can be reached at karlandbill@avondalestrategicpartners.com.

When it comes to launching a small business, American entrepreneurs don't go very far. In fact, sixty-nine percent get started at home, according to the latest Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report.

When we think of entrepreneurs, we think of visionaries working with a brilliant team of coders, disrupting an industry for millions of fans.

That may be true of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, but the average American entrepreneur is far less glamorous, says Donna Kelly, a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College.

Recently, a team of researchers from Babson College and Baruch College interviewed nearly 6,000 U.S. adults as part of the 2012 Global Entreprenurship Monitor report. Most respondents were just starting out, but had taken significant strides, writing business plans and securing financing. Others had been running their businesses for less than three-and-a-half years, notes Kelley.

According to the report, an increasing number of U.S. entrepreneurs (69 percent) start their business at home, and many (59 percent) continue to work from home, even after it's up and running.

Many entrepreneurs choose to go it alone -- with no partners or employees to speak of, says Kelley. Some (23 percent) rely on at least one unpaid family member for help, while another 21 percent count one or more paid relatives among their staff. Only 37 percent expect to hire more than five people in the next five years.

In contrast, many of these entrepreneurs (30 percent) choose to outsource various aspects of their business, such as payroll, taxes, and legal duties, because it's easier thanks to the Internet and other web-based services.

As far as launching a business goes, "it's a lifestyle preference," says Kelley. "They are opportunity-driven. They see an opportunity to improve their income or to pursue independence."

That may explain why the average entrepreneur is wary of accepting venture capital or an angel investment. "Outside investors, as opposed to family members or close friends, have expectations and by imposing them they'd be restricting the entrepreneur's vision," Kelley says. To her point, only 16 percent of funding received by entrepreneurs surveyed came from banks, whereas 82 percent came from personal savings, family, and friends.

There are tons of new funding opportunities for undergrad entrepreneurs.

Peter Thiel may be paying students to skip college, but undergrad entrepreneurs need not worry--there's plenty of money out there for them as well.

Several VC firms on the lookout for the next Michael Dell or Mark Zuckerberg have launched investment funds aimed at college entrepreneurs.

First Round Capital created a $2 million fund called the Dorm Room Fund, which targets student-run start-ups at dozens of schools, including the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell.

General Catalyst has launched Rough Draft Ventures, which will back 10 to 20 student entrepreneurs at 60 Boston universities. Meanwhile, three other firms--NEA, Polaris, and Accel Partners--created the Experiment Fund on the Harvard campus, with plans to back four to six companies each year with $50,000 to $500,000 seed rounds.

The Dorm Room Fund and Rough Draft Ventures even rely on student-run investment committees to make the investment decisions. "We've been blown away by their insight," says Phineas Barnes, a partner at First Round. "They have excellent judgment."

Your business may keep you racing like a frantic short order cook, but truly great ideas require a slow simmer, advises the founder of Behance. Save a little time to stir these pots.

You’ve no doubt heard of Google’s famous 20 percent time, and here on Inc.com we recentlly offered another bit of advice for long-term sucess that suggests only working to 80 percent of your capacity on a daily basis.

But these aren’t the only percentage-based rules of thumb out there. Behance’s founder Scott Belsky recently offered another. His magic number: 5 percent.

Like the other tips, Belsky’s suggestion boils down to setting aside some time for less immediate concerns and not burn all your energy on putting out myriad small daily emergencies, but he adds a culinary twist to his advice. “The secret behind many of the greatest dishes is patience and pacing. When you cook something slowly, at lower heat for a longer time, the flavors and textures can yield culinary masterpieces. The process of our own creations isn’t much different,” Belsky begins his post.

Like the best chili sits in the marinating in its own juices all day, some of the best ideas need plenty of time to stew, so make sure you devote a small portion of your schedule to keeping that crock pot of ideas topped up and simmering, he urges readers:

Few of us, except for the most legendary painters and novelists, can “slow cook” for a living. Amidst everyday demands, we are line cooks obsessed with turning out results, and quickly. And this is a good thing--it’s how we keep up with demand and how we keep the lights on.

But we can round out our work by keeping a few slow-cooked projects going in the background of our frenetic day-to-day lives. The secret of slow cooking is to not to forget what you’ve got on the stove, and keep coming back to it. See if you can give these “slow projects” 5 perent of your time as part of your routine.

What sort of projects benefit from this crock pot approach? Belsky suggests that for him writing projects and business ideas have benefited from being given lots and lots of time to mentally slow roast. Check out his complete post for more details.

Whatever particular percentage you choose or exactly how you phrase the insight, all of these rules of thumb share one fundamental idea: putting all of yourself into short-term concerns will leave you no time or energy to prepare and innovate for the longer-term and no capacity to respond when the world changes around you. However you structure your commitment, make sure you’re not short-changing your future self by burning through all your reserves today.

Do you have ideas and projects bubbling away on the mental back burner?

Dark Sky's creators Adam Grossman and Jason LaPorte on how they developed their breakthrough meteorological technology.

Adam Grossman, Jack Turner, and Jason LaPorte had an idea for a simple weather app, with one major twist. Instead of predicting weather by the day or week, their app would predict rainfall minute by minute-one hour into the future.

Since launching Dark Sky, their Troy, New York-based company, in 2012, the co-founders have plenty of satisfied (and dry) customers. The $4 app has been downloaded more than 100,000 times. Here's how it all started.

Getting Drenched on I-90

Grossman: I was driving to Cleveland with my girlfriend to visit my family. We were on I-90 and stopped at a rest area to get some gas and food. When we were inside, it started pouring--just one of those summer thunderstorms that sneak up on you and start pouring buckets. We didn't want to go back to the car, because we would have gotten drenched. The question was, "When is this rain going to let up? Do we have to wait 10 minutes or an hour?"

I got out my iPhone and pulled up the weather. It didn't say when the rain would stop. It just said, "Forty percent chance of rain."I spent the next two weeks on my laptop trying to figure out how to pull in National Weather Service radar data to see if there was a way to solve this problem.

Laporte: When Adam told me about the idea, my first reaction was, "Wow, why isn't anyone else doing that?" It's something people wanted--even if they didn't know they wanted it. In the popular consciousness, it was still very much a science-fiction sort of thing. You think of Back to the Future; they have this funny watch that tells you it's going to stop raining in five seconds.

We're Not Meteorologists. So, How Do We Do This?

Grossman: In 2011, we did a Kickstarter and raised $40,000--enough to create the app. None of our family or friends thought it would actually work. When you tell someone that you've created something that can predict the rain, they'll smile and nod. If it's your mom, she'll say, "That's great." But I don't think they thought it would work.

None of us are schooled in meteorology. We're computer nerds: I'm a Web developer, Jason studied computer science, and Jack makes weird computer art.

So, the challenge was, OK, how do we do this? Conventional weather forecasting often involves physical models simulated using supercomputers.

The atmosphere is modeled using fluid dynamics. Running these simulations is a slow process, which is fine for seven-day forecasts. But to make our short-term forecasts in real time, we had to take a different approach.

Laporte: We may not be well versed in meteorological methods, but we are well versed in computer methods. There are a lot of computer-vision algorithms and statistical algorithms you can use to predict how a storm is moving. I guess I would call them glorified cheats.

Grossman: We rely on data from Doppler radar stations--there are more than 150 in the U.S. The raw radar data is from the National Weather Service. It's free.

The U.S. kind of gleefully gives it out to everybody to see what they can do with it. We convert the Doppler data into images and then explore it in the same way a human meteor­ologist might.

A trained person can look at a series of radar images and see how the storm is moving and evolving, which areas are increasing or decreasing in intensity, and where the rain is headed. We basically simulate this process, using algorithms. Because it's automated, we can watch millions of square miles simultaneously and in real time.

People Love Us--the Weathermen, Not So Much

Laporte: Meteorologists? Yeah, they don't like us very much.

Grossman: Well, they're sort of split into two camps. There are the meteorologists that think Dark Sky's really cool and want to understand how it works.

Then there's the other camp, which really doesn't like what we're doing. Meteorologists know a lot more about the weather than we do, so it's useful to hear what they have to say.

When we're not in foul moods, we take the time to explain how our technology works. We say, "We take a statistical approach, not a physical-modeling approach--and here are the upsides and the downsides."

Our algorithms really work only up to an hour in advance. Beyond that, you really need a physical model to figure out what's happening. The downside to a physical model is that it's impractical. You'd need a supercomputer cluster to run that.

Building a Weather Brand

Grossman: Recently, we launched a full-featured online weather service, Forecast.io. It's our answer to Weather.com, AccuWeather, and Weather Underground.

Laporte: People are happy to switch to it. It doesn't smother you with ads or news stories. It's getting 70,000 new users a day. You can tell how many intense weather systems there are because it mirrors how many users we have on our site.

Grossman: Right now, we're still paying the bills with sales of Dark Sky. The reaction from customers has been phenomenal.

Last summer, I was sitting on the banks of Lake Erie next to a little kid and his dad. I saw on my phone that it would rain. I told the kid, "It's going to rain in exactly six minutes." He laughed. Exactly six minutes later, the drops started falling. The kid's eyes lit up. He asked, "How did you do that?" I looked at him and said, "I'm from the future."

