Eight failed startups in three years.

Close to 100 ambitious employees who had their dreams crushed.

My situation is not unique — nine out of ten startups fail. It’s a cold reality. As a result, I quickly learned everything not to do and slowly learned everything I should be doing. The process was painful, but the progress was there.

I had suffered financially — no new clothes for years, a junk car, and a laptop that barely worked. I was at the point of sleeping in my car and interviewing across California.

Related: These Wildly Successful Entrepreneurs Once Were Homeless

Finally, I landed a job in San Diego at a Facebook marketing startup, 22Social, with huge potential. Several months in, I knew this company was not like the rest. We were going to make it big. In a short period, we doubled our revenue and began hiring more employees.

Looking back on how I made it, here are the eight lessons I learned from my failures that catapulted my success:

1. Put yourself in a position to create value.

It’s simple: Keeping your job depends on how much value you add to the company. When put in a position where you’ll create less value, you should disregard what you’re told to do and focus on something better. Once you stop listening to people who give you orders that undercut your output, you’ll become more successful and make them happier.

2. Speak your mind.

The biggest regret you’ll have is not speaking your mind when it matters. You may be hesitant to take a strong stance because you risk rejection. But the actual risk in a world with constant innovation is not taking chances. And you never know if bouncing your small nugget of wisdom on others may turn into a gold mine.

3. Do things that are unlikely to work out.

Multifaceted entrepreneur Elon Musk once said, “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”

The chances are that your startup will fail. Since the odds are already against you, then you might as well take on projects with huge upside and a devastating downside. Even if you devote months to a project, and it fails, the next time you want to commit to a similar project, you’ll know what strategies to avoid.

4. Company culture is everything.

Startups live and die based on their quality of team communication. There’s a huge difference in production between people who wake up excited to put 100 percent into their work and those who dread seeing their coworkers.

Related: 3 Ways to Create the Company Culture You Want

5. It’s not how much you read, it’s what you read.

I’ve read hundreds of books to give myself the knowledge that helped perpetuate my success. It’s not all gravy. What I realized is that many five-star Amazon books aren’t worth the read because it’s now effortless to self publish and regurgitate information. Remember, read books that are relevant to what you’re achieving, those are the ones that will provide the most benefit.

6. Avoiding distraction is your most valuable skill.

Distractions are everywhere from Facebook to Instagram. Moreover, they’re in the work you’re doing that you mistakenly think must be done by you. If you can outsource your work for a good price and get the same results, then you need to do something better.

7. Success doesn’t happen overnight.

Almost always, you will have to take many more steps than you originally thought to achieve success, but the good news is that you can decide whether to walk or run.

Most people believe they deserve to be at the finish line. But until you put in the work required to conquer your dreams, you won’t realize what it takes to go through the journey of ups and downs.

8. Failure is only good if it changes you.

Risk failure only if you’re willing to change what you did wrong the next time around. Many who fail can’t pinpoint their mistakes. And repeatedly doing something that’s not working is the definition of insanity. So figure out a new strategy before moving forward.

I encourage you to take these eight lessons and add to the list along your startup journey. Good luck!

Related: 6 Stories of Super Successes Who Overcame Failure

The startup culture is full of people who want to, and try to, but just can’t get their business off the ground. Why is this the case? Much of the reason has to do with the fact that many entrepreneurs don’t know how to take their business from point A to B. Point A is that brilliant idea in the mind of the entrepreneur. B is that subsequent, hoped-for state where the business is secure, established and making money.

Related: 10 Entrepreneurial Land Mines to Avoid 

“In between” is tough.

In terms of strategies, one of the best ways to build your business is to take that idea in your head to market as soon as possible. Because delays kill. Speed saves. Here are ten tips on how you can launch your startup faster.

1. Just start.

In my experience, it’s more important to start than to start right. Think about it. If you don’t start your business, nothing will happen. Whatever it is that’s keeping you from launching is the very thing you either need to ignore or tackle head-on. So . . .

• Write the first line of code.
• Register the domain.
• Sketch the product.
• Design the prototype.

There is nothing standing in the way of your starting your business except yourself. Do the first thing that needs to be done.

2. Sell anything.

There are some entrepreneurs who know exactly what they want to sell. There are other entrepreneurs who have no idea what they’re going to sell. They just want to sell something. Here’s my advice: Sell anything.

