So you’re thinking about starting a business? Terrific. About 543,000 small businesses are started each month in the United States according to data from DocStoc. However, for those thinking about starting one, it’s often the mental hurdles that prevent you from forging ahead.

Unanswered questions can get in the way of advancement. Am I ready to start a business? Do I have enough savings and time? Or, I have several business ideas — which one should I pursue?

Starting a business is exciting, heady stuff, and it’s not for everyone. Here’s some guidance to help you determine your entrepreneurial talents, whether you’re ready to join the ranks of small business owners and the next steps.

Why Start a Business?

For some, entrepreneurship is inspired by the need for autonomy, like in Jayson DeMers’ case. The founder and CEO of AudienceBloom, a Seattle-based SEO agency, was 24 years old and working a full-time job at an online-marketing agency when he began a side business.

“I questioned everything and felt uncomfortable being bound by someone else’s rules,” he says. “I wanted to be free to make my own decisions, take time off when I chose to (without asking) and not have to report to anyone.”

After gathering freelance clients, DeMers was eventually able to quit his full-time job.

For others, starting a business comes from solving a problem in their own lives, like it did with Sujan Patel, the vice president of marketing at When I Work, an employee software scheduling company. Last year, Patel, 30 years old at the time, created two marketing tools to save himself time and effort in his job. After telling friends, who were also in the marketing field, about his tools, he discovered they were willing to pay him money for access to them.

“That’s when I knew I had something people really wanted,” he says. “It was a bit of an accident.”

He started two new businesses, ContentMarketer.io and Narrow.io, with the benefit of marketing his SaaS products to in an industry where he already had more than 10 years of experience.

Some entrepreneurs go into business for the challenge. Mike Templeman, CEO of Foxtail Marketing, a digital content marketing firm specializing in B2B SaaS, was at a full-time job where he’d been promoted and given a raise — and he found himself restless. He would work on side projects at night. Eventually, those projects brought in enough income to allow him to leave his full-time job and start his own company at the age of 30.

Also, a significant number of baby boomers become business owners, revealfindings from the Kauffman Foundation. Martin Zwilling, founder and CEO ofStartup Professionals, a company that provides products and services to startup founders and small business owners, was 60 years old and halfway to retirement when he started his one-man business development consulting firm.

Zwilling — who’d had a long career as a software executive and tech consultant — says money wasn’t the top priority for starting his business.

“I wanted to make a positive contribution to aspiring and new entrepreneurs.”

There are many reasons for starting your own business. Putting a name to yours can help you identify if entrepreneurship is right for you.

Related: 50 Signs You Need to Start Your Own Business

Are You Ready?

While you may feel a sense of urgency to quit your job and get your business started, don’t quit just yet. How long will you be able to cover your regular expenses as you build your business? Do you have to keep your job as you work your business on the side? It’s time to assess your life situation to help you figure out the best way forward.

Sara Sutton Fell was in her third trimester of pregnancy and had lost her job shortly before she started her business, FlexJobs, an online career site with flexible jobs that include telecommuting and part-time work. Starting a business while pregnant is not something she says she’d recommend, but her business idea resonated so strongly, Sutton Fell felt compelled to do so in spite of complications about the timing.

To assess your readiness, ask yourself if you have the financial and emotional support you need to take care of yourself (and possibly your family) as you build your new business. How much savings should you have before starting?

There is no single correct answer. Some business owners have no savings when they start — not ideal — while some have enough to cover several years of expenses. The bottom line is to not be sacrificing paying your fixed expenses — such as rent/mortgage — to fund your new business. Or figuring out a way to decrease your fixed expenses, like moving in with your parents — also not ideal, but perhaps a temporary money saver — or getting a roommate, to funnel money toward realizing your new business.

Foxtail’s Templeman had a few months of savings in the bank and a secondary cash stream that met his basic monthly expenses before he quit his job. He also had a young child to support and another baby on the way when he started a his business.

“It wasn’t an ideal time,” he admits. “My wife was really wanting something more stable.”

But, he took the risk. Risk is inextricably a part of starting your own business, but the risks should be calculated and fit your lifestyle.

