I'm in the final weeks of Y Combinator, and the summer has been an incredible learning experience. Through the process, I've learned how to be a better coder, better designer, better marketer, better deal-maker, and an all around better person. But the one thing that made the biggest difference was just having more self-confidence in what I think is right instead of just listening to the advice of grown ups. As Paul Bucheit said at Angel Conf, a good founder may hear lots of conflicting advice and ultimately say to oneself "no, I actually think I'm right."

And this summer, I can honestly say that I've finally acquired that ability to say "no, I actually think I'm right". Without self confidence...

1 - inDinero would be competing head-on with QuickBooks, trying to replace it as the premiere accounting system. Ends up that nobody likes accounting software, and I'd go insane working on a product that I didn't love. Multiple successful founders urged us to go in this direction while we were still building out our product, because they couldn't understand why someone would want to use a dumbed-down finance product. And it's pretty difficult to speculate what customers will and won't like before you build the product, so we decided to take the lean startup approach and release the first crappy product that we were able to build. Can you imagine inDinero being an accounting solution?

2 - inDinero would be focussing on marketing and user acquisition before finding happy, passionate customers. In hindsight, that would have been a huge mistake, but it was hard to tell at first if the bigger problem was marketing, or if it was product. Only after you find happy and passionate *paying* customers do you realize how bad your product was before. When starting the company, people would often tell us how great our product team was, but how none of us had a background in sales/marketing, and that we should focus on that. But since I think 100X more about my business than any potential investor does, I can quickly tell that businesses that think they have a marketing problem actually have a product problem. And our friends at FreshBooks.com reassured me that they just focussed on making the product great long before thinking about user acquisition, and it's served them well. And I respect that, because FreshBooks is one of few companies in our space who "gets it".

3 - inDinero would be raising money at a significantly lower valuation than what is actually market-rate for the company. Grown-ups typically advise young entrepreneurs to settle on what will clearly be a fair deal, and my personal opinion is that fund-raising should be the first test to train your deal-making abilities. Settling at a "fair" valuation doesn't make any sense, especially for a founder who's trying to hone their negotiation skills. I spent a decent amount of time studying negotiation from books like Bargaining for Advantage, and it made me realize that honing these skills during the busiest weeks of the Y Combinator program won't be smart in the short term, but will ultimately be crucial if my goal in life is to be a world-class CEO. Therefore, I've ignored pretty much all advice on settling for a "lower than market-rate" valuation. The consequence: slightly less demand from investors, but a drastically higher price and significantly better outcome for the company.

If you're a first-time entrepreneur, be mindful that you'll have world-class entrepreneurs telling you what seems to be good advice. They'll assert with confidence why their advice is the best advice, but in the end, you need to decide what the actual right thing to do is. Listen to your instincts and never be afraid to tell yourself "no, I actually think I'm right."

Have you ever read an article by someone on the internet who shared awesome advice? And don't you wish you could have them as your true mentors for your company? I've been applying the idea of having "virtual mentors", where I pick just 3-5 people I respect and follow their supposed advice as religiously as possible. To keep it simple, I find one mantra that gives me context for any advice they would give me in person. 1) Paul Graham: "No distractions." 2) Dave Mcclure: "Focus on core product, stop adding useless features." 3) Sean Ellis: "Focus on product/market fit. Until then, nothing else matters." 4) Eric Ries: "Build minimum viable product for everything." The key isn't in figuring out everything they would tell you, but rather in living by your virtual mentors' rules. And you'll find that if they were actually your mentors in real life, their advice would revolve around the mantras that you listed. The interesting thing about this is that you might yield up to 50% of a mentor's value just by asking yourself "what would so-and-so say about this?" For example, some people have been giving me the advice of thinking about marketing and distribution more than I do about product. But if I go through my checklist of virtual mentors, all of them would have something unique to say:

"What should I do about marketing and distribution?"

