I recently heard a Columbia Business School professor tell an audience that entrepreneurs share 6 traits that are intrinsic rather than learned. The takeaway is that entrepreneurs are born that way, and if you’re not born that way, you’re out of luck.

I couldn’t disagree more. Successful entrepreneurs are often in the right place at the right time, with the right background and training to seize opportunities when they arise. They’re not special people.

Most successes are stumbled upon after many iterations and failures, so if you’re deciding whether or not to start a business, don’t start by asking whether you’re an entrepreneur. Instead, ask yourself if you’re willing to subject your vision to scrutiny, criticism and change. Are you willing to test your theories about the market? And if you’re wrong, are you willing and can you afford to change your plan? Answer yes to these, and your chances of being a successful entrepreneur will increase.

Let’s face it: everyone wants to build an online business. Virtually everyone I know has ideas for web and mobile apps and businesses. Add to this the fact that Americans are risk-taking entrepreneurs and you have the perfect conditions for many people to lose their shirts.

Start With No
When people suggest that they want to build online businesses or start companies in general, I usually advise them against it. And why should I encourage them? Telling someone not to do something is a low-risk proposition. Dedicated entrepreneurs will proceed no matter what. Not-so-dedicated people will probably give up, saving themselves lots of time and money. Building a website is cheap; building an online business is really expensive.

Play to your strengths
If you do proceed, you may have more success building businesses and products that fit your situation. By your situation I mean how much money, knowledge, experience and connections you have. Leverage every advantage and avoid weaknesses.

All Skills, No Bills
If you’re a developer with low / no people skills, then build consumer-facing products that you can iterate on constantly. Don’t try to build a b2b product that requires a sales team and schmoozing for success.

Dumb Money
If you’ve got lots of money but no experience or tech skills, then spend the cash buying a team and experience. Hire freelancers create relationships, learn how to manage them, get them excited, and be able to deploy them on a variety of projects that are short-term in nature. Learn fast, find a dedicated team, and you’ll figure it out.

Relationships
By themselves relationships are helpful but they don’t help you execute. They won’t help you build a great product. So use relationships to get industry knowledge and do research on what products to build. You can be the business side of a startup in your domain.

Knowledge
Having deep industry knowledge is like relationships; it will help give insight about products and services, but won’t help you create great products. Again, you need to wrap a team around you before embarking on the business.

This has been a great year for my wife Anika and me. We’re iterating super fast on products and projects to learn more each day. So far this year we’ve already built:

ClearGears – a totally new redesign.
RollCallMe – a new product built in a weekend.
Thankhub – a collaboration with Crowd Interactive, and part of ClearGears.
PashaFit – Anika’s custom women’s clothing company.

Why are we building so much? Well, last year Anika and I considered the cost of her going to grad school and decided that, for far less money, we could build 10 new products. We’d learn more, develop a better network, and gain actual, usable skills faster. Oh, and while grad school is guaranteed to lose us lots of money, these projects offer the opportunity to make lots of money. Foregoing grad school wasn’t a decision so much as an IQ test.

The most successful free online services for consumers share three traits. They are frictionless to join, they are inherently viral, and people want to use them every day.

Frictionless
Being frictionless to join means no one has to pay a fee, fill out long forms, or jump through hoops before they get utility from the service.

Viral
The service grows if every action on the site involves other people. Pictures, video, messaging, and multi-player games are all examples.

Every Day
Frictionless and viral tools are great for getting users, but the true magic happens when people are compelled to use the service every day. It must deliver utility every time it’s touched.

I’m getting closer with my recent projects, ClearGears, RollCallMe, and most recently, Thankhub, but I can’t seem to nail the every day part.

As simple as these principles are, not everyone in the free consumer-services space is building apps with these in mind. Beyond that, these are all really difficult to implement. To me, new businesses that don’t fulfill all three of these objectives are simply not going to grow fast as fast as those that do. Online, growth means user acquisition, and the number of users determines the value of a company. Services that are frictionless, viral, and useful every day are incredibly valuable.

Imagine if your coworkers could be as ecstatic about their work as Justin Bieber’s tween fans are about him… wouldn’t that be scary/awesome?

There’s something about Justin Bieber that makes tween girls go nuts. They swoon over him privately and publicly, individually and in groups, and their love is expressed in Youtube videos, tweets, collages, Bieberized bedroom walls, school folders and lockers. Harnessed Bieberlove could solve the world’s energy needs.