Deborah Mitchell, CEO of Deborah Mitchell Media Associates, a media and brand management company, took her own risks after a 20-plus year career as a television producer at CBS. Mitchell says she believes that her being single with no kids gave her the freedom to take more risks as a new business owner.

“But being single also left me with limited emotional and financial support, all vital things that you need when starting any venture,” she says.

Don’t stop there — ask and answer the following:

• What you are willing to do to start a business? Examine what you will need to do to make your business a reality. Startup Professionals’ Zwilling, who had been a tech consultant for years, bootstrapped it, because he didn’t want to depend on investors to start his own company.
• How will I fund my startup business? Funding depends on what you’re willing to do. Mitchell used her personal savings to start her company and runs her consulting firm as a virtual office with remote workers to save money on rent. When I Work’s Patel freelanced as a consultant to make extra money and used the income to fund his two startups.
• How long can you survive the possible loss in income? Patel had to ask himself if he was willing to lose the time and short-term income by starting two new businesses.
• Are you ready for the responsibilities and stresses of being an entrepreneur? When you open a new business, the buck stops with you. AudienceBloom’s DeMers asked himself if he was prepared for the responsibilities, risks and stresses of entrepreneurship.

Filling out this Personal Goals and Objectives worksheet from Start Your Own Business (Entrepreneur Press) can help you identify your business goals and whether starting a small business is right for you.

Usability is a crucial part of running a successful website. Broken links, bad contrast, text blocks, over-complicated designs, technical clutter . . . these can spell death for both website traffic and sales conversions. The good news, however, is that these issues are enough of a problem that hundreds of tools now exist to assist with the process of properly testing a website.

Related: Stop Being Such a Tight Wad. Invest In a Great Website.

While certain process are worth putting money and effort into (for example, hiring testers to do a thorough check and recheck, and to do proper split testing), some things can be handled for free.

Here are ten useful tools to get you started. At the very least, they can point you in the right direction so you know where to spend your budget.

1. WhatFix

Always be there when your user needs you: WhatFix allows you to create interactive flows explaining any part of your site: You can create multiple flows and use them as the non-intrusive widget. A flow is the step-by-step explanation of what should be done on the current page. WhatFix is free, with the option to upgrade to create self-hosted customized flows.

2. Color Oracle

Is your site optimized for people with color blindness? You might not think it is worth catering to such a small sliver of the population, but there are more people suffering from color perception issues than you think. According to Color Blindness Awareness, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have color awareness problems, which means a fair percentage of your users are going to have trouble seeing colors in your design.

Color Oracle is an overlay filter that you can use on any art or designs to make sure your colors can be perceived by anyone who visits.

3. Paletton

Speaking of colors, you don’t want to consider just color blindness. You also want to make sure your colors mesh as well as you assume they will. Given some of the horrible color choices even official brands choose for their websites, logos and products, color choice is too frequently ignored. Indeed, this important choice is typically reserved for when customers tick off those psychological association boxes companies rely on more than they do common sense.

Having garish or uncomfortable colors will make viewing your site harder for the user. Paletton makes it easy to find the best combinations of colors, tones and shades.

Related: 5 Things That Belong on the Front Page of Your Website

4. Cyfe

Create your own site performance and usability dashboard to monitor how your site is serving users. Your usability dashboard can aggregate the data from the following built-in tools: Google Analytics (to spot any weird activity), Pingdom (to monitor the down time) and ZenDesk (to monitor your customer team stats).

In addition, you can add widgets for any RSS feed (for example, your brand-name mentions, to track questions from customers), and any Google spreadsheet. (You can also use Google Docs to aggregate notes from your team.) The cool thing about Cyfe is that you can see all these widgets on one page to get a handy bird’s-eye view of all the aggregated data.

5. Page Speed

Site speed is important, because if your site doesn’t load well, people won’t bother to use it. This is especially true in today’s age, when high speed Internet is in almost every household, and available on every mobile device. Page Speedwill analyze your web page speed, and diagnose problems that might be slowing it down. All you have to do is put in your URL.