Paul Graham: It's a distraction at this point. Focus on building something useful first. Dave Mcclure: AARRR - optimize everything. Fix your landing page. Measure the funnel of conversions. Optimize signup page, make it as few steps possible. Fix core product to increase engagement, build in ways for users to refer their friends. Sean Ellis: You don't have product market fit yet, and until you do, focus on product. Eric Ries: Resist the urge of launching. You're locked into positioning, and you can't launch again. Better to screw it up with early customers. Of course, I don't know exactly how they'd respond to my question, but simple role-play can go a long way. Consider this an alternative method of getting free world-class mentorship :)

As my final semester of college comes to a close, I've been training one of my classmates to help organize the computer science events here at Berkeley - and as an engineer, he hates the idea of promoting events that don't exist. "It's total vaporware!" Yes, it's vaporware, because we're advertising an event that doesn't actually exist. But by selling vaporware, you quickly figure out if something is worthy of spending your time on. Last summer when Andy and I started our company, we just put up a crappy webpage that told people what our product did. And of course, we didn't have a product. So people would try to sign up, only to find a form where they could leave their email address. This was important for three reasons: 1 - we immediately knew that our problem was worthy of solving. 2 - we got instant feedback from people telling us what they wanted to see from our product. 3 - it gave us the motivation to push forward. In fact, I've taken this to the next extreme: my focus is on the vaporware itself, since it solves the problem of not knowing what to build. Engineers are terrible when it comes to solving problems that don't exist, and I knew that my co-founder and I had a similar risk. I now spend about 50% of my time figuring out what needs to be solved (by fixing the website, validating screenshots of our vaporware), and 50% of my time on building the product that has so far been vaporware. This works in many arenas of life - for the CSUA (computer science undergraduate association) here at Berkeley, we're co-hosting the annual "Engineering Demo Day". Which means we had to find a) a lot of engineering demos, b) sponsors for the event, c) people to attend. To take my focus on vaporware to the extreme, we signed up dozens of demos and secured out sponsors before even finding a venue, because none of the logistics would have mattered if there was no demand in the first place. We set up a facebook event advertising the event to see if anyone would RSVP. This took less than an hour of our time. My CS friends hate the idea of selling vaporware (and in this case promoting an event that doesn't yet exist), because it's "morally questionable", but I don't think so at all. Let's say that Demo Day had no demand. We'd tell the demoing teams that the event is off, and we'd tell our sponsors they could keep their money. No problem, at all. Let's say inDinero had no demand in its first product. What if I told you that it didn't have much demand? Truth is, we didn't get any compliments until I redid the website for the third time. And through each iteration of the user-facing website, I learned of what prospective customers wanted, I figured out what our website didn't advertise, and I had a much better idea of what people were looking for in a finance product. And all of this knowledge came from my selling vaporware. The bottom line: Vaporware is good because 1) it'll save you time and money, 2) it's a completely legitimate method of doing customer development, and 3) You'll learn so much about your product without even having to build a prototype.

Most entrepreneurs hate their competition. Many of my friends would come up with a brilliant business idea, only to decide not to pursue it because someone else has already begun doing it. But if anything, they should be happy, because competition means two things: validation of a business idea, and pressure to innovate. If someone else is in your market, at least you know it's something worth solving. And if someone else is in your market, it means you have to create something truly useful. But investors don't always see this perspective... if anything, the first question I get asked is "how are you going to deal with Intuit as competition?" It's a reasonable question that I've put a lot of thought into.

The first thing to keep in mind is that for most internet companies, competition is irrelevant. As our friends at Zoho.com say, "... if there's anything I've learned from my years in the tech world is that companies don't get killed by competition, they usually find creative ways to commit suicide." Zoho is right, and we remind ourselves of that everyday here at Indinero. Chances are that your web startup will run out of funding, a co-founder will leave, or your inability to create a useful product will lead to the destruction of your own enterprise. And if you're able to get past those first barriers to entry, then I'll allow you to think a little about your competitors.

Now lets say that your company has an infinite cash runway, your company is capable of building a product, and you know that it won't commit suicide anytime soon. Even then, competition shouldn't be your primary concern. If you created a list of all of your competitors, 90% of them could probably be crossed off your list of concern because of their inability to innovate quickly. And of the remaining 10%, plot them on two axes: who is innovating, and who are you losing potential business to. You'll find that more often than not, no competitor is on the top right of the graph. It's often a big company (in our case, Intuit) that we're losing business to, and we know that they're not innovating at the pace that we are. More nimble startups, on the other hand, often make for good inspiration! Their mere existence, even if they have a better product than you do, does not mean that they'll be the reason for your failure. Keep in mind that your company will probably commit suicide in a creative way, and you'll never have the opportunity to evade the startup competitors you fear.

One valuable lesson I learned back in my middle school days was that having lots of competition was a good thing: I was in the web hosting space, which was and still is notorious for having terrible service providers. The rules I listed above applied to web hosting 5 years ago in that 90% of the competition was irrelevant, and many of the big players weren't doing anything particularly creative. There was an obvious pressure to do more than just provide diskspace and bandwidth to clients, which means that companies that couldn't keep up were able to fail earlier in the process. If anything, these failed companies should thank the competition for having saved them time!