Getting fired from the company you started may seem hard to imagine, but it happens fairly frequently. Avoid these mistakes and it won't happen to you.

Getting fired from the company you created is probably the last thing you can imagine. Unfortunately, it's a fairly regular occurrence that can have devastating effects on both you and the company.

Dismissing a founder is never an easy decision for a board to make. In general, investors have good reasons to want to see you lead the business to long-term success. You are the person who got the investors excited about the company and sold them the vision, and you are the person they bet on to lead the company. Start-ups have lots of luck hiring managers but generally little luck hiring visionaries. Not to mention the fact that hired CEOs are quite expensive.

But boards have an obligation to investors to do what is in the best interests of the company, and if you give them no better option, they will get rid of you.

I have found that there are a few failure modes--fireable offenses, so to speak--that ultimately persuade a board to replace a founder. Here are the three most common.

Fireable Offense no. 1: Failing to Address Real Problems

In my experience, the most frequent failure occurs when founder CEOs don't confront the hard facts. You get so invested in selling the grand vision of the company that you fail to deal with the challenges that the company is facing every day.

Moreover, fear of appearing incompetent can cause you to downplay any problems in the business. By failing to address those challenges, however, you start to lose all credibility with the board of directors. I've seen CEOs who insist that things are going well, even though the company is demonstrably far behind plan. It is nearly impossible to take meaningful corrective action as a company when a CEO is insisting that everything is rosy.

Fireable Offense no. 2: Neglecting Functions Outside Your Comfort Zone

Most founders have expertise in a single area--be it engineering, product, or marketing. Staying within your core experience and neglecting other areas is a common problem. For example, I see lots of founders who come from product backgrounds (my bias as the best background for a start-up CEO) and fail to recruit and manage a great sales and marketing organization.

Too often, they undervalue the importance of less-familiar functions to the company's success. When a product-experienced CEO is struggling in all areas but product, that person should probably consider stepping down as CEO and simply running product.

Fireable Offense no. 3: Not Recruiting an Awesome Senior Team

Founders are frequently threatened by leaders with more experience. Perhaps you worry that the board regards senior managers as your potential replacements. In my view, however, the best evidence that you should stay in the CEO seat is if you demonstrate the ability to recruit and lead a team of experienced functional leaders. If outstanding talent is willing to work for a less-experienced but inspiring CEO, that's evidence enough that you are doing a terrific job as a leader.

To be sure, I have seen numerous underperforming start-ups whose board members are so impressed with the founder that they find it simply unthinkable that anyone else would lead the company. If you can manage to avoid the mistakes above, you'll earn the support of your board, and you'll stay in the CEO seat long enough to get the business back on track.

Not all stories have a happy ending.

Kickstarter, the world's largest crowdfunding site, gives entrepreneurs a platform to raise money for pet projects like a new business, a film, or even a music video.

To date, the site has collectively raised more than $679 million for more than 100,000 campaigns, launching the likes of the new gaming console Ouya and funding a feature film for "Veronica Mars" fans.

But not all Kickstarters have a happy ending and success can be difficult to bear. Some fundraisers simply aren't prepared to handle the demand that comes with thousands of new backers and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Here are three tales of Kickstarter campaigns gone bad.

1. Ed Carter hoped to raise $21,000 to fund his board game. Instead, he lost his house and job.

Carter's plan was to raise money to produce a deluxe version of his board game "Glory to Rome."

It was a smashing success. At the end of his 21-day funding period in the summer of 2011, Carter had raised $73,102 from 1,600 board game enthusiasts -- more than three times his goal. In return for the donation, Carter promised his backers free shipping of his game.

Fast forward a year and Carter was in deep trouble. His backers-turned-customers still hadn't seen their board games. Turns out, the games were ready to ship but were crushed in transit after Carter forgot to indicate that the packages were fragile. And free shipping was easy enough to finance for domestic orders and even to Brazil, but a large order to Australia cost Carter more to ship than the game itself.

The blows kept coming. Carter was laid off from his full-time job with Staples. As he ran out of money, he had to dip into his personal savings account to pay for the game production and subsequently stopped making payments on his mortgage.

The writing was on the wall at that point. Eventually, Carter lost his Boston home. Despite bankrupting himself, Carter has managed to deliver all of the games he promised and says he'd do it again.

"I'm doing this because the corporate world is one of the best games ever invented," he told Quartz.com.

2. Childhood friends raised thousands to produce eco-friendly sandals. Then they completely fell off the radar.

John Eades and Michael Ferreri created the Vere flip-flop, a sandal they marketed as having "its eye on the environment."

The childhood friends hoped to raise $12,000 to build a sandal-making factory in Geneva, N.Y., telling would-be supporters they had the experience and equipment, but needed help with production costs.

The two raised $52,618 -; almost four and a half times their goal -- in the spring of 2011.

Ten months later, Eades and Ferreri found themselves in the hot seat with their 1,091 backers. The sandals that were promised to customers were still nowhere to be seen as of December 2011, way past flip-flop season.

"It’s been a long, frustrating process to say the least, and we’ve hit more roadblocks than even we expected," they wrote in a letter to BetaBeat.com. "Kickstarter orders were overwhelming, and if we were to do it again we would definitely have put a limit on the number of backer awards available."

The two sporadically updated backers, citing mechanical issues, short-staffing, and the late arrival of materials.

They were still fielding complaints from customers in January, but it seems like they've finally managed to get on track. The sandals are finally being sold at retailers across the country.

3. Kickstarter backers thought they were funding a cutting edge pair of video-recording glasses. Turns out it was a total scam.

What seemed like a great investment quickly went south for the 2,106 backers of Eyez, HD VideoRecording Glasses for Facebook. The glasses were supposed to be able to record video in your line of sight and upload it to Facebook.

ZionEyez raised $343, 415 towards their project -- more than six times their original goal.

Anyone who pledged $150 or more to ZionEyez was promised a pair of the glasses by Winter 2011. Nearly two years later, the glasses are nowhere in sight.

To top it all off, the creators have been silent since the spring of 2012. On April 10, 2012 they updated their Kickstarter page saying they needed approximately seven months to finish testing and manufacturing. Over a year later, still nothing.

Some backers were angry enough to suggest filing a class action lawsuit against the creators. One commenter did post a copy of an email from the creators of Eyez, saying an update will be coming in the "near future."

So far, it doesn't look too promising for the supporters of Eyez. To their disadvantage, Kickstarter doesn't give out refunds.

What can you do if you've backed a Kickstarer campaign gone wrong?

Before you decide to fund a campaign, choose your projects to fund wisely, or as Kickstarter says: "Use your internet street smarts."

Unfortunately, Kickstarter does not claim responsibility for failed projects. The company only ensures that projects meet their community guidelines, which loosely states projects must be just that, a project, and fit into one of their categories.

Kickstarter's Terms of Use does mandate a legal requirement for creators to finish the project or give backers their money back, which can give funders grounds to sue if they feel fit. They encourage backers to only pull the legal card if they believe the creator didn't make a good faith effort to complete their order.

This article originally appeared in Business Insider.

The founder of Justin's explains how his company shook up the nut butter category.

In 2003, Justin Gold began peddling his homemade organic nut butters at a farmers' market in Boulder, Colorado. With just $25,000 in seed money raised from family members, Gold planned to build a strong local following for his company, Justin's, and expand slowly. In 2004, he persuaded a local Whole Foods to stock his product.

Today, Justin's line of organic nut butters, organic chocolate peanut butter cups, and all-natural candy bars is available in more than 15,000 national retail stores, including Whole Foods, Target, and Starbucks.

The 20-employee business generated $20 million in sales last year. That represented three-year growth of 614 percent, enough to place Justin's at No. 594 on the 2012 Inc. 5000. "We're a 10-year overnight success," says Gold, who is now eyeing convenience and drug stores. Here, he offers tips for getting onto store shelves, then into shopping carts.

1. Man the front lines. "When you first get into Whole Foods, you pinch yourself," Gold says. "You might think all the hard work is done. But most products fail." To boost his chances of success, Gold started by selling just three products: 16-ounce jars of cinnamon peanut butter, honey peanut butter, and honey almond butter--for $5 to $10 a pop in a Boulder store.

He delivered the jars, stocked the shelves, and manned the sample table, where he got valuable feedback from shoppers. "It gave me time to work out my flavors and my message," he says.

2. Start local; Thnk National. In the beginning, Gold focused his expansion efforts primarily on local health-food stores and specialty shops. But he also met with national retailers at trade shows and in their offices to make his pitch.

"They told me the same story: 'Come back next year and we'll see how your sales improve,'" Gold says. "But I wanted them to know who I was." The strategy paid off: By 2008, Justin's nut butters were available in Whole Foods stores around the country. The next year, they launched in Wegmans, Safeway, and Kroger stores.

3. Build grass-roots loyalty. In lieu of traditional advertising, Justin's sends free products to brand ambassadors and encourages them to spread the word. Some ambassadors are fans who have contacted the company via email or Facebook.

Justin's has also recruited influential fitness and nutrition experts, such as Dave Ellis, a sports dietitian who stocks the training facilities of many professional sports teams with Justin's squeeze packs. Unsolicited plugs from celebrity fans, including actress Eva Mendes, have also added some extra honey.