If you are wondering how your site downtime looks like compared to that of other sites, here are up-to-date uptime stats for you to dig in. These stats are updated every month to show you the biggest losers and winners when it comes to hosting service uptime.

6. Pingdom

If you are worried about bottlenecking, this is a great tool. Pingdom will isolate any bottlenecks that are impacting speed or causing pages to loop. Pingdom has a subscription service that will automatically test your site every day, so you will be alerted to any issues that crop up the moment they are detected. That is a paid service, but basic testing is free. As mentioned above, I use Cyfe to monitor my site downtime.

7. Spur

Get an honest critique on your design choices, with Spur. You put in your URL, and Spur runs it against classic design principles to tell you what ”rules” you are violating. You will be able to see what does and does not work. Then you can get a further critique from community members, sharing the original and the changed designs, based on their recommendations.

8. Feedback Form

WordPress is a platform of choice for many due to the many plugins that you can use to customize the website for free. Feedback Form is one of those invaluable ones that everyone should install. You can create simple forms in various styles that ask your users directly about ways you can improve usability.

What better way to find out than to go straight for the source? This is only one of many customizable feedback form generators out there for WordPress.

If your site runs on WordPress, here are a few more must-have WordPress plugins to install, including WP Super Cache for better load time and Gravity Forms for more feedback form options.

9. Chalkmark

Chalkmark is a really cool way of crowdsourcing usability and design feedback. You provide a design screenshot, and people on the site leave you notes. It is all based on first-click, so you get fresh impression opinions every single time. The information is then put into a visual format as a heatmat, so you see for yourself where people clicked, avoided and created the most traffic. It is easy to use, and highly effective. You won’t find a better way to get mass opinions all in one place.

10. Five Second Test

Five Second Test focuses on two things: landing pages, and calls to action. It quickly evaluates your design to tell you whether these components are being properly optimized. From there, it gives you actionable tips on how to improve, as well as alerts about serious problems that have to be addressed.

Usability is all about first impressions, which is where the term comes from. You have to be able to hook the attention of users within the first five seconds of their landing on your page, or your site is not doing its job.

Do you have any tools to put on this list? We would love to hear about them, so let us know in the comments!

Related: How to Build a Multi-Platform Website

The lone wolf gets a lot of guff for separating from the pack, but when it comes to entrepreneurship, separating yourself is exactly what you should be doing. The startup world is remarkably competitive, and about 90 percent of startups will fail.

Not a fun statistic — I know.

Chances are likely that your business exists among a large wolf pack of startups that all seemingly provide the same service. This is frustrating when you know that you are providing an important product. You know it’s different from other products because you have spent months — even years — creating it, but customers haven’t had that time. They’ve only just met you, so unfortunately, you run the risk of looking identical to a service they already use or know of.

Related: If You Build It, They Will Not Come

Take the companies Customer.io and MailChimp, for example. At first glance, each of these companies specialize in sending email. Looking at their features, prices, testimonials and even benefits, a new user would have no problem choosing one by randomly drawing from a hat. However, at a closer look, you begin to see what sets them apart. You begin to learn about their core value, and suddenly you’re seeing them in a new light.

For example, it turns out that Customer.io is known for making it easy to send emails to your customers who are already using your app. Their main focus is to help you communicate better with your customers, in a tailored way, personalized to what the customer is already doing in the app. On the other hand, MailChimp is focused on email marketing and making it easy to send email newsletters to anyone you might have on your email list. This core value sets them apart, and once you see it, the two products couldn’t be more different.

Based on their core values, one is more concerned with growth, while the other focuses on retention. Depending on your company’s strategy, you can make an educated decision between the two.

How Wistia broke from the pack of video hosting sites

A recent study shows that 1.8 million words have the same impact as a one-minute video. That’s about 150 days of writing that can all be packaged into one tiny video. So it’s no coincidence that a myriad of video hosting companies have entered the startup scene in the last 10 years.