Many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs aren’t selling anything new. They are selling it different or better:

• Sam Walton (Wal-Mart) sold the same thing that you could find at any five-and-dime or corner convenience store.
• Ted Turner simply sold television broadcasting and advertising.
• Howard Schultz sold coffee.
• Warren Buffett bought and sold other people’s stock.

Entrepreneurs aren’t always innovators. You can take someone else’s product and sell it. Richard Branson, after all, launched Virgin Airlines in desperation. He was headed to the Virgin Islands for an, um, romantic interlude. But his flight was cancelled. So, he chartered a private flight, despite his lack of money to pay for it. Here’s how he described what happened next:

I picked up a small blackboard, wrote “Virgin Airlines. $29” on it and went over to the group of people who had been on the flight that was cancelled. I sold tickets for the rest of the seats on the plane, used their money to pay for the chartered plane and we all went to the Virgin Islands that night.

Got the message? Go ahead and sell something. Anything.

Related: 8 Musts to Start Your Business With Little to No Capital

3. Ask someone for advice, then ask him/her to do it.

When you start a business, you will most definitely not have all the answers. For example, you’ll need to get incorporated, but how? S-Corp, C-Corp or LLC?

To get these answers, ask a competent attorney. The attorney will provide advice — say it’s to start an S-Corp. But, then what? Ask the attorney to do it for you. Instantly, you will have gained an expert who is implementing his/her own advice for your money. Payment? You can reward the attorney with stocks or deferred payment.

When an issue arises, and you don’t have the answer, find someone who does. Then, when this expert gives you advice — whether business best practice, manufacturing locations, logo design, accounting, whatever — ask that person to do it.

Your business needs more help, knowledge and professional skills than you have time for. Get people to work for you.

4. Hire remote workers.

If you want to find the best and most affordable talent, you may not find it next door. Be willing to hire remote workers to get great work done.

5. Hire contract workers.

Becoming an employer carries with it a lot of baggage. It may, in fact, form such a barrier that it slows down the process of your startup. Besides, few people will be willing to take the plunge to become the employee of a tenuous startup.

Instead of hiring employees, hire on a contract basis. The point is, you need to find a way to get the talent to provide their services. Don’t let the specific arrangement get in the way of getting stuff done.

6. Find a cofounder.

I couldn’t have founded my businesses without my cofounder Hiten Shah. For me, starting a business took more than just hard work and passion. It took the inspiration and skills of a cofounder. VCs are more likely to invest in a startup that has a founding team, not a founding individual. Even having three cofounders isn’t too many, assuming you have a clear decision-making hierarchy.

Cofounders can provide the skills you lack, and take you further than you ever expected you’d go.

7. Work with someone who pushes you to the extreme.

One of the reasons why Steve Jobs was able to grow Apple into one of the world’s most innovative and valuable brands was because he pushed people. Here’s how he described his management approach.

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

Sure, Jobs could be aggressive and unkind, but he could also draw out from people better than they thought their best could ever be. You can find the same qualities in a cofounder, a partner, a friend, a mentor or an employee. More importantly, you can provide the same level of expectation for your own team members. As Jobs said, “By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.”

8. Don’t focus on money.

Creative Bloq has this gem of advice regarding startups: “Don’t necessarily worry about where an income will come from. A good product/service will always find a way to make money.”

This is true. A myopic focus on money can pull your business off track. Whether it’s funding, capital, business loans or the perfect pricing model, back off and let things evolve. Growth doesn’t equal funding. Growth means hacking, straining, selling and doing things other than asking for money.

9. Spend time and money on marketing.

Marketing is one of the best things that you can do for your business. When you market your product or service, you are getting it in front of the people who will actually buy it. Marketing is not a waste of time. It’s one of the best early investments that you can make in your business.

10. Talk to your potential customers.

A startup does not exist in the entrepreneur’s mind alone. A startup exists in the landscape of customers and potential customers.

If there will be people buying or using your product, you need to learn all you can about these people, from these people and for these people. Your business will live or die based on their receptivity to the product or service.

The sooner you learn about your customers, the faster you’ll be able to pivot and serve them better.

Conclusion

Starting fast doesn’t mean that you should force scaling. Scaling is something that happens carefully, in a measured cadence.