4. Shake up your category. A big factor in Justin's success has been its individual squeeze packs, which are geared toward campers, dieters, and brown baggers. Gold, an avid backpacker, drew inspiration for the product from the high-energy gel packs sold at outdoor-gear stores.

Justin's 1.15-ounce nut-butter packs, which retail for 50 cents to $1 each, have helped boost profit margins and set Justin's apart from rival brands. "We breathed life into a stale category," Gold says. "If I was just making nut butter, I wouldn't be here today."

After one year with Google Fiber, Kansas City is learning that it may take more than just superfast Internet to spur start-up creation.

Kansas City is famous for its barbecue, not its start-up scene. That's why it came as quite a surprise when Google selected it to become the pilot city for its Google Fiber program.

Despite lacking the resources normally considered essential to tech hubs--including a solid VC base, established mentors, and universities with Stanford's cachet--Kansas City is hopeful that affordable, lightning-fast Internet will somehow spark a surge in the region's start-up activity. It's been a year since Google Fiber officially kicked off in Kansas City, so how are things going so far?

The good news is that fiber works, enabling 1-gigabit connections that are 100 times faster than standard broadband. Other than the fact that residents have an unfair advantage at World of Warcraft, however, it is still not quite clear exactly how most Kansas City entrepreneurs can take advantage of it.

"The majority of the start-ups based here were founded before this gigabit revolution started to take hold," says Matthew Marcus, chief technology officer of Local Ruckus, a curator of local events. "No one relied upon it, so we're just starting to figure out how we can leverage it to increase productivity."

Part of the problem is that though Kansas City has a sneak peek at where the Internet is heading, the rest of the country is probably still years away from having 1-gigabit Internet. It's like being the only neighborhood with telephone service--it's cool but somewhat limited.

For example, Mike Farmer, founder of the search start-up Leap2, says Google Fiber has "ignited" his imagination. He has envisioned a 3-D version of his product that would utilize 1-gigabit speeds. Still, he thinks it would be premature to actually build it, given the limited number of people with Google Fiber. "It doesn't make sense at this point," he says.

If nothing else, Google Fiber has certainly strengthened the esprit de corps of the Kansas City tech community. That can certainly be seen in the Kansas City Startup Village, a tightly packed neighborhood of roughly 20 start-ups in the city's Hanover Heights section, the first area to go live with Google Fiber.

The Village has lured start-ups from as far away as Los Angeles. It has also attracted the attention of venture capitalist Brad Feld, who played a role in building Boulder, Colorado's tech community. Feld bought a three-bedroom house in Hanover Heights in February, and he recently handed the keys--rent free--for a year to Handprint, a 3-D printing software start-up that launched in Boston.

A local software developer has also started a Homes for Hackers program that offers start-ups interested in moving to the area three months of free rent in a house in the Startup Village. Eager to try Google Fiber but not ready to move to the Midwest? "Fiber tourists" interested in taking Google Fiber for a weekend test drive can rent a room in the house on Airbnb for $39 a night.

His company was thriving. Then he joined a startup accelerator. Now he's going bust. Is start-up culture to blame?

Entrepreneurs love to talk about success. Failure, not so much. Indeed, when the dreaded f-word is mentioned, it’s almost always invoked as something to be proud of, a badge of honor.

Perhaps that’s the appeal of a new blog called My Startup Has 30 Days to Live. Launched today by an anonymous CEO whose technology company is rapidly circling that drain, the blog is bracingly honest and should be more than a little frightening for young, would-be tech moguls.

That’s because, if the blogger is to believed, the startup was killed not by tough rivals or a crummy economy, but by a company accelerator, overly ambitious peers, and greedy venture capitalists--indeed, by startup culture itself.

Here, for example, is what he calls his biggest mistake:

We listened to our investors

They were proven entrepreneurs that had made millions (sometimes nefariously…) and they believed in us. If only we would:

• “Make feature X free”

• “Stop focussing on revenue, someone else will pay the bills”

• “Grow $VANITY_METRIC so you can show a hockey stick at demo day and look good”

• “Cut out that pesky client that generates 80% of your revenue, they’re a distraction on the road to executing $OUR_BIG_VISION”

We drank the Kool-Aid and went all-in. By the time demo day came around, we had cheques being written and were all over the press. Still, I had this nagging feeling eating away at me. That nagging feeling was disbelief.

I didn’t believe the shit I was selling investors. This was not the company I put my life on the line to build.

No surprise, the blog has sparked a lively conversation on Hacker News. Some commenters argue that the poster’s problem is that he intended to build a “business,” rather than a “start-up.” "I have come to the opinion that if you are bootstrapping, you have no business calling your company a startup. You are building a small business,” writes a user named gregghinch. Adds another, michaelochuch, “We say in this country that getting rich slowly is the virtue and that get-rich-quick is the scam. Yet VC is obsessed with the latter.”

The anonymous blogger--who ends his inaugural post with the chillingly definitive statement, “I’m scared”--also gets his share of advice, the best of which, it seems to me, comes from Hacker News user tptacek:

Your startup is going to die, you're going to get a new job (which you'll have no trouble doing), and sometime in the future you'll start another company. Maybe you'll do the next one smarter, since you'll have more experience.

Signed,

Been There

Two start-ups attempt to change the relationship between government and entrepreneurs.

On June 24, the Knight Foundation announced the winners to its Knight News Challenge on Open Gov. Launched in February, the challenge aimed to encourage innovators to come up with solutions that would enable journalists to do their jobs better and empower citizens to contribute to community progress.

Two of the eight winning projects hold special promise for entrepreneurs. Once aims to make it easier to open a business. The other is an attempt to smooth the process of competing for government contracts and make it more transparent.

Awarded total of $910,000, OpenCounter and Procure.io are starting to change the way that entrepreneurs and governments deal with each other.

OpenCounter

One of the more frustrating parts of launching and running a new business is navigating the multiple layers of government regulations and permit requirements. OpenCounter aims to simplify this process on the city government level. OpenCounter provides local governments with open source software they can use to build a streamlined, easy-to-use interface for entrepreneurs that are just getting going. The company then "collects and sorts data on existing regulations while providing running totals of the costs and time involved in setting up shop," according to the press release.

The project, which was developed in Santa Cruz, Calif., in 2012 by Code for America fellows Peter Koht and Joel Mahoney, will receive $450,000 from the Knight Foundation to finance expansion into additional communities.

Procure.io

Winning a government contract can be transformational for a small businesses. However, the procurement process is daunting, complicated, and time consuming. That's where Procur.io comes in. Its procurement software, called Screendoor, tries to simplify the posting of requests for proposals and bring more transparency to the government contract bidding process.

The tool, which was built by White House Presidential Innovation Fellows Clay Johnson and Adam Becker, has already proven itself on the federal level. The $460,000 award from the Knight Foundation will be used to expand the software to roll out the software to state and municipal governments, with the goal of "reduc[ing] costs and ensur[ing] that the most qualified teams get the job."

Rather than rely on someone else's software, the eyeglass maker created its own.

In Warby Parker's world, style isn't the only thing that shouldn't be imitated. Software shouldn't be either.

When the venture-backed start-up realized none of the 30 existing point-of-sale vendors would serve its purposes, it set out to develop its own, reports Jason Del Rey for All Things D.

The company cobbled together a solution that's one part payment management and another part customer management using a Google Nexus tablet and a credit card reader.

“Even though we felt like we found the best vendor, we realized it just wasn’t going to be a long-term tech partner for us, and the only way we were going to be able to get what we needed was to build it ourselves,” Kyle Ashley, Warby Parker’s director of retail, told Del Rey in an interview.

Warby Parker disrupted the vision space by convincing customers to buy glasses online. Now it stands to do the same with retail payments.

Rather than have clients pay for their goods at the point-of-sale, they'll be charged when their merchandise ships. What's more, clerks can enter prescription information and use technology to limit mistakes.

Beyond that, the system will store customers' purchase history, including which styles they've browsed and when. Everything is accessible from one location. On the customer side, this could improve the experience as a salesperson can easily pass on information about products. On the store side, this may improve sales. Long-term, the company hopes to use an iPad or iPod for its hardware and develop a native app for its software.

Warby Parker joins a slew of e-commerce start-ups like Bonobos and Julep that have taken their business offline. Perhaps others will buck the trend of using one-size-fits-all payment systems like Square and take a page from Warby Parker's book.

A Baltimore start-up tackles blindness with new innovative treatments.

Warby Parker isn't the only start-up disrupting the vision space. GrayBug, a company that recently won the Invest Maryland Challenge in Baltimore, Maryland, is revolutionizing drug delivery and treatments for the eye.

GrayBug started after three professors at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University--Justin Hanes, Peter Compochiaro, and Peter McDonnell--developed two treatments to help patients who suffer from age-related macular degeneration. The three founders determined that the fastest way to get their innovations to the public was to start a company.

Age-related macular degeneration is a leading cause of blindness in adults 65 and over, with over 20 million cases in the U.S. and Europe. GrayBug estimates that market is worth around $4 billion worldwide. The typical treatment includes receiving injections in the eye every one to two months. GrayBug claims its sustained-release drugs may reduce the number of injections needed to just twice per year--a potential boon for the tens of million patients who describe the experience as disturbing and painful. Other treatments for blinding ocular diseases, such as glaucoma, are in the works.