Wistia is a company that knows better than anyone the trials and tribulations of feeling overshadowed in a massive wolf pack, as there are several other video platforms offering basic video hosting functionality. With this kind of competition, how do you set yourself apart? How do you break off from the wolf pack and find success in your own adventure? Moreover, technology is constantly changing. How do you market a reliable product when software is bound to go through countless features and continuously evolve?

The answer to these questions boils down to one simple concept — a gold mine that makes people trust that you have just the product they need. Just four years ago, Wistia was doing everything they could to market their product to as many people as possible. They would advertise the features of their video platform left and right, which essentially resulted in a crazy marketing spider web that muddled the overall essence of their product.

You can list feature after feature and spout benefit after benefit, but if there isn’t one unified idea to umbrella that under, people are going to miss out on that “aha!” moment that will make them recognize the value of your product.

Related: 3 Tips for Building a Business That Reflects Your Deepest Values

This idea will form your core value — all you need is a mission and a vision. Here are three ways to get there:

1. Establish your mission to help your customers.

Wistia co-founder and CEO Chris Savage highly encourages companies to write down their mission as a way to focus on what it is you are trying to help your audience do. You mission is something that will establish who you are and will convey your passion for your product. Writing it down and ingraining it in your marketing strategy will change the way that people see your product. This is why Wistia markets to their mission as opposed to their product.

Before establishing a mission, Wistia was marketing to their product. This means that they were sharing all that their product had to offer without really providing a basis for what exactly it was they were offering. Chris couldn’t quite figure out why they weren’t growing, but once they established a company mission, they saw everything about their marketing transform for the better.

Wistia’s mission is to empower people to use video. Knowing this, they don’t make any marketing decisions that contradict this statement, and this resulted in a significantly broader range of content they could produce. Just look at their blog. It’s chock-full of fun content including actionable tips on how to make your videos more accessible using captions, improved tools for your video library management, how to create visual stories with a B-roll, and much more.

This content fits under their mission because it’s helping their users get the most out of making their own videos.

2. Define your vision to differentiate your product.

Having a mission is great, but when it stands alone, it can seem rather static. It’s also important to look toward the future and set goals for your company. Wistia has done this by defining their vision. Your vision is something that differentiates your product from everything else on the market.

Wistia came to their vision by realizing that people were using their product for a multitude of reasons — marketing, internal training, collaboration etc. — which looks great, but also makes it really hard to focus on everything. They realized that what it came down to was that Wistia was built for video marketing. You could use Wistia for everything that people had already been using it for, but it was built for video marketing.

The introduction of Turnstile on Wistia was what really set their vision in motion. Turnstile is a tool that lets you identify leads and capture emails through your video. Unsurprisingly, people saw Turnstile and suddenly realized why Wistia was different from other video-hosting platforms. No other video hosting platform was allowing you to run analytics, capture leads andcapture emails through the video on your site. Wistia’s clients could get actionable data telling them what segments of their videos people were watching.

It’s their video marketing that sets them apart.

3. Market your core value to build an educated and loyal consumer base.

Once you have established the two tenets that make up your core value, marketing will naturally become a lot easier, and the period of time from when someone learns about your product to having an “aha!” moment will get shorter and shorter.

Once Wistia established their mission and defined their vision, they started integrating this language into everything and began their solo journey away from the rest of the pack. Their external marketing emphasized that they were a video-marketing platform, and their content made people feel empowered to use video as a tool. Internally, they implemented their core value into the ways they thought and talked about their company out loud and on their site.

Suddenly, Wistia found themselves a proud lone wolf.

Related: What Volkswagen Can Teach You About Values-Based Marketing

When it comes to startups, risk comes to mind for many. But not taking that leap poses a greater risk — the risk of missing a great opportunity for compensation, personal growth and networking galore. Choosing to accept startup risk — as a founder or early employee — could fundamentally alter your life and career, and quite frankly, I think you should do it.

Building a startup isn’t as risky as it sounds, it just requires a trade off of some short-term pain for long-term gain. Here are some initial pains I went through when building my company, so you can be ready when starting yours or joining your first new venture:

Related: 4 Steps to Taking Calculated Risks That Move Your Business Forward 

Short-term pain #1: Little to no pay

When I first started The Bouqs Co., I took no pay for eight months. Zero dollars. And I’m no spring chicken. I had a 15-year career at Bain & Co and Disney, a new mortgage in Los Angeles and a 1-year-old boy at home.