Starting fast means that you leverage all possible resources to focus on one thing — getting started. Getting started is the main thing. Once your business is up and running, anything else is possible.

A startup is a race. The faster you are, the more likely you are to win big.

What are your tips for launching your startup faster?

Related: 7 Essential Tools Every Startup Can Afford

If you knew that the birth of your company would also be the death of your marriage, would you still start your business?

Most entrepreneurs have not considered this question as they begin the long road of building their businesses. As a result, their marriages often take a massive hit. There is a reason for this.

There is an abundance of information available on how to start a business. As a result you feel prepared for the amount of time that is going to be required, to face the rejection and to push through when you feel like your back is up against the wall.

However, there is very little information that prepares you for the toll it will take on your loved ones. My goal in this column is to share my experience launching a business, to get vulnerable and share the toll it has taken on my marriage. You can listen to my wife’s take on how this has affected our marriage below.

^{Subscribe to The Mentee podcast on iTunes and Stitcher Radio.}

Related: Becoming an Entrepreneur Takes Courage, But Marrying One Is Even Braver

Here are five ways you can make sure starting your business doesn’t end your marriage:

1. Share your vision.

Sit down with your spouse and share your vision with him or her. Help him or her understand why you feel compelled to start this company and what the future will look like when you are successful. Your goal here is to make sure your spouse is tied to your vision. This will be vital when you are less available and there is added stress on the relationship.

2. Set realistic expectations.

This is where you cannot hold back. You have to help them understand what the road ahead looks like.

Will you have to cut back on your spending to underwrite this venture? Will your weekends suddenly be filled with more work and less play? Will they be going to sleep and waking up alone since you will be burning the candle at both ends trying to get the company off the ground?

Paint a picture of what lies ahead and make sure they are prepared and agree with you moving forward.

3. Set a weekly meeting.

If you were to look at your calendar right now, I bet you would find a number of appointments scheduled with customers. While meeting with these people are important, most people do not have scheduled appointments with the most important person in their lives: their spouses.

As I scaled my podcast, The Mentee, into a business, my days were long and I did not block any time for my family. This was catastrophic to my relationship with my wife. I then had a conversation with John Assaraf, who helped me change the way I looked at my relationship with my wife.

Related: 4 Tips for Workaholic Entrepreneurs to Avoid a Crumbling Marriage

I sought out his mentorship because he has a thriving business and a thriving marriage and I wanted to know what his secrets were. He told me that he and Maria have a standing 90-minute meeting every Saturday to discuss their relationship, where they get everything out on the table: finances, business, sex, God, children, ex-wives — nothing gets left unsaid.

Amy and I started to implement these and have found that truly investing in your relationship each week has a tremendous effect on your ability to be the best partner possible.

When you speak with your spouse, pull out your calendars and schedule a meeting for this week. Then, post in the comments below the power this had on your relationship so you can inspire others to do the same.

4. Remember, you’re in the same boat.

While a weekly meeting will work wonders for your relationship, there will still be times when you your spouse is frustrated at your lack of presence and a fight ensues.

In that moment, recognize that you’re in the same boat and need to be paddling in the same direction. Instead of saying “Screw you! Do you know how hard I’m working?” take a step back and recognize he or she is asking you to jump. Your response needs to be “How high?”

The faster you adopt a mindset that there is enough time in a day and “how can I go above and beyond to support you,” you will find an abundance of support flowing back to you. Try this. It really does work!

5. Celebrate small wins together.

When you accomplish small milestones along the way, make sure you celebrate and give credit where credit is due. You would not be able to launch your business and maintain your sanity if your other half was not supporting you. This is their win just as much as it is yours. Make sure they feel that way!

At the end of the day, remember why you are going down this road. If you are like many of the entrepreneurs, it is because you want to provide a better life for your family and make a difference. If you implement what you’ve read here today, it could truly help your marriage. If that’s the case, this time could be one of the best investments you ever make.

Related: 4 Essentials for Being in Business Happily Ever After With Your Spouse

In early August I launched my first product, an all-natural, plant-based,probiotic protein powder. But it wasn’t easy.

Related: 7 Myths About Starting a Business That I Used to Believe

In the 18 months leading up to the launch, I experienced every trial, tribulation and startup cliché/buzzword imaginable (think: “pivoting,” “minimum viable product,” “growth hacking,” etc.).