So far, the company has three full-time employees and more than a dozen advisors. A GrayBug spokesperson declined to offer specifics about the company's valuation or annual revenue, but says that Baltimore's thriving start-up scene helped drive the company's early success. Not only does GrayBug enjoy easy access to a number of prestigious universities and federal institutions, but the Maryland Biotechnology Center and BioMaryland have also extended support.

In recent years, Baltimore has become a thriving hub of health innovation. The state of Maryland ranked No. 2 for science and technology assets (behind Massachusetts), according to the Milken Institute. One of the foremost biotech companies, MedImmune, which is based in Baltimore, developed the FluMist nasal spray influenza vaccine. Other innovators include Zyngenia, a biotech company, and MedImmune's venture capital arm, which invests in health start-ups.

From Sky Sapience's Hovercraft to the Scanadu Scout, here's a rundown of the coolest gadgets turning our sci-fi fantasies into reality.

Sci-fi authors and filmmakers are visionaries, creating gadgets for a whole new world. There's the flying DeLorean from Back to the Future and the stealth helicopter that tracked Katniss Everdeen's every move in Hunger Games. Wouldn't it be cool to use those gadgets in real life? Turns out you can. These start-ups took some of the most iconic tech from pop culture and made it real.

To survive the 74th Hunger Games, Katniss had to evade the Capitol's surveillance craft as she poached deer and rabbits to eat. Sky Sapience, an Israeli start-up, has created a similar product called the HoverMast, which monitors crowds, illegal immigrants, and more. The machine can fly up to 164 miles high and carry antennas, radars, or cameras.

Perhaps the precogs featured in Steven Spielberg's sci-fi flick invented LeapMotion. The Solar System Model lets users draw with their fingertip, reach into a universe, or widen a window--all without a mouse or a keyboard. The gesture-tracking platform just opened its developer portal, though the trackers won't be shipped until next month.

Where would Leonard H. McCoy be without his beloved Tricorder? Thankfully, Trekkies can get their hands on Scanadu's Scout, which co-founder Walter De Brouwer modeled after McCoy's gadget. The gadget can track vital signs if you hold it up to a patient's forehead. And the doctor doesn't need to be present--Scout can bring data direct to his home, so long as the patient knows what they're doing. The California company has big dreams for the little disc, as Scout has entered Qualcomm's Tricorder XPrize.

Doc Brown's DeLorean used a plutonium-based flux capacitor to travel through time and fly. Start-up founder Michael Mercier may not use plutonium for his inventions, but his hovercraft will have a gas-electric hybrid that ensures a continuous air cushion, sort of like an air-hockey puck. The exterior reminds us of an souped-up Audi or Bugatti--it's just as luxurious and seats up to two people.

During most of Tally's time as a Pretty, she makes elaborate costumes for endless (and mindless) parties. Mexican start-up Machina could be a hit here on Earth or in her world. The start-up is designing wearable machines in the form of jackets, the first of which will produce music kinetically. With sensors, buttons, and a joystick sewn into the material, the jacket will serve as a platform to control an iPod or mix music videos.

Remember Harry Potter's interactive paper and the e-paper with changing headlines seen in Minority Report? British start-up Plastic Logic is developing a flexible tablet that can be flipped, bent, or rolled up like an old-fashioned newspaper. The display media is e-ink, just like what Amazon's Kindle tablet uses. Founded by researchers from Cambridge University, the company has also created bendable cameras and a solar-powered paper watch.

Hopefully, people wearing the new RL Mark VI Space Diving Suit won't be as obnoxious as Tony Stark. Two Baltimore tech start-ups, Solar System Express and Juxtopia LLC, designed the space suit, which might pave the way for a new kind of tourism. Juxtopia designed a set of voice-controlled goggles that feed the explorer a stream of data about his course, vitals, and other info.

Total Recall's Douglas Quaid wasn't a big fan of the automated cabbie running JohnnyCab. Today's passengers can simply tell 2getthere's CyberCabs their destination and avoid a chatty robot. The start-up has created several automated transport systems for various cities in the Netherlands including the Capelle aan den Ijssel.

Neal Stephenson's Metaverse was an urban world that ran along one road. Users could buy virtual real estate, date, or hawk merchandise after entering through terminals. Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset, may be the closest you can get to Stephenson's idea. The Rift uses head-tracking technology to follow head motion and translate it into movement within the virtual world. If combined with the Virtuix Omni, a treadmill of sorts, locomotion will mean more than pressing "W" to move forward.

Jane Jetson counted on Rosie to do most of the housecleaning while she pondered fashion and gadgets. Now Calgary-based start-up EZ-Robot offers a platform for building tailor-made Robots from modified Roombas to personal assistants. Founder DJ Sures offers unified hardware and software for clients so they can program to their heart's content.

If R2-D2 hadn't projected Princess Leia's plea for help, who knows what might have happened? Here in this galaxy, Sunnyvale's zSpace is making holographic imagery so users can interact, manipulate, and navigate the complex holograms. It's not quite TuPac worthy, but zSpace makes an effort to make its holograms look like they're real.

Experts weigh in on everything from when should you try to get away to how to keep the heat from ruining your gadgets.

This Friday summer officially got underway but you’ve probably been daydreaming about vacation season from long before that. And, as a business owner, also probably fretting about it.

Like everyone else, entrepreneurs love a good beach getaway or lazy Saturday BBQ with friends, but the warm months present particular challenges for business owners. How can you find time for a proper break? What sort of contact should you keep with your employees back home (and how much will disappoint the kids or annoy your significant other)? And should you leave that laptop at home or at least in the hotel room?

Thankfully, the experts have plenty of wisdom to offer.

Short answer: never. Let’s be honest, there’s never a time when you calendar is truly empty, but that shouldn’t stop you from planning a vacation anyway, writes Alan Henry on lifehacker recently. "If you've been hoarding vacation days because it just hasn't been a 'good time' to get away from the office, stop. The truth is, most of our jobs are busy and hectic enough that there's never a good time, so think instead about the accommodations you can make so you can slip away to recharge," he chides vacation-starved business owners.

Not only will getting away help stave off burnout, but its also a good way to test out new ways of delegating work and communicating on the go with your team. If there are slow periods at your work, by all means aim for them, but get online already and book yourself a getaway!

Obviously, the answer to this is going to vary based on the person and the business, but there are some general principles to help you find a sane balance. It’s clearly a good idea for everyone to communicate when you’re going to employees as well as possibly customers and key partners as far in advance as you can and to make every effort to lighten your schedule for the days you’ll be away.

Experts such as Careerealism’s J.T. O’Donnell also suggest setting a fixed schedule for check ins so everyone is on the same page. "My dad was a pro at this," she writes. "He made it clear he would dial in at 9 AM every morning and that it would be the only time staff would get him ‘live’ during his vacation. They were always organized and ready with questions. Just because you have a cell phone on vacation doesn’t mean you should be picking it up whenever someone from the office calls... You can even send e-mails the night before to remind them you’ll be calling."

O’Donnell also stresses that when you’re sipping a cool drink poolside isn’t the time for any heavy duty coaching or tough feedback. "It’s one thing if you are in the office and can provide valuable feedback face-to-face. But, telling a co-worker in a text message or two-sentence cryptic e-mail from vacation that you weren’t happy with their work and intend to discuss it when you return is pure evil," she writes.

Working vacations have gotten even more complicated since we’re all wired all the time. Exactly how much should you abstain from your smart phone? At what point will your travel companions start contemplating throwing your tablet into the ocean?

First, if this is a struggle for you beyond the boundaries of your vacations then consider putting some effort into redefining your relationship with you tech. But if yours is just garden variety gadget overload, take comfort in knowing you’re not alone. Everyone from veteran entrepreneur Noam Brodksy to VC Brad Feld has publicly come out as struggling to draw this line (Feld offers a creative fix for how much email to respond to in the same post) but as Brodsky notes, not taming your connection anxiety not only annoys your traveling companions but can also really hurt your business.

As a warning to "people who think they are taking a vacation when in fact they have simply moved their offices outdoors" he confesses that "for eight or nine years after starting my first business, I took breaks only when my wife, Elaine, forced me to... If the technology had been available, I would probably have been one of those poor souls sitting on the beach with a BlackBerry in one hand, a cell phone in the other, and a computer on my lap. Or I would have been doing deals while riding a ski lift up the side of a mountain. It took a long and painful trip through Chapter 11 to make me realize the dangers of becoming consumed by the business. Looking back, I could see that I had gotten in trouble in part because I had lost perspective."

Now he’s a firm believer in vacations -- real vacations -- so put down your phone already.

This Mashable post is for you. If you’re concerned about water damage or temperature changes might do to your beloved gadget, it has solutions. Now, just make sure you’re as careful about applying sunscreen.

From going out too much to having too many founders, here's what you've been doing wrong.

When you write and read about start-ups all day long, you see founders make a lot of mistakes.

As an observer of and dabbler in start-ups, I've kept track of all the things I'd try to avoid as an entrepreneur.