So the next time you think of a business idea, embrace your competition and build your offering around unique things that your "big rival" isn't doing, and will likely never do. And if a friend or investor asks about your competition, you'll know precisely how to respond.

In building my latest company, many people have asked me "how will this make money?" And even when it was still in its idea stage, I'd quickly say "with a freemium business model, of course." I needed an easy, efficient, and trustworthy way to attract users into paying for a service, and most people assume that a freemium business model works best.

But I think there's a lot more to this thing called "freemium" than meets the eye. It's distinctly different from offering a free trial or a free sample. The biggest problem with freemium is that the conversion rate from free to premium is utterly low -- some say that the average conversion rate is 3%. But in the companies that implement freemium business models well, I see that they attack one thing that customers can't argue with: an actual, urgent need. By doing this, they'll assuredly increase their conversion rate and customer satisfaction. In case you forget, here's a checklist that you can post on your wall:

The key is in acquiring users who are looking for a potential solution to a problem, and may or may not pay depending on what they need. But when they have that urgent need for your upsell, they'll gladly pay. Here are two examples of companies that understand freemium:

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VistaPrint.com is best known for "selling" free business cards. I first heard about them when someone gave me a business card that said "Made by VistaPrint.com" on the back of it. I ordered my first batch of free cards, paid for $5 shipping, and I was a happy camper. The poor souls from VistaPrint made practically nothing off my purchase.

Two years later, and the week before my first TED Conference, I knew that I had an urgent need for business cards. So surely enough, I went back to VistaPrint to get my "free" cards. But fortunately for them (and unfortunately for me), they understood that freemium models work best when the customer has an urgent need, and they showed that in their shipping prices. I got free cards from them before, so I knew they were good. But I needed a new batch within 72 hours, and VistaPrint made a nice profit from the rushed shipping costs that I paid them. Take a look at their pricing breakdown for free business cards:

I think the key here is that VistaPrint spent less time worrying about features that would be "nice to have", and more time on selling me something that I absolutely needed to have, and something I'd obviously be willing to pay for. Props to them!

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Another company that's done a great job at freemium is PBworks.com. (formerly known as PBwiki). I worked there last summer, so I had a lot of time to think about why their model works so well. Firstly, the company targets so many different demographics: individuals, students, teachers, companies, conferences, engaged couples, people trying to lose weight, among others. But most of these users will never pay for PBworks, because they don't have a need to. And even if there were "cooler" features that PBworks could offer, these users probably wouldn't pay. As a student using the product for personal use, I remember ignoring the upgrade button on the top right of the screen, and using PBworks as far as free would take me. In fact, I still have a personal wiki I use for taking notes in class, and I see myself as the type of user who'd never want to pay for premium features.

But now I run a company, and we love our PBworkspace. In fact, I think I'm addicted. But my colleagues and interns are too. And while I'd still do anything possible not to pay for "cool-to-have" premium features, PBworks is smart enough to make me pay for its service because I need it. There were two things that they could do: cut me off after I made too many edits to my wiki, or heavily encourage me to pay when I'd have a clear need. They chose the latter route.

This is precisely why the "per user" model is so powerful. You get the benefits of a full-fledged product, but you only pay for what you need. For the first 3 users, PBworks is free, but when I bring in more people, I have to pay $8/user. Which is a relatively small cost to pay for something that I'll probably need to have. Take a look at their pricing structure. Note that I omitted the free plan.

What's interesting about this is that the difference between the "Professional" and "Professional Plus" plans is trivial. We normally expect the most expensive plan to have 20 baller features that the others don't have, just to convince you to pay for the more expensive plan. But PBworks isn't that naive: they realize that as long as you have a need for more than 3 people to collaborate on a wiki, (which is pretty much every organization out there), you'll pay for the product out of sheer need. And the difference between their "Professional" and "Professional Plus" plans shows their understanding of this too: Some organizations need to have 24/7 live support, and they're willing to pay for that.

But at the end of the day, when the organization's decision maker needs to figure out which PBworks plan to purchase, it isn't comparing featuresets between plans. It's about selecting the one plan that solves the needs you have, and PBworks and other enterprise software companies such as Freshbooks and Salesforce do this well.