Here are four of the most important lessons I learned, and how you can use them to turn your idea into a business.

1. Get lots of feedback (from the right people).

How do you know your idea is something people actually want? I found it was equal parts intuition and objective validation. First, your idea should obviously address an unmet need in the market — what can your proposed product do for the end user that others can’t? If you can’t answer this question, start over.

Once you land on an idea you think might work, run it by other people. Go beyond friends and family — “I love it!” is not constructive, objective feedback. I talked to the most successful entrepreneurs I knew, cold-called and emailed entrepreneurs in my industry, asked for candid feedback on start-up blogs and forums, conducted surveys on my website and got as much input as possible from a handful of mentors and advisers.

My first idea got picked apart. So did my second. I had to start over, and it was tough. But gaining feedback was also a critical part of the product development process that saved me thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of time pursuing an idea that was likely destined to fail.

2. Do the work.

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Begin it now.”

— Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

The next phase is to turn your idea into a product. Rule No. 1: Make your idea so great people can’t ignore it. The key here is to stop thinking and start doing as much as you can, yourself (getting help where you need it, of course). I spent six months coming up with different ingredient-combinations and testing them with healthy people I knew. I built my own website.

Related: 9 Steps That Will Help Your Chances of Starting a Successful Business

Rule No. 2 is to do hands-on work to learn about your product. In my own case, I hand-packaged the first 500 bags of my protein powder, which gave me a huge amount of information about this part of the process I’d had no knowledge of before. Here’s another simple strategy I used to get a good amount of work done: I bought a planner and wrote down the top three-to-five things I wanted to accomplish each day. Forget about everything else; cross off each item as you complete it. Do this every day, and in 12 to 18 months, you will have a product ready to launch.

3. Deliver immense value for your first 100 customers.

If you spend the necessary time and effort on numbers 1 and 2, you will have a product to launch. Regardless of your launch strategies and tactics, make a concerted effort to surprise and delight your first 100 customers. This is where you should spend most of your time during the first few weeks.

I wrote a thank-you card and personal email to my first 100 customers, sent them bonus recipes with their shipments and added them to my VIP email list, to whose members I deliver my best content. I asked for feedback, answered their questions in a timely manner and made it my number one priority to make sure my product was making their lives better. I knew that if I could do this for 100 customers, I would have proof that my business was sustainable.

4. Find a healthy balance.

I was juggling the arrival of my first child, working full-time at my “real job” and working on my business. But I still made time to exercise three-to-four days a week, eat healthy and spend time with friends and family on Friday or Saturday nights.

Healthy entrepreneurs are more likely to be successful entrepreneurs. I truly believe that. So, I made it a habit each day to do something physical (exercise/eat healthy), mental (read/write/learn), emotional (spend time with family/friends) and spiritual (reflect/pray/give thanks). I tracked these four things every day in my planner, and they made all the difference (thanks toJames Altucher for the inspiration).

If you too follow these four ideas, your odds of turning your product idea into an actual business will increase exponentially. There will be roadblocks aplenty along the way. But you will be well equipped to handle them.

And launching your product will be one of the most fun, challenging, exhilarating times of your life.

Don’t forget to enjoy the ride.

Related: Starting A Business? You Need These 3 Basics.

In the summer of 2013, shortly after landing a plush gig at YouTube in the company’s marketing division, 23-year-old Stanford grad Raymond Braun teetered into his boss’s office near tears and with a lump in his throat.

Braun had arranged a meeting with YouTube CMO Danielle Tiedt to pitch a marketing initiative that would break wholly new ground for the platform — and that was also wrought with personal resonance.

He had hatched the proposal during his “20 Percent Time,” a Google perk that allows employees to devote one-fifth of their work efforts to any passion project with a business tie-in. The catalyzing policy, outlined by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in Google’s 2004 IPO letter, has resulted in such blockbuster products as Gmail, AdSense and Google News.

On his off-time, Braun had noticed that a disproportionately influential faction of LGBT creators was proliferating across YouTube. Bold-faced names like Tyler Oakley, Hannah Hart and Davey Wavey were amassing millions of viewers, and serving as digital lifelines for kids in ostracizing households the world over.