Ouch.

This kind of sacrifice is common in the beginning stages of a startup. Founders often sacrifice their pay to fund what needs funded, betting they’ll get it back (and more) later. And due to necessity, most startups pay below market in salary in early stages, asking employees to focus on equity upside instead.

Short-term pain #2: More hours

Startup founders and early employees work more hours than almost anyone — except maybe bankers. For example, at the launch of XYZ Co., two to three people will be the only ones running the entire operation. That’s a lot of work per employee. As funding and demand increase for XYZ Co., the team will expand to six then 10 then 20 and so on.

The trouble is, no matter the number of people on XYZ Co.’s team, the work is never less. Nothing about XYZ Co. existed in its early days, so it requires an incredible amount of time and energy to give it life and sustain it. This means many hours split among few people — and it’s a grind.

Short-term pain #3: The fear it might not work out

The founding team works long hours for little or no pay, barely scraping by for months. Regardless of their Herculean effort, there’s no guarantee the company will succeed. There’s a constant fear in the back of everyone’s mind that they are sacrificing all they have for something that may ultimately fail.

That kind of stress paired with early mornings, late nights and lack of funds is usually what scares away would-be entrepreneurs. But it’s just fear. It’s not reality. While there’s no guarantee it will work, there’s also no guarantee it won’t.

Related: What the High Dive Can Teach Entrepreneurs About Dealing With Fear

And ultimately, it isn’t real risk. Regardless of the outcome, the gains will likely outweigh these pains. Here’s how you win, regardless of whether your startup results in an initial public offering or a closing of the business:

Long-term gain #1: Compensation growth and equity

While founders and early employees may start out making below-market salary for their skills, when the company gets big, they’ll be making more than they would have in their alternative reality non-startup company. At a startup, founders automatically step into senior management roles, skipping over the traditional rise up the ladder. As the company grows, early employees naturally move into higher management positions. Since they helped build the company from the ground up, they’ve earned the seniority needed to lead newer employees.

Additionally, the equity value in a successful startup can be more than enough to offset any short-term decreases in pay in the beginning. As a startup accrues value, equity value grows to exceed what early team members would make as employees at regular day jobs.

Long-term gain #2: Not much is actually lost — even in failure

Even if the business fails, not much money is lost by an employee or founder in the grand scheme of things. Let’s say Sara tries to build a startup. She makes nothing. Zero dollars. Zilch. Six months later, it fails. Take the lost wages (half of one year’s salary at the next best alternative job) and divide it by all the money she will make in her career. It’s just a tiny portion.

The losses, while real, are mitigated by the short time frame in which startups make it or break it.

Long-term gain #3: Learning at a fast-forward pace

Running a startup forces founders and employees to learn more than they would at any traditional job, earlier in their career. Everyone is forced to do more, do it more quickly and are asked to execute beyond their pay grade and experience. This means rapid development of experience and skills that may take years to acquire in another environment. If the company doesn’t go big, at the least employees will walk away with knowledge and experience that makes them more valuable in the job market.

Long-term gain #4: Building a solid network

When building a startup, founders and employees meet and have the opportunity to develop relationships with key people who may influence the business or their career. They’ll attend industry events and meet business influencers, investors, founders and others who could get their ideas in front of the right eyes to help the startup take off. These connections may also support their individual careers down the road. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to be well-connected to a pool of successful investors when another great idea for a business manifests in the future.

While there can be downsides to founding or working at a startup in the beginning, there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel — in the upside or downside. Ultimately, the experience gained, the connections made and lessons learned are likely to be more than enough value to cover any short-term losses.

And those who make it? They get to change the world in some way, experience a life-changing sense of accomplishment and validate that the risk was worth it all along.

What short-term sacrifices did you make when you started your own business? What did you gain long-term? Please comment below.

Related: 7 Essentials for Overcoming Mental Barriers to Exceptional Success

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