Here are the most common mistakes early stage start-ups and new founders make:

1. Getting press too early or just because.

If you're a start-up looking for press, the first question you need to ask yourself is "Why?"

Why do you need press? Are you really ready for press? What will an article help you achieve?

If you want press to make yourself look cooler to friends or employees, you probably shouldn't be seeking it. If you're doing it to gain users, the bump will likely be temporary. Just look at Turntable.fm, Airtime or Brewster.

In some cases, press can be good. It can attract investors if you're seeking financing. An article in Ad Age could attract advertising dollars.

But if you haven't nailed your business model or product (and chances are in the first year you haven't done either of those things), do you really want your name out there only to fail a year later? That'd be more embarrassing than never having press in the first place.

2. Raising too much money too early.

Bootstrapping a start-up is scary. No one likes seeing their savings dwindle away. But when you rely on outside investors to take all the risk, it can make founders frivolous with their spending. It also can dilute them so a future exit becomes much less rewarding.

If you pursue a start-up on your own first, you can work on proving the business model and gaining traction without the pressure of board meetings or investors looming over your head. Once you are self sustaining, you can secure better terms from investors. And, if no one outside is controlling your company, you can exit whenever you want and never worry that someone else with a vested interest in your start-up will fire you.

If you don't have at least $50,000 saved up and you're not at a stage in life where you're able to take a risk, you shouldn't be doing a start-up.

3. Trying to do a start-up alone.

Start-ups are stressful and no one is good at everything. To avoid burn out, you need a co-founder and/or advisors to split the work load and confide in. You'll also be more productive with other people helping you, plus there will be more money to bootstrap with.

Startups take up a lot of time, so it's normal to feel chained to your desk. But you need to interact with people and take productive meetings to move your business forward. No one can do a start-up alone.

4. Having too many co-founders.

It can seem like a great idea to start a business with your four best friends. But that means you're starting out with just 25 percent of the company before ever raising a round. Plus, it's hard to have four people calling the shots and it's frustrating if everyone isn't pulling equal weight. Most start-ups with multiple founders dwindle down to one lead founder anyhow. Think Facebook, Quora, Path and Foursquare.

Do a start-up yourself (like David Karp) or with one other person you know you can work with. Otherwise, it could be a messy and expensive breakup.

5. Going out too much.

There are a lot of networking events and parties in the start-up world. It's possible to network too much, and not work enough.

Strike a balance. If you're a well-known face in the start-up community you should probably be spending more time at your desk. Otherwise it sends a bad message to your employees and investors.

6. Trying to force a business that isn't working.

You quit your job because you have a brilliant idea you're sure will work.

Only ... it doesn't. Now what?

First, you should never quit your job until you've had a chance to test your concept and there's a legitimate chance it will work. But even then, it's hard to predict your start-up's future.

You may not have accurately predicted the way people would use your product, or customers may hate a new feature you love.

Move fast, break things, and kill things. Don't hold onto a start-up idea just because you're enamored with it. Pull out a kernel of the idea that's working and blow it up into a full-fledged business, or pivot altogether. Some of the biggest companies today arose from the ashes of failed start-ups.

7. Communicating poorly and ignoring critics.

When you have a start-up roadmap in your head, it can be difficult to properly communicate it to others.

Keep lines of communication open constantly and force yourself to listen to critics. Learning how to manage people takes work. But if you don't learn how to communicate, you'll destroy your relationships with customers and employees.

8. Being greedy.

Being a smart entrepreneur means knowing when to leave the table.

A lot of buzzy start-ups have gotten $100 million acquisition offers and decided to walk away. Usually that's an admirable but stupid decision.

Foursquare could have sold for $150 million when it had only raised $5 million. Video startup Qwiki had an offer to sell for over $100 million and now it may be selling to Yahoo for $50 million. Path was offered big bucks by Google but its founder Dave Morin turned it down and has had a bumpy road since.

For first time founders especially, seize a life-changing opportunity when it's offered to you. Save going all in for your next start-up.

It can be better to sell for a smaller amount of money than for hundreds of millions of dollars. A $20 to $30 million exit takes less time to reach and less outside capital to fuel than a $200 million exit.

9. Telling white lies.

Since start-ups are private companies, they can lie to journalists and investors who don't perform due diligence. If you're desperate to raise capital or keep your start-up alive, you may be tempted to tell a white lie about how quickly you're growing or how much money you're making.

If your start-up is failing, the truth will come out eventually. Lies just delay death and keep you from founding something worthwhile.

10. Being impatient.

Investors say 10 million users are the new one million users, which has start-ups scrambling to scale quickly. But if you're only focused on growth your product will suffer.

Different types of start-ups grow at different rates. Set growth goals based on the trajectory of similar start-ups and manage your expectations accordingly.

If you're running a media company, you're going to have to wait until you're big enough to hire a direct sales team before you make money. That could take years. If you're running a transaction-based business, know what margins you need to sustain a lasting business.

11. Underestimating how difficult a start-up really is.

Most of the start-up stories we read are about successes. But founders don't often win the lottery.

500Startups' Dave McClure recently explained how difficult startups really are:

It was a hell of a lot of work for not a hell of a lot of return. And then there are days when you sit in a corner and cry. You can't really do anything else. You don't have a social life. You don't really want to interact with family and friends because there's just not much context for them. Your world revolves around your start-up and it's all about trying to survive and not look like an idiot in front of employees.

There's still recognition that it's a set of first-world problems that don't get to the level of war, starvation, or something like that. But when your whole world is about trying to show everyone else you're successful and hold it together, and maintaining that psychic dissonance of externally everything is going great while the internal side you're freaking out and trying to make payroll ... it gets fucking stressful.

12. Not dreaming big enough.

There are people who are practical and there are people who are dreamers. The best start-up teams employ both types to keep them grounded while working toward a massive achievement.

If you think too small, you're limiting yourself and what you're capable of. When you're creating something from scratch, you can create anything of any size you want.

This story originally appeared on Business Insider.

The next generation of entrepreneurs literally have the world at their fingertips. Here's why you want to employ them.

After years of launching companies, I've often wondered how today's entrepreneurs create, structure, and grow a small business. Finally, I took a 16-month tour to find out.

Last week I attended the G20 entrepreneurship summit in Moscow, where I gave a keynote talk and met with entrepreneurs from 30 different countries. The results were the same whether I was in Rio, Dubai, or Lima, or Kuala Lumpur.

Social media, combined with the explosive growth of online education, has created a real opportunity. For perhaps the first time ever, industrious citizens in almost every nation can be your competitor or business partner.

Take a young man I met in Senegal launching an online payment system. When I asked how he learned what he knew, he simply replied, "Stanford." He had never left Senegal, so when I asked how this was possible, he replied “Coursera," the free online university course site. When he wasn't working in the fields, he took free classes on the Internet. He showed me his plan and I was impressed. “TED videos,” he said. “I stay up late and watch them all."

A few years ago, this young man could never have dreamed of leaving the agricultural job his family members have been doing for generations. Today, though, he is not only building a world-class online business, but may show up in your market and compete aggressively. He is smart and he is hungry. And there are thousands more like him.

But this isn't just a threat.

You are a small business owner. You want to grow. You don’t have connections in global markets, but they do. This new generation of online-educated entrepreneurs can bring your product or service to their market much faster and more effectively than you can.

So what should you do?

Find them. Employ them. And partner with them.

I have never been more excited about the state of entrepreneurship worldwide. Small business is the answer to global unemployment. And now we have a global army of ambitious entrepreneurs and small business owners who are attacking the problem from all sides.

Truly great entrepreneurs aren't satisfied with comfort. Pushing their own limits is how they get to greatness.

Everyone has a so-called "comfort zone." You know what I'm talking about: that mental space you live in where there are boundaries and you feel a sense of emotional security with your work and your decision making.

What distinguishes successful people from everyone else is what they do with their comfort zone. There are those who are perfectly happy staying warm and cozy in this safe box they've built; and then are those who constantly push and test the limits.

You already know which person goes on to be a successful entrepreneur.

Now I'm not suggesting that the comfort zone is a bad thing. It's there for a reason: to protect us. Otherwise we all may be jumping off cliffs and out of airplanes. It also protects us from taking on more stress and anxiety than we are equipped to deal with. But eventually the familiar routine of your comfort zone will keep you from learning, and experiencing new things that are potentially good for us. It is also likely to prevent you from building a thriving business.

So how do you know when your comfort zone is holding you back? Here are a few things you may notice:

• Excessive stress
• Boredom
• Self-criticism
• Envy
• Anxiety about your situation
• Excuses--lots of them!
• A stagnant, or failing, business

Any of those sound familiar? It's time for a stretch. Try these baby steps and watch your world grow.

Accept that you are less than perfect.

Are you afraid of what others may think, or of letting someone down? Usually the "rules" we create around how to behave so others will accept us are nothing but self-imposed, ridiculously high standards. Get a little crazy. Do something fun, like dance in the department store (my kids were mortified) or sing at karaoke. Break the illusion of perfection and join the rest of us in the human race.

Break the fear barrier.

