Give Back to HN: Advice for New Entrepreneurs

TL;DR: Work smart, work hard, examine the competition, know your strengths and weaknesses and know what success and failure look like.

I thought since I've been in the web game now for nearly a decade that I should give back to the community that's given me so much in a useful way, that would benefit those people who are where I was when I started out. So here's some pointers for people new to the business of doing businesses (design, marketing, building, finding clients etc) online.

# Gnothi Seauton (Know Thyself)

This is the single most important piece of advice I can give. As someone who's worked in agencies, worked in-house and run a business, the thing that stands out most is this:

Know what you're good at, and what you're not good at

That's not to say that there's things you can't do; on the contrary, I'm much of the mindset that just about anyone can do just about anything, if they both work smart and work hard. However, that you can do something, doesn't necessarily follow that you must or even should do that thing.

For example, I'm not bad at web design. I'm not bad at code. However, what I excel at is marketing. So if I've got an amount of time to play with for a client, I'd much rather spend that time doing marketing, where I can achieve the best return for them. The design and build, I'll outsource.

# Time, Money & Feature Creep

In any project, whether it's your own hobby project or work for a client or your employer, understand that there's limited time and budget. To better understand this, either convert the timescale into money, or the budget into hours. That way when you have to decide on additional features, outsourcing, or any of the other sundries that crop up in project lifecycles, you'll be able to better decide how to deal with them.

This is especially important in your own projects. Because there's often no set monetary value involved, there's a tendency to never ship, because you constantly want to improve.

Just ship. Get a minimum viable product, then launch and iterate. Having to actually ship something will bring into focus the more important things in what you're doing, and help you better understand and keep your customers. Keeping your attention on their needs, rather on what you think would be a RCF (Really Cool Feature) is vitally important.

# Zag

Watch what other people are doing (zigging), and then do the other thing (zag). Look at markets that all follow a similar theme, and do something else. That's what Apple & Google did with mobile OS's, it's what Google did with search, it's what Airbnb is doing with hotels, Envato did with tutorial blogs and Nintendo did with the Wii (how good that was as a product is a different matter, but you can't argue with 86 million sales).

Look at the marketplace from the 10,000 ft view, and see what's the common themes. Is it old-school 1990's design? Is it centuries old business practice? Is it a mindset? By understanding what the herd is doing, and why, you can distinguish yourself. A USP or UVP can only ever come from knowing what everyone else is, thus letting you show what you aren't.

# Agility & Armour

Mobile warfare is good. So's armour. Sometimes it's a good idea to go in to battle with a small, manoeuvrable product. However, when your opponent is a battleship, it's not such a good plan.

Facebook didn't kill MySpace by trying to kill MySpace, it killed it by going after a small group of passionate users, and being better for them. Then it slowly and steadily expanded it's definition of "them" out, bit by bit, until it encompassed everyone. Apple didn't overtake Microsoft by trying to compete with Windows, they did it by looking at mobile devices and thinking "Hmm, no-ones done anything amazing here... We could do that".

Pick your battles. Go after the single point where the competition is weak. Don't try and take on an established battleship in its entirety. Go after the things you can attack first.

# See the Problem

Sometimes the problem isn't what you...