Know your Entrepreneurship II: Invaluable tips and advice from successful internet entrepreneurs

Jeet:  When I started, I was only 17 years old and even worst, I had a baby face. My age was a big struggle I had to deal with in the beginning. I dealt with a lot of negativity and criticism, which almost stopped my journey short. However, I quickly realized I needed to turn my negative into a positive if I wanted to be successful.

Lori:   As a trained architect, I had no idea what I was getting into building a business. After coming up with the idea, I walked around in circles for over a year trying to figure out how to build my business and 2 guys came on board to help me (I couldn't have made a worse choice of a team in my life). They both had the same skill set, are no longer involved in my business and they own nearly 20% equity.

Jeet:   I think many small business owners create products/services without any idea of how their potential customers think about it. Many small businesses operate with the idea that "I think it's a great idea so that means everyone else does too", which wastes a lot of time and money. Survey and test everything. Start small and figure out if your ideas are really great as you think they are. Survey your audience or create a minimum viable product of your idea so that you can test it with the market to get a much better feel before investing a lot of time and money into it.

Lori:  I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve failed building my business over the past few years. I’ve learned to welcome the mistakes and even joke that I’ve learned so much from them that I’m going to keep making more of them on purpose. I’ve taken a crash course in building a business and failing has probably been the greatest lesson of all. The skill that’s come from this is embracing the mistakes, learning how to make them, make them quickly and not make them again. 
 

Jeet:   Launching a business without thinking of a revenue model first. We didn't need to have the right revenue model, but we should have been testing something. It was a tough thing to bounce back from but we did recover by spending the latter months focusing/testing our revenue models.

Lori:   I launched my business in May of 2010, had hired a PR firm a couple of months before launch and got a couple of articles written. After paying them nearly $10K, I realized I had more passion for the subject, had tons of connections to start out and could do what they were doing and decided to go for it. I've been doing my own PR for the past 3 1/2 years.