So what are you really afraid of? Make a list. Include everything, from fear of spiders to fear of financial devastation. Now make a plan to face your fears one at a time. Begin small. If you have a phobia, for instance, reach out for help to eliminate it. The Emotional Freedom Techniques has an amazing track record of curing phobias. Knock these fears off your list one at a time and celebrate each success.

Get a partner.

There are some things that just aren't meant to be done alone. For over two years, I've had a dream to produce and present an empowering women's conference. But it remained a dream and nothing more. Then one day my coach said to me, "that's just not something you take on all by yourself," and I finally got it. I needed a partner in this endeavor. Sure enough, I found someone within a week and "Make It Happen" is happening this September. It's amazing how much fun it is to create and I am certainly stretching the limits of my comfort zone. But since I'm no longer alone in this little adventure, I still feel safe (mostly).

Is there something you want to do that just shouldn't be done alone? Find a buddy and make it happen.

Detach and accept.

Your comfort zone keeps you in a very predictable space: You usually know exactly what's going to happen. A fear of the unknown will keep you stuck forever. So the trick here is to let go of your expectations and accept the results of your actions. Take risks in measured amounts. If you are designing a new consulting program or rolling out a new product, do it in small bits. Don't go gangbusters and risk losing it all. Gamble with something you are willing to lose. These losses will teach you something, such as how to make the product better or market it differently. Look forward to the outcome, whatever it is.

Hang out with someone different.

Often we choose our friends and peers based on what we have in common. Instead, try to find someone who's crazier than you. Choosing the company of people who go farther out on the limb will bring out your adventurous side. Be open-minded and observe the benefits of being more daring.

Imagine your success.

If you spend a few minutes each day visualizing your success you will become more willing to take the risks associated with it. Give your brain a break and daydream a bit. You'll be amazed at the results.

Now go ahead and break those silly rules--and keep me posted on your success.

A hard-charging professional flames out and discovers a better way of working based on the wisdom of long-lived Japanese islanders.

Who’s your business role model? Whether you go for high tech gurus like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos or more down home exemplars of business greatness such as Henry Ford or your shop-keeping mother, one place you probably haven’t looked for entrepreneurial inspiration is elderly residents of Japan.

But maybe you should, writes Justin Jackson on his blog recently. Wisdom from the island of Okinawa, which has a shockingly high number of residents who live to see their 100th birthday, helped him deal with a professional crisis and learn to manage his career in a sustainable way.

Jackson works as product manager at a start-up and is the father of four kids and, despite this full already plate of commitments, he writes, in the past he also dove into volunteering, studying for another degree and various side projects. The result was predictable.

“I loved the busyness. I was firing on all cylinders. Spinning all these plates in the air. The world was my oyster! And it all worked fine until …I cracked,” he confesses. “I had no reserves. The problem with being maxed out is you can’t deal with anything new. I couldn’t fit anything else in. I’d squeezed my schedule, my finances, my energy, and my family to the absolute limit. And then a crisis: the business I’d invested in went bad. I had no extra room to deal with a crisis: all those plates I’d been spinning came crashing down.”

In the aftermath of this crisis Jackson suffered with depression for the first time in his life and went searching for a better way. He found it on Okinawa with its outsized proportion of centenarians. “How do Okinawans maintain such a high standard of health? Researchers have traced their longevity to a Confucian practice called hara hachi bu. Roughly translated it means: ‘eat until you are 80 percent full,” he explains.

Jackson decided to apply this principle not to his diet but to his schedule.

“As I began the slow process of rebuilding, I decided I would start practicing a form of mental hara hachi bu at work,” he writes. “I became conscious of the amount of energy I spent at the office. I would deliberately pace myself so I that I spent only 80 percent of my mental energy throughout the day.”

Without calories to count of an internal fuel gauge, how does he determine when he’s reached 80 percent?

“It’s a state of being mindful. I try not to overstimulate my brain: I pick 2-3 big things to accomplish a day. After that, I focus on little things that don’t require as much energy.” Think of it as another way to follow Ernest Hemingway’s famous dictum on writing: “The best way is always to stop when you are going good.”

“The benefits have been huge,” Jackson claims, including better crisis management, better work and a very low risk of burnout. Check out the post for more details on the impact of this 80% rule on his revamped life.

Could you benefit from leaving a little gas in the tank each day?

Need a few good business partners? Sometimes the best recruits are the ones you already know.

Launching a business is hard, so it's no wonder the majority of entrepreneurs refuse to go it alone.

Some find their partner at school or at work, while others look in more unusual places.

We asked a few entrepreneurs to share where they found their talent and how it worked out. Here's what they told us.

Sports teams

Launching a business is a lot like sports, says Jeff Salter, founder of Caring Senior Service, who found his future business partners while playing rugby.

“When out on the field, I felt I was able to see the players’ true leadership potential,” he said. “Whether it was seeing how they handled and learned from constructive criticism or that they thrived under stressful conditions, I was certain that the members I chose would work well with one another and bring the drive needed to make my business a success.”

Singing groups

When Ted Fienning and his wife, Molly, were planning to launch Babiators, a line of aviator sunglasses for babies, they turned to Fienning's a cappella partner Matthew Guard and his wife Carolyn.

“Live performance is a lot like business: You execute according to a plan, but you have to be prepared for contingencies," Fienning said of their a cappella group, the Kroks.

"In the Kroks, just like in business, we relied on each other to perform an individual part but to also be prepared to improvise, adapt, and keep things running smoothly. Matthew was actually our music director and he was an expert at this--he could feel problems developing and guide individual singers in the group to correct an issue without the audience knowing the difference. All the audience saw was a seamless, professional performance that is exactly what we do together as partners in business.”

Craigslist

Craigslist is where most people turn when searching for roommates, so why not use it for business?

The classifieds site worked for Nathan Blecharczyk, a co-founder of Airbnb. He met Joe Gebbia while looking for a roommate and an apartment in 2007.

Gina Lujan, co-founder of Hacker's Lab, also turned to Craigslist with a post that read, "Seeking all hackers and enthusiasts--where are you?" She found two partners, Charles Blas and Eric Ullrich.

"I got a few weird responses," Lujan admitted to Reuters. But "it was the founder at first sight. The minute we met each other we said, 'Let's do this.'"

Got innovation-phobic team members? Use this handy guide to classify and overcome their objections.

In business, just about everybody claims to be for creativity and finding new and better ways to do business. Not only does innovation sound exciting, it also sounds profitable. But studies have revealed that while lots of folks claim to love change, when they’re faced with the reality of actually altering their usual way of doing business, they’re skeptical if not downright hostile.

Creativity may be cool but it’s also scary, so how can you get your team to actually embrace fresh ways of doing business? The first step, according to Dana Brownlee, the founder of productivity consultancy Professionalism Matters, is to take a careful look at your team’s foot draggers. Not every innovation-phobic employee is the same. Once you know what sort of change resister you have on your hands, you’re better placed to overcome his or her objections.

Intuit Fast Track columnist Alexandra Levit recently rounded up Brownlee’s insights into a handy field guide to change resisters, laying out six types of innovation-unfriendly employees, as well as ideas on how to prod them to adopt new ideas, including:

“In group settings they seem positive, but often make passive aggressive comments that are really thinly veiled jabs (I’m sure the new shipping process makes complete sense and I’m fully onboard, but I’m just wondering what we should say if customers complain about longer wait times?)” explains Levit.

The solution: Try to ensure they air their grievances in public so you can deal with rather than allow them to curdle the office environment with barbed comments and whispered insinuations. How can you accomplish this? “During a group session, ask each person to write their top concern about the change on an index card and ask everyone to pass them to the front of the room for review and discussion.”

“This is the person who feels that their situation is different. For some reason, they’re special and shouldn’t change along with everyone else,” Levit writes.

The solution: The fix here is straightforward. Simply stress that that the change will benefit everyone but that this positive impact requires 100 percent compliance.

This type is the victim of analysis paralysis, Levit says: “They don’t want to make a change until they’ve analyzed every possible scenario and option.”

The solution: Puncture their perfectionism by explicitly saying that “the goal is ‘directionally correct’ but not ‘perfect.’” Then get moving by setting out a limited time to study the issue. Once that time has elapsed signal that you meant what you said by taking decision action.

What are the other types of common change resisters and how can you get them on board with new ways of doing things? Check out Levit’s complete post for more details.

Do you find you have team members who are hostile to change? How do you handle their objections?

A lot has changed since the mid-1990s when Google and email were barely in use. Here, the service rating site founder explains what sets her small business apart.

Well, that was quick. After a week of hopscotching across the country--and an itinerary that SBA employees have assured me did not include open bars or lavish hor d'oeuvres--National Small Business Week is wrapping up in Washington.

The keynote speaker at the main event is Angie Hicks, cofounder of Angie's List. So I got on the phone with her and tried to get her to spill her secrets ahead of time.

I wanted to know two things. First, how can entrepreneurs apply the lessons learned from her experience in starting Angie's List to their own business? And, second, how can small businesses succeed on her site? Here's what she had to say.

It pays to start early.

Hicks was a student at DePaul University in the mid-1990s, when she was up for an internship at a venture capital firm. At the time, the highlight on her resume was "employee of the month" honors at Ryan's Family Steakhouse in Fort Wayne, Ind. and she could barely define venture capital.