“I’ve heard from teens who say, ‘At night, before bed, I go under the covers, I put my headphones in, I open the YouTube app and that’s my connection to this world,’” recounts Braun, who is now 25. Having grown up gay in a small, conservative town in rural Ohio, this was a sentiment that hit close to home.

Related: An Unlikely Icon: With ‘Drag Race,’ RuPaul Rounds Another Victory Lap

And so, standing before Tiedt that day, Braun made an impassioned pitch for #ProudToLove — his concept for YouTube’s first LGBT-themed consumer marketing campaign. The idea was to be the first brand in the world to respond to the Supreme Court’s DOMA decision. YouTube’s logo would be reimagined as a rainbow for the day, which would also link to a page of LGBT-centric content, including this touching compilation:

After tearfully sharing his personal stake in the venture, Braun says he’ll never forget Tiedt’s response. “She said, ‘This makes complete sense for our business, and I also see this as an investment in you, because I know that you’re going to do everything you can to make this successful.”

He did, and it was. In addition to garnering millions of views, acclaim from human rights activists and landing Braun on Forbes‘ 30 Under 30 list, #ProudToLove has since become an annual fixture for YouTube each June to coincide with LGBT Pride Month.

Braun subsequently added LGBT marketing lead at Google/YouTube to his job title.

“The press and social media impressions of this campaign matched those of sophisticated, high budget marketing campaigns,” Tiedt says. “Raymond shepherded our #ProudToLove campaign with such heart and passion that being more LGBT-mindful became an even larger part of YouTube’s culture.”

Spotlighting the LGBT community was a shrewd move for YouTube because it amplified a conversation that was already humming across the platform. The ‘It Gets Better’ campaign had become a viral phenomenon, for instance, and a spate of popular ‘Coming Out’ videos — and, more recently, transgender creators documenting their transitions online — had begun to reap massive viewership.

But entering this conversation could have the potential to lift most any brand, says Anastasia Khoo, chief marketing officer for the Human Rights Campaign. “The U.S. adult LGBT population has an estimated buying power of $830 billion in 2015,” notes Khoo — adding that 75 percent of non-LGBT adults say they are likely to consider a brand that is known to provide equal workplace benefits.

Given these turning tides, and the momentum he’d generated with #ProudtoLove, Braun’s mission seemed to be crystallizing. And in an age of digital influencers, he was starting to think that perhaps his greatest impact might not be behind the camera but in front of the lens. Therefore, in January, he made an unthinkable leap: departing Google on a volunteer leave of absence to start his very own YouTube channel.

Devoted exclusively to LGBT issues, the channel was established at a pivotal moment in history, Braun says, when Ireland’s same-sex marriage referendum, the U.S. Supreme Court’s marriage decision and Caitlyn Jenner’s transition all loomed on the horizon. It turned out to be prophetic timing. This year, as LGBT rights turned a historic corner, Braun amassed roughly 16,000 subscribers and 1.5 million total views.

His venture represents a nascent concept in the realm of online video, he says — that of a “nonprofit YouTube channel.” None of his videos are monetized, and many are made in collaboration with the HRC, GLAAD, the Trevor Project and other LGBT rights groups.

Related: How YouTube Megastar Connor Franta Is Channeling His Eclectic Passions Into Entrepreneurial Gold

As an online personality, Braun’s giddy charisma is underscored by a palpable empathy. His most popular clips thus far include emotionally-charged vlogs documenting recent legal victories in Ireland and Washington, D.C., though he also has a knack for sassier fare, such as how to strut in high heels:

As the channel continued to grow late last July, Braun arrived at a decisive juncture. What had started out as a “20 Percent” side project had evolved into a higher calling. And this summer, Braun gave Tiedt the bittersweet news that he would be leaving YouTube for good in order to become a full-time YouTuber.

“He will always be part of the YouTube family,” she says.

Today, in addition to his channel, Braun is in the early stages of founding a consultancy that will work with brands looking to engage the LGBT community. As a relatively untapped marketing arena, Braun believes his unique proficiencies in social media as well as the immense scale and budgets that brands have at their disposal will be powerful assets on the path toward equality.

“During Raymond’s interview at Google, he talked about how his goal in life is to use entertainment, media, and technology to create positive social change,” Tiedt recalled. “He’s doing just that.”

Related: Meet the Business Strategists Behind the Careers of Today’s Biggest YouTube Stars