I've been on a roll with lists, so I'll continue this blog post with the same format. The experience of 75 start-ups has taught me a few lessons about starting great companies. The internet provides an awesome opportunity to create businesses, but it's also a trap for eager entrepreneurs that try to build the next *big* thing.

Here are 16 ideas an entrepreneur can use to get a successful web business to market faster. There's a lot more that could be written for each idea, but I'll let these ideas brew over the coming weeks before elaborating on each point.

1. Prototype key concepts first. The biggest failure of early stage companies is failing to create prototypes. Prototypes are quick and easy ways to learn potential problems with a concept. Too many companies want to talk about product issues instead of understanding the real problems a prototype could reveal.
2. Start with a small team. Too many cooks in the kitchen can slow down the idea generation process. Error on the side of more doers than thinkers.
3. Stay away from marketing surveys. Your customer won't help you build something revolutionary. Build a great product and then solicit their feedback.
4. Find a role player. Not everyone can be a entrepreneur. Find a team that can work together under stressful situations. Complimentary skills are helpful for getting stuff done.
5. Sketch ideas out. Don't sit in front of Power Point or Photoshop. Grab a white board and start working through screens. Graphics programs will slow you up.
6. Iterate quickly. Fail fast. Find ways to quickly test interactions with people.
7. Use tactics. You can't go from strategy to implementation and expect great results. Use sketching, prototyping, observing and mind mapping to test your strategy.
8. Ask questions. Lots of questions. Find other entrepreneurs and people running businesses who can help you shape the product. Don't be worried about sounding dumb.
9. Find advisers. Find a couple of reliable business advisers who can offer advice when your stuck. Financial, technical or marketing professionals are extremely valuable. If you have to pay a little for someone you trust, it might be worth it.
10. Keep your start-up costs minimal. Find as many ways to reduce your costs as possible. Try to get by without spending money on items that you can do without- desks, chairs, and office equipment (these can be purchased when you have the resources).
11. Do more with less. It seems obvious, but unless you're challenged to limit your time or budget, you'll spend unnecessary time doing dumb stuff. It's all about momentum.
12. Start sales early. Find customers for your product or service on day one. You may not receive money from them, but their information will be valuable to find your first paying customers.
13. Timebox development. I'll get some push back here, but it's important to limit development time. Find a market for your product before you build something truly scalable. You're going to have to refactor your code anyway.
14. Don't worry about idea theft. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Getting ideas into the marketplace is much harder.
15. Create conversations. Great ideas don't happen in a vacuum. Find people who can help you refine your vision.
16. Keep features minimal. There's nothing more discouraging than keeping up with a runaway feature list. If you can't find value in a few key features then you need to rethink your business.

Do you have another insight or thought?

You can't force a message that potential customers aren't ready to hear. This is a great example.

Design isn't about creating elements in a screen- it's about solving user problems. And anytime there's a design decision for a user, there's sure to be an argument. Here are eleven ideas for winning the design battle.

1. Be cool. Stay relaxed and unmoved by criticism. A designer's use of empathy goes a long way to relax a tense situation.
2. Don't highlight that the other person is wrong. The other person might not have a clue about design, but a designer needs to express the disagreement subtly. Even if you think they are wrong. Design decisions are not always qualitative, so expressing ideas as opinions can go a long way in building trust.
3. Back it up. Bring in research or numbers to back up your claims. Show competitive examples where something worked or failed.
4. Give them the floor. Often it doesn't take any effort to win the argument. Let your competitor seal their own fate. Focus on listening and let them hear themselves talk.
5. Make them be agreeable. Get them to agree to something. Anything. If you find a common agreeable point it makes it easier to win other ideas.
6. Be wrong. Modesty is a great quality. If you made a mistake or misjudged the situation, then say so. Don't be *that* designer that is always right.
7. Stay open minded. Sometime those critical thinkers on the business side are right. Open yourself up to other ways of looking at a design decision.
8. Let them own the idea. Sometimes getting the best ideas into the mix is to let them have it. It's not always fun, ultimately your sound ideas will survive the design process.
9. Best practices. If it's a definitive truth in the world of design, then it's going to be hard for an opponent to justify a decision that contradicts this idea.
10. Figure out want they want. Identify their real desires and re-frame your argument around their needs. A shift in perspective and a few concessions works wonders.
11. Bring the hammer down. Make them reach a boil and make them uncomfortable about sticking their neck out on something they can win. Close the deal.