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So ask yourself, "where is the actual need?" With VistaPrint, the need comes down to getting business cards in a timely manner. With PBworks, the need is when an organization has more than 3 users on a wiki. For Indinero, my current company, the need is when a company has more than 2 bank/credit card accounts that they need to keep track of. By thinking about "what the user needs" rather than thinking about "what a user sees as cool features to have", you'll be taking full-advantage of the beautiful thing called freemium.

Speaking of smart marketing, VistaPrint decided to give you guys a 25% discount on all products, and an 80% discount on premium business cards. For a product that I've actually paid full-price for, I highly recommend them. If you run into another company with a unique business model, please send me a tip at jessicamah (at) jessicamah.com.

Virgin founder/chairman Richard Branson and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page just posted videos on the first manned adventure to Mars -- except they wish to inhabit the planet with colonists for years to come!

Cool idea? Check. Suspicious? Definitely. Here's what I found off the FAQ page:

oh, all right. Fine. April Fool's. Ha, ha, ha. It isn't real. There. Are you happy? Does it please you to drag us out of our lovely little fantasy world, to crush all our hopes and dreams? Is that really what you need to hear? Fine, you've heard it. Virgle isn't real.

Yet.

Sure, they posted this on April 1st. But for some reason, this project sounds just crazy enough for Richard Branson to endorse it.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early collegeBard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

How are the virgin advertisements so good? Observe:

If you're going to form partnerships with other companies, please get it right! I see way too many companies forming alliances mainly for the sheer sake of forming alliances and doing "biz dev" work, but it's often a distraction from the core focus of your company. And if you decide to go forward with the partnership, it helps if the connection is seamless and that your customers are able to extract true value from that partnership.

Let's take a look at my favorite companies: airlines! Gotta love the expensive fares, the long delays, the bad food, and of course the incompetent representatives. It may sound like I write way too much about how airlines suck, but I'm just giving my honest advice!

Many of these airlines participate in mile-sharing programs. This basically means that if you accumulate frequent traveler miles with one company, you could use it with any of its partners. The plus side being that you're not scared to accumulate these miles because you have supposed assurance that you can use it anywhere. Of course, when it comes time to actually use your points on partner airlines, you may find yourself running into a brick wall.

True story: I booked my round trip airfare to Amsterdam with KLM because the FAQ's said that I can upgrade using frequent flyer miles after booking the flight in coach. Only problem being that KLM's partner, Delta, won't let me use the Delta miles for the upgrade unless I'm upgrading a Delta seat. How lame is that? Sure, it's partly my fault for not being 100% sure I could upgrade before booking my seats, but this example comes to show that the supposed partnerships these companies have between one another don't allow customers to take full advantage of their frequent flyer miles!

As for the logistics behind entering a partnership, some companies waste way too much time, energy, and money on getting a deal done only for it to fall through. The best deals I know of happen near instantly, where each company can easily help the other without changing too much. For example, I spoke to the marketing guy at Shopzilla.com, and he told me about the many partnerships the company has with media companies to exchange traffic with each other.

In a nutshell, finding partnerships can be a terrible waste of time. But if you decide to enter into a partnership, focus on the cheap and easy ones and do them right.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com.

Most of you have only met the superficial version of me. I've been thinking a lot about my personal brand in the recent weeks, and I've come to a few major decisions as to how I want people to perceive me. Through my blog, I have complete discrepancy as to how and what I write about myself. Until lately, it's been completely overdone. For some silly reason, half the people who have heard of me perceive me as a child prodigy. The other half either think I'm arrogant or don't care. The purpose of this blog post is to tell you that I'm more of the normal teenage girl than you probably think.

Firstly, I don't deserve the credibility that I have. I'm out there in the tech world and I'm sometimes mentioned on people's blogs. Big deal! I haven't sold a successful startup and I don't have a product that I've launched this year. Yet somehow, I get invited to speaking engagements and other fancy elitist groups. Instead, you should see me for and only for my enthusiasm and potential. I'm off to an early start, but in a few years, that won't matter. Nobody will care in 10 years that I went to college early and failed at a few startups when I was 16 years old. I guess I'm slightly worried that I've been spending too much time talking to you guys and not enough time doing something great. Until I find amazing success, none of you should have the right to call me smart.