Hicks was convinced she'd bombed her interview with partner Bill Oesterle, but he brought her onboard anyway. The internship led to a job after graduation and when Oesterle decided to launch a locally based community reputation and marketing business in Columbus, Ohio, Hicks was the first to get hired.

That was 18 years ago. The company made the Inc 500 in 2002 and went public in 2011.

Get away from your desk and talk to customers.

Networks that depend on user-generated content--like the reviews that people post on Angie's List--face a chicken-and-egg problem. Who will come to the network without content? And who will create the content if there is no audience.

For Hicks, the solution was literally "going door to door, signing up consumers and asking for reviews on every service company they hired. It wasn't rare that I would get a phone call and somebody would ask me for [a referral in a category] we didn't have reviews on yet. The answer was, 'Let me go find you someone.'"

If you're not a visionary, find one.

Hicks doesn't see herself as an entrepreneur. "I put entrepreneurs as the creative people who come up with the fantastic idea," she said. "It's entrepreneur versus executor. Sometimes they're the same person. Sometimes they're multiple people." She puts herself squarely in the second category.

"I'm going to be the one to make the donuts," she said, which meant she needed to partner with a visionary cofounder. "I don't consider myself a big risk-taker. I was presented an opportunity by someone I had a lot of respect for, and I took it."

Pick a good name.

If she credits Oesterle with being the "idea person," how did the company wind up being named after her?

"Our business started out of an idea that we copied from another company, that did this in Indianapolis," Hicks said. At first their venture was called "Columbus Neighbors." But that wouldn't work beyond Ohio.

"We had three different ideas. Either, 'The List,' which was sort of militant, and 'we've got your back,' 'Jackie's List,' who was the mother of a board member who knew everyone in Columbus," or finally, "Angie's List."

Hicks had personally met most of the members, so they went with her name.

Communicate, always.

"Small businesses are what makes up Angie's List, and that makes [speaking at National Small Business Week] a real honor," Hicks said. "My message has been, 'Get back to basics. It's a great time to be really focused on high quality service and doing exactly what you say you're going to do.'"

The biggest category of complaints about businesses on Angie's List, Hicks said, has to do with otherwise diligent service providers who don't communicate well with their customers. That leads to crossed signals, which in turn leads to negative reviews.

"I encourage companies to go out of their way on the communication," she said. "It pays off. Whether it's a single guy in a truck all the way to 30 trucks on road, their emoplyess are all carrying forward same culture of customer service."

Evolve--or die trying.

A lot has changed since the mid-1990s, before there was Yelp, TripAdvisor, or Google local reviews. So what sets Angie's List apart?

First, Hicks said they don't allow anonymous reviews. Second, they focus on what they call "high cost of failure transactions." In other words, a bad restaurant leads to a bad dinner. But a bad roofer leads to a leaky roof--and an even bigger repair bill.

Of course, it's not just the competition that has changed in 18 years. The types of businesses that Angie's List members rate have expanded as well to include car repair and lawn maintenance and most recently the addition of health care provider reviews.

The biggest surprise growth industry on the site?

"The evolution of the pooper scooper business," meaning dog walkers and the like. Back when Angie's List started, "It did not exist."

It started with a simple idea: a portable loo for dogs. But building it into a $10 million company nearly sunk founder Tobi Skovron.

Tobi Skovron has lived what many would see as the entrepreneurial dream. He came up with an idea, started it with a $20,000 loan, and over 10 years built a multi-million dollar business that he sold. But it was a slog: He survived a distributor who undermined him, not to mention a sudden 40 percent drop in his expansion capital (he financed his family's life on credit cards and one home equity check after another).

Skovron comes from a family of entrepreneurs in Australia. He remembers his father, a "ragingly successful guy," teaching him two things: 1) "If you want something done right, do it yourself" and 2) "Don't wonder why or how, go in there and make it happen."

It Starts With an Idea

In 2003, he and his then-girlfriend (now his wife) Simone lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Melbourne. He bought her a dog and they immediately faced the problem of having to walk the dog regularly, as potty-training seemed unrealistic. "There needed to be a better way to live with a dog although we could only afford an apartment," Skovron thought. Simone said, "If we could only get a patch of grass on the balcony."

Bingo! Skovron invented the Pet Loo. Two years of R&D as well as patent and trademark filings and it was time. He had taken nothing out of the business and took odd jobs to help keep things together. Simone, a social worker, covered their expenses. "We went, 'Wow, we'd better do something here or die wondering.'"

He went onto an Australian show called The New Inventors. Similar to Shark Tank, a panel voted on the best idea and then the public got to weigh in. A week later, and the Pet Loo was the cat's meow, so to speak. In a 24-hour period, he sold 500 units. That turned into a AUS$1.2 million a year business. Skovron had a real salary. But what he really wanted was to build a global brand.

"In Australia we have 7 million cats and dogs combined," he says. "In the U.S., you have 200 million. I wanted to be in the biggest market and the best market."

Getting Some Big Attention

Things continued to look up. In 2008, at a European pet show, he met the CEO of PetSafe, a major manufacturer of pet-related products. Skovron flew to the company's headquarters in Tennessee. The CEO told him, "We believe you, but go prove it. Grow big enough and we'll buy you." Big enough, as in $10 million a year in sales.

He and his now-wife moved with their two dogs to Los Angeles to expand the company. The day he did, the global financial crisis caused the Aussie dollar, and the $300,000 in start-up capital he had saved, to drop by 42 percent in value. "We're entering the biggest consumer market in the world and I have $160,000 odd dollars to throw at it," he says. "It's not good enough."

Then the other shoe dropped. He already had an American distributor that was sending back roughly $300,000 a year in sales to the Australian company and was supposed to be working with retailers. Only, the man hadn't. All the sales were done direct from that company's website. Skovron's business plan had been to work with the largest pet stores in the country.

Back to Struggling

The two parted ways, so Skovron was on his own. He used credit cards, a home equity line on his house in Australia that soared to $500,000 by the end of a year, and the occasional night of eating cereal for dinner, to fund the company. Sales grew, but the business was tough.

"I was 31 years old," he says. "This could not go on. It would consume me, so I needed to find another route." The choices were taking on debt, something he was brought up to avoid, bringing in private equity investment and all that can entail, or getting acquired. His company's revenue had hit the $10 million mark. He called PetSafe's CEO.

They met and it sounded as though he'd get an offer. But, at the last minute, he got a call: "For reasons I cannot disclose today, we're not going to make an offer." It hit him hard, but he didn't give up. More time, a new line of "fresh air cat litter," and he went back yet again.

Ship Comes In

It turned out that the previous time, Skovron had shot himself in the foot by insisting that all of his staff, 12 at that point, would be brought into the company as part of the acquisition. But two of the employees were not a fit. By chance, they had left for their own reasons since and the deal, a big one, went through in 60 days.

Now Skovron works for PetSafe. "I put my family in a position where we don't have to worry like we used to worry, whether it's food on the table, keeping the lights on, or a two-day vacation," he says. Plus, he gets to keep growing the product lines he was responsible for.

Sometimes the most effective marketing is the kind you do right outside your front door.

National advertising campaigns might sound amazing in theory, but an entrepreneur's secret marketing weapon could be waiting right outside the front door. We asked eight successful founders from the Young Entrepreneur Council to name some creative ways businesses can use hyperlocal press to their advantage. Here are their best answers.

1. Offer Hyperlocal Examples

One of the key things about getting hyperlocal press is that it requires hyperlocal news. Don't just offer the same national stories you'd pitch elsewhere; instead, offer the press an event or customer who lives in that area, an employee who went to college there or a case study that took place in the neighborhood. Be relevant by being local in your pitch. --Eric Koester, Zaarly

2. Take Advantage of Your Roots

When we launched Tunebash, I wrote to a couple of local press outlets about my story. I told them that I was born in Key West, my father was a treasure hunter and I was raised in Miami. I told them about the lack of tech companies in South Florida. When you relate to the local news, they will take your story and make it big in that local market. Even if it's scalable, it's a good test environment. --Joseph Ricard, Tunebash

3. Promote Local Stories to Up Your Social Shares

In 2013, press coverage is a numbers game. The ability to socially share your coverage means local press has a much greater reach and, as a result, much greater value. This is a great thing because local press is often more likely to cover you. That coverage builds momentum and eventually starts to extend regionally and nationally. --Jeremy Hitchcock, Dyn

4. Make Local Reporters the Stars

A great way to maximize hyperlocal press is to share the best reviews online. Blasting coverage from a local paper to your email list and socials is an easy way to spread the word beyond the local market and show the reporter that you value his or her feature story. Including those local press clips on your site, along with the big guys, is a fantastic way to give props and garner future coverage. --Brittany Hodak, 'ZinePak

5. Get the Press Involved

Get the press involved in a niche event, and make them the heroes. For instance, if your company is in the food and restaurant industry, try hosting an event featuring hyperlocal press or bloggers as local "celebrity judges" or perhaps hosts for the foodie event. Not only are they more likely to show up, but they'll probably promote it as well! Appeal to others' self-interest, never your own. --Andy Karuza, brandbuddee

6. Become the Local Expert

Local media is always looking for local experts to comment on news stories, national events and pop culture happenings. If you have expertise in finance, legal, fashion, beauty, technology, lifestyle or any other area that would appeal to the masses, reach out to your local news station, magazine, newspaper or radio show and offer up your unique viewpoint.
--Melissa Cassera, Cassera Communications

7. Make Your Company Relevant by Giving Back

The best way to attract coverage for your business from local press is to give back to the community that you serve. Whether you're hosting a philanthropic event, partnering with a local organization or creating an ongoing charity initiative, bringing value to your community will be a great way to attract reporters and cover your story. --Zach Cutler, Cutler Group

8. Pitch Angles You Want and Control the Message

Reporters want good angles. Period. If a local outlet pitches a story that doesn't fit, change it. An Austin reporter wanted to link March Madness and decreased work productivity. Yodle offered the reporter a chance to see how we use March Madness to increase productivity and team morale. The story went national. Don't be afraid to control the message while building reporter relationships. --Ben Rubenstein, Yodle

You can't innovate from the center of the firm. You have to start at the outer edge and work your way in.