I have to admit that it's easier to highlight these tactics than actually use them. Experience plays a big role in adoption- there's no substitute for learning from mistakes and putting that into your work flow.

Ten years of managing the design process has taught me a few key ideas. Here is a short list of the ways I've seen designers lose their value in a project and suggestions for how to get energy flowing and work your way out of it.

1. Creative block. Eh. Things need to get done. If the left brain isn't working, switch to the right brain. Find a method to get the ideas out on the table. Force them out.
2. Wrong tool. Photoshop is great for visualizing ideas, but it isn't ideal for rapidly exploring ideas. Use appropriate tools for different phases of a project.
3. Details too soon. Design is in the details, but the idea isn't the details. Focus on details at the right point in the iterative process.
4. Wrong conversations. Don't get stuck trying to figure out the purpose of the page while working on the rounded corners in Photoshop. Having a conversation about the "business goals" while in implementation mode is a recipe for disaster.
5. Follow through. Starting and stopping can be a huge momentum killer if things can't get done. Binge sessions are necessary to get closure on an idea.
6. Business goals lost. Staring at a computer screen and creating beautiful curves for extended blocks of time creates distance from the business goals of design. Be nimble.
7. Designing for the screen. Design for the eye, not the screen. Good design is made by people to solve a problem for other people. 10 hours in front of a monitor will convince you that the problem you've solved is solved *by* Photoshop. Shake that idea off.

Have another to add?

We're letting the cat out of the bag, folks. We're redesigning, and in a big way. We're overhauling our website, blog, extranet, and much more. As part of our redesign process, we needed to rethink how we approach our work and internal projects in a way that better facilicates activity. We needed a dashboard.

So we built one! From a late night team brainstorm before heading to Red Robin, Dashboard was born. Great name, huh? We think so. Our Dashboard acts as the pulse on everything we do on the Web, and is a unique look at our team's activities. Twitter feeds, del.icio.us links, ZURBword.com searches, and activity on the blog are all routed through Dashboard.

Act and React

From Dashboard, we do everything. We tweet, we link, we blog, we monitor, we create. Your typical dashboard is a jumping off point, a way to quickly and easily access data and actions from a central page. Here we've blown that model out to encompass several tools and sets of data. We're looking to keep an eye on everything we do so we can act, and more importantly, react.

For instance, when I finish this blog post, it'll show up in our Activity feed. The rest of the team will see my post and be able to jump right in to add their own comments and engage those of our readers. Just like a blog post, we're also notified of things like newsletter sign ups. Those numbers are encouraging and offer a unique look at our business that we otherwise wouldn't have.

As a side note, we considered e-mail updates for blog comments, but we decided against it in the end. Instead of e-mail updates for our team, we have a central repository for everything ZURB. This keeps our head in the game while we work, but still keeps us apprised of how we're doing. Also, e-mail is a bottleneck and acts like cold storage more than an heat lamp for activity.

The Big (Little) Reveal

Here's just a taste of what's to come. It's small, but we're keeping a lid on most of it for now. We're only a few weeks in, but is this baby handy.

Those blue boxes across the top are actual business stats, but for now, we're hush-hush on which is which. So why the blue boxes right in our faces? Well, as I mentioned earlier, the point of any great dashboard is to serve as a stepping stone to something else. For us, this means easy access to key drivers of our business, like blog comments and tweets between team members.

Most importantly though, we're encouraged to do more. Having important metrics and a single point of distribution for all our online content means we're activity engaged in moving content. Really, we're on top of it.