It’s about music, romance, and hope.
Behind every one of those teary Bieber fan eyes is an idea. It’s an idea, or a hope, or a plan, that one day she will be Mrs. Justin Bieber. Yes, she loves the Biebs’s dance moves, his songs, his fame and money, but what she really loves is their future together. And years later she’s still capable of hoping and wishing and planning, but her hope has been squashed by reality enough times that she keeps a lid on it. She’s become hopeless in the face of countless disappointments.

Her ability to hope, however, isn’t dead. It can be rekindled with the right combination of context, content, timing and delivery. In 2008, Barack Obama’s first campaign tapped that infinite well of hope to achieve the unlikely.

I want that.
I want the dudes (sadly they’re all dudes right now) on my development teams to be more like tween Bieber fans. Dreaming, hoping, planning for an awesome future for our company. Plastering their bedroom walls with company paraphernalia, tearing up when we deploy code. My job is to create the context, content, timing and delivery of messages to uncover that.

Steps to Bieberize your worforce

1. Give everyone a plan. Everyone, myself included, needs a plan for the foreseeable future and they need to know how the current work fits into that plan. For example, I’ve shared the plan to sponsor US visas for my developers in Pakistan, and we’re working with lawyers to make that plan work. The success of the business is tightly linked to the likelihood of sponsoring visas to live in the US.

2. Hand over ownership. Make people responsible for their work by giving them wide authority and decision-making power. I have completely handed A/B testing of my homepage over to one of my developers, and he’s been awesome at optimizing the process. He owns it and nothing’s getting in his way of dominating, just like Bieber fans feel like they own a piece of the Biebs, and no one can stop them from posting awesome Bieber covers on Youtube.

3. Collectively dream. I want my whole team at ClearGears to be embarrassingly rich. We want huge outcomes for the business and we want to upgrade from the motorcycles 4 out of the 5 of us drive to some really blinged out rides. We have a plan for a company meeting in Dubai when we hit the right number of customers. We’re collectively setting lofty goals. It’s kind of like dreaming of marrying the Biebs, but these goals are attainable.

I can’t get much done by myself. Accounting, coding, sales, legal, design… I depend on other people to make these things happen, so my success depends directly on their enthusiasm to help. And since I’m not the richest, smartest, most successful or sexiest guy in the world, these people have better options than working with me. What keeps them motivated?

My secret is respect. Respect for what people do. Awe when they do it right. Celebrating their small achievements, and bestowing them with the sense that, yes, they have super powers. Because to me, they do have super powers.

My second secret is providing meaning. We live for meaning and self respect. Don’t underestimate the length your employees, contractors and vendors will go to maintain a high level of respect, but meaning is equally important. Tying the work people do to a larger meaning is an equally powerful motivator. So long as you are genuine in showing respect and sharing the meaning of the work, people will never tire of your message and they won’t tire of working with you.

Pay on time, pay well, provide meaning, give respect, and they’ll stick with you. This is the core of my personal philosophy, and the driver behind my products, ClearGears and Thankhub.

I just built another project from concept to launch within one week, and I’m starting to hit on a repeatable formula for the non-technical CEO to use. In this post I’ll describe the project, and then share a dialog I had with a friend about how exactly one builds fast.

Thankhub.com
Thankhub is an easy way to save all your thank-you emails in one place. Using Thankhub, you can even make some notes public. Thankhub makes you a better networker, job candidate, and person.

Here’s how it works:
It all works by email.

When you cc someone, you create a Thankhub account for you and the recipient. Bcc them, and you’ll just append the note to your own account.

How I built it:
I supplemented my awesome ClearGears team with the equally incredible squad at Crowd Interactive. I worked with a senior developer named Jonathan Garay (@netmask) and one senior designer named Karla Magaña. In total we had one lead developer from Crowd, one designers from my company, me, and seven days. We used Heroku to host, Pivotal Tracker to coordinate tasks, Mailgun to parse emails, and Twitter Bootstrap for designs. The blog is hosted on Tumblr.

What I learned:
This project was way more complex than RollCallMe.com, which was built in the same number of days but in far fewer hours. We had many more bumps this time because we only had one developer who didn’t pair program, and he put in 18 hour days, culminating in the final night’s 4 am launch. Next time I’m going to insist that we pair program on this and work more reasonable hours.

Working fast virtually is also a struggle. We didn’t waste much time, but my team member in Pakistan couldn’t contribute as a developer because of constant power outages. That doesn’t happen in NYC as often.