There's a reason people use terms like "cutting edge" and "leading edge" when describing innovations. If it's not edgy, how innovative can it be?

Yet organizations often err by trying to innovate not at the edges of the company, but at the center. The reason? The center is where decision makers reside. If you think of organizations as bell curves, the center--the inner 80 percent--is something like a stable middle ground, writes Jeff DeGraff, professor at the University of Michigan, on the Management Innovation eXchange site. The two extremes of the bell curve graph--the outer 20 percent of the organization--are the risky edges of crisis and exceptional opportunity. "The farther away you are from the center of the company, both physically and emotionally, the more likely you are to seek alternative ways of doing things."

That's why DeGraff argues for the creation of a "20/80 rule" to innovation: "It's easier to change 20 percent of your organization 80 percent than it is to change 80 percent of your firm 20 percent," he notes. "Work your innovations from the outside in."

Innovating from the center--instead of at the edges--is one of DeGraff's "Seven Deadly Sins of Innovation Leaders." From all seven sins, one theme emerges: Stop researching, and start doing. "A sure sign of a company that is stuck in the planning phase of innovation is the incessant collection of data," he writes. "Planning is important, but learning from real experiences is more so."

Related articles

The Long Road to Takeoff
You Cannot Solve What You Don't Understand
Don't Confuse Novelty With Innovation

Another mobile payment start-up enters the ring. The founder explains how his company is different.

Co-founded by billionaire Jack Dorsey, Square was the first to give people a free mini card reader to plug into a mobile device and accept credit and debit cards on the go. Square's charm is in its simplicity--there are no hidden fees and you only pay a flat rate of 2.75 percent per swipe or $275 a month and nothing per swipe.

Some big guns have tried to get in on this action. With similar flat-rate models, you can also use your phone or tablet to accept payments with a slew of copycats, such as PayPal Here, Intuit GoPayment, and PayAnywhere.

But now another company wants to be your digital cash register: Punchey, a Boston-based start-up that just came out of beta targets small businesses that typically charge customers higher dollar amounts. Since August Punchey has processed more than 50,000 payments totaling $25 million for 500 companies.

How It's Different

According to founder and CEO Nathaniel Stevens, Punchey isn't trying to mimic Square's pricing and is instead using a "pass-through" model in which it charges merchants the actual interchange fees set by Visa and Mastercard plus .75 percent and $0.10 per swipe.

The company says a typical $100 debit transaction would cost $1.24 with Punchey and $2.75 with Square; a $100 Visa credit card swipe would cost $2.41 with Punchey and $2.75 with Square. Punchey is able to undercut Square on debit transactions because of the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd Frank Act that went into effect in late 2011 which capped how much banks could charge for them.

So even though Square is paying a smaller amount of interchange fees to process debit cards, its flat rate doesn't differentiate between debit and credit, whereas Punchey's model reflects the lower interchange fees for debit transactions.

Even so, Stevens admits Square is a good option for companies that have a high volume of small-dollar transactions and says Punchey is better for businesses that typically charge higher dollar amounts.

He says that while the government capped the percentage fee that banks could charge, it increased the fixed amount they could charge--as much as $0.23 cents per transaction. So if you're selling a $1 item a $0.23 fee is obviously too much and in such a case Square is actually eating some of the cost of the transaction by only charging 2.75 percent.

"As the dollar amount goes up that fixed fee becomes inconsequential," Stevens says, pointing out that the breakeven point where companies can save money with Punchey is an $18 debit card transaction and a $67 credit card transaction. Essentially, coffee shops are going to want to stick with Square but auto mechanics, plumbers, and lawyers could save on transaction fees with Punchey.

The Hardware

Another thing that's different from Square is the cost of hardware. Punchey says it's giving away the first 1,000 mobile device card readers ordered after its launch out of beta June 18; after that, they're $19.95. Hardware for PCs or Macs--currently a signature reader and swiper--costs $199 in total. Stevens says a combination reader/swiper is coming later this year.

While a lack of a free card reader after a certain point might be considered friction by some, Punchey is banking on other features to make up for it.

For one thing, it aims to help brands with reputation management. For example, at the end of every transaction you can email or text a receipt to a customer as well as a review request that asks a customer how well you met his or her needs. The goal is to get customers to praise or complain to you first, as opposed to grandstanding on Yelp or your Google Local page. Depending on the kind of feedback a customer provides you could either post it on your company's Facebook page or website or respond directly to an unhappy customer.

"What we found is that merchants are always looking for feedback on things that are going really well in their business and things that maybe aren't going so well," Stevens says. "What we do is allow merchants to take control of the conversation."

Is It Enough?

The question is whether Punchey can make serious inroads in the Square-dominated mobile payments space. Square says that it has more than three million individuals and businesses on board and processes $15 billion in transactions a year, not including the credit and debit transactions it handles for 7,000 Starbucks locations.

If his track record is any indication, Stevens certainly has the chops to attempt such an ambitious goal.

He co-founded and still remains a shareholder in Yodle, an eight-year-old New-York based online marketing platform for small businesses that has 30,000 customers, 1,000 employees, and revenue of $132 million a year. Yodle is on track to become the biggest company to ever land on Inc.'s 30 Under 30 list.

You can give back long before you're big and successful. Here's how.

In the summer of 2007, Susie Hadas found herself in the middle of hot flash. She was using a rather uncomfortable product to try to cool down, and, like the other products she’d tried, it wasn’t working. Frustrated, she said aloud to herself, “How is it possible that I am the only woman in the world who wants to be personally cool?”

That, my friends, is the start of a business. In 2009, Hadas quit her day job and incorporated Personally Cool.

I met Hadas at the 2012 Astia CEO Summit. Personally Cool is an Astia client; I am on the Astia board of trustees. Hadas, her co-founder Hugh Brownstone, and I shared a car to the airport after the summit. During that car ride, Hadas talked enthusiastically about how philanthropy would be as much a part of her company as making a profit.

I caught up with Hadas to find out how she is leading her business to make a difference while still hitting her growth targets. Here are her tips:

Be consistent with your brand

“Doing good” is at the core of Personally Cool. Hadas believes that a start-up must create an identity and consistently demonstrate it. “Making people feel good” is how Hadas describes the business she is in. “Your company is not just a product. It’s not just a business. For a customer, your company is a complete experience,” says Hadas.

If your goal for your business is to make a positive impact, then every part of your business must deliver on that promise in every way. It’s great to donate to charities. But if your customer service stinks or your supplier relations are not up to par, your brand will suffer. Do good with everyone.

Act slowly and smartly

Personally Cool donates its long-lasting reusable cooling packs to charities around the world that help people with medical conditions that result in heat intolerance.

Hadas and her team also had an opportunity to give their product to an audience who didn’t have a clear need for it. She chose to participate because it meant potentially strong coverage to a broader audience. For a company that has “doing good” at its core, donating a lot of product to an audience who would probably not appreciate the intended benefit was not a good choice. Hadas readily admits that she and her team said yes to that opportunity when they should have said no. Take your time and consider only those philanthropic opportunities that align with the good your brand promises.

Rethink your investment dollars

“Giving doesn’t cut into the bottom line any more than other line item,” says Hadas. Many companies spend significant advertising dollars with no real insight into their return. Hadas sees the donation of her products as a guaranteed return. “I could spend $30,000 on a full-page advertisement in a monthly magazine and have no idea if someone will flip by it or read it. And if they read it, would they act upon it?” she asks.

The right charitable donation, however, will always deliver a return. With each donation, Hadas gets market research that extends the reach of her brand, builds influential relationships, and yes, makes a difference. Challenge yourself to invest some of your budget to make a difference in your target market in new and different ways.

Find backers who share your passion

The investors who have backed Personally Cool to date know exactly what the company stands for and how their money will be spent. Hadas thought long and hard about how a company can operationalize a philanthropic arm while making money. Hadas’s pitch and her business plan leave no question that Personally Cool can make a difference while turning a profit. Ensure your business shows alignment between your corporate brand, your company’s targeted philanthropic efforts, and what you will yield in return.

Many founders wait to execute on charitable contributions until they hit certain financial milestones. Personally Cool proves that you do not have to wait. Are you building in a culture of doing business while doing good right from the start?