My formula, revealed:

I posted the launch on Facebook this evening and was contacted by friends right away for support on building their apps. For example, My friend Zahid in the UK is a mover and shaker who wants to build a web application. He pinged me on Facebook today for my take on how to build applications, so I gave him my recipe for fast and furious development.


Zahid:
…absolutely, it is a great culture to encourage
my question was going to be a very simple one, that is probably very common one. “I have an app idea, but no idea how to program/ develop”, what next?

Me:
oh I see
well first I think you want a designer actually
to mock up the minimum viable product.
Some great designers usually also know developers
so that’s one way to network to developers
Then I’d suggest hiring one really senior person to help configure the setup


Zahid:
so by “designer”, you mean someone to literally do screenshots as to what different steps of the user experience would be?
or designer is someone who can code as well, and to produce a basic skeleton to show potential functionality?


Me:
the former
Just the interface
but thinking through EVERYTHING
Forces you to make lots of decisions
and helps you pre-sell the product before investing too much
There are actually going to be 4 skills involved, so you need a team that can do all these:


Zahid:
ok (i really appreciate your input here, thanks man)


Me:
- rapid deployment of you development environment
- Front end design
- Front end developer
- Back end Coder
And in terms of coders, you’ll need two types:
- expensive, experienced coder to build the core functionality
- less expensive and experienced coder to maintain and deploy incremental changes
You don’t need them all at once.
Designer first, then experienced coder, then then front end developer, then maintenance guy
that’s my formula



Zahid:
Do you have programming background yourself? I assume you perform some of the functions you describe?


Me:
nope
I’m just a product guy
I only bring money drama and persistence

As the non-technical CEO of a tech company, it’s vital that I work with tools that meet my developers half way. I can manage better when I know what my team is working on, how complex their tasks are, and when they’re committing code. It’s also useful when I can control the performance of the final product – my application.

Heroku
Heroku is an easy-to-use application-hosting service. With Heroku I can increase performance by adding more “dynos” and I can choose services a-la-carte, usually with the guidance of my tech team. Heroku and Github work well together.

Github
Github is an online repository that my developers deploy code to. It tracks different versions of the code, letting us peel back mistakes and avoid overwriting one another. Importantly, it shows me exactly who is deploying code when.

Pivotal Tracker
Last but not least, I rely on Pivotal Tracker all day long to manage all the tasks that need to be done. We create “stories” such as “validate email addresses on the login page,” and then we assign those tasks to someone, estimate its complexity, and track when it’s started and finished. That gives a really solid sense of how long everything will take.

I highly recommend these tools to anyone embarking on a web development project.

Shivani Siroya, CEO of InVenture.org, is a true marketing maven. InVenture enables people anywhere in the world to invest in micro businesses anywhere else in the world. From her early videos explaining the product, to her latest video documentary by the Unreasonable Institue, she is consistently explaining, promoting, pivoting, and learning in public. InVenture’s success or failure is still to be determined, but Shivani’s already demonstrated her ability and willingness to give her business every opportunity possible.

I find it ironic that I’m an advisor to InVenture because it’s Shivani who teaches and inspires me. If your startup is innovative and you’re willing to bet your reputation and all your time on it, then follow Shivani’s lead by talking to the press, holding events, traveling to conferences, and applying to programs like the Unreasonable Institute.

After building RollCallMe.com in a week, I realized that the first week of building a web application is the most exciting and possibly important time. In the first week, each line of code has a huge impact, and you see visible improvements to your app every day. Don’t, however, think the fun will last.

Just a few weeks later it will feel like your application development has come to a stand-still. You’ll no longer see big changes every day. Now the application has many moving parts; there’s a front, middle and back end to think of; and each new line of code effects other lines of code.

This is the time trap. The more time and thought you put into an application, the harder it becomes to change it. Your early decisions cement, and after just a few weeks of development, changing direction becomes a daunting task requiring weeks, if not months, of work. The time it takes for the developers to build changes is expensive, often wasted time. This is why early customer development – getting clients to agree to pay for the service – is so critical before you start writing even a line of code.

If you’re reading this and you’ve already spent months on your product but are seeing little traction, you should recognize that your odds of success are lower than ever. It’s unlikely that feature changes will lead to breakthrough success, and you’re ability to add features is now so slow that you’ll probably run out of money before you find that success. Now is a great time to look in the mirror and ask yourself, “should I pivot, or should I persevere?”