Next, I much rather you guys view me as a child prodigy than as a whore. Sure, my personal branding has been overdone, but at least it was overdone in a somewhat positive direction. Unlike Paris Hilton, people have a slight clue as to what I want to do with my life. Smarts are sustainable, looks are not. As one of my friends said, "if you're going to be famous, at least have a business model." People associate my name to business and technology. As for Paris Hilton, well, people look at her as a hot girl with an empty brain. No matter how hard she tries to change her personal brand, people will be stuck in their old ways of thinking. So, if you overdo your personal branding, "do it with a business model" :)

Internet celebrity Julia Allison wrote on her Tumblr yesterday:

I’m in the midst of a transformation right now. Actually, it’s not so much an internal transformation (although there’s that, too) but a realignment - so my outside matches my inside, so the perception matches the reality.

The quote just comes to show that people don't understand who she is. They read about her in Valleywag, but they don't know how fun, enthusiastic, and smart she is in real life. I've been told so many times by my blog readers that I'm different from how they thought I'd be. Some thought that I'd be formal, proper, intelligent and well-spoken, whereas others thought I'd be a snotty-arrogant-uptight-child-prodigy-bitch. One reader suggested that I overdid my professional brand, whereas Julia blurred her personal and professional brands together.

In real life, I'm just an adventurous teenager. I like to do something called having fun. I have something called friends. I go to class, I do my homework, I play instruments, I play sports, and do all the things you'd expect a normal 17 year old kid to do. (minus the many fun business/tech trips I've been on). Sure, I'm in college, but that doesn't mean much about my personality. Instead, try to see through the fog: all of the random bloggers you stalk are real human beings and have lives outside of the internet. Their personal brand may be completely deceiving for all you know.

Like many girls, I've had that desire to have the spotlight on me. And I've gotten quite a lot of spotlight for a girl my age, but I've come to realize that it's nothing more than a distraction. I'm dedicating too much effort to building up my personal brand and not enough in a) leading a normal teenage life and b) working on doing something amazing, whether it be save the world or build a hot startup. As one of my friends Charlie mentioned, the most brilliant people he knows prefer to keep in the shadows. They don't have much of a personal brand, but their smarts and successes create the true credibility one needs to be known. I guess as of late, this idea has been much more appealing to me.

So what does all of this mean for you, me, and my future in blogging?

1) The blog lives on. I'll always continue to blog because I love you guys so much!

2) I've decided to cut wayy back on my conference going. I have many connections as it stands and I don't need to waste more time networking with 50 year olds.

3) You hopefully won't have to see me on Valleywag again. As I've mentioned in other posts, the influx of press gives you a temporary high.

4) It's soo easy to get drawn into the fun culture of Silicon Valley. It's so easy that you sometimes forget to create something of value.

So for now, I'll try to stay in the shadows. I have no problem speaking at conferences or doing interviews or whatever, but I'll remain honest and true to myself: I'm a kid who's yet to succeed in business.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup and the managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. Big thanks to my friends Jacob Locke, Patricia Handschiegel, and Charlie O'Donnell for having helped me gather my thoughts on this.

OK, seriously. Stop spamming me with your startup pitches. Just read my blog, does it look like I'm Michael Arrington, writing about all of your new startups? No! If I want to write about you, it's probably about something you do that's super unique. That or you bribed me with your incredible friendliness. Here are a few tips on how to get me to write about you:

1) Firstly, I don't often write about startups. When I do, I fully endorse the startup or fully despise the startup. It's never something in between. Getting a blogger to write about you involves building a relationship. Most startup marketing people don't understand this concept and send generic emails to bloggers. It doesn't work! So, the best way is to send me a pointless email that tells me how awesome my blog is, even if you don't think it's that great. I've probably fallen for this dozens of times, but hey, it works!

2) Real bribes. Startup founders seem to enjoy taking me out to lunch or dinner. While I was at South by Southwest, I managed to get away without paying for a single meal. How? Well, my blog readers! Half were friends who I wanted to build a lasting connection with, the other other half were random startup founders who wanted nothing more from me but my connections and minimal influence. (no, not that many people read my blog or know who I am.)

3) Do something special and tell me about it. No, I don't mean that you should do something stupid just for attention. For those people, go to Valleywag. For startup founders who did something funny that had a real purpose and intent, let me know about it! Take for example Xobni's recruiting video, which I heard about from my friend Bryan Kennedy.

For the rest of you, I'd suggest following one of my prescribed tips above. Whether it's me or Michael Arrington who you're trying to get a hold of, you can't just send generic emails. Those end up in the spam folder. One blog reader of mine suggested that I "write them up and completely misrepresent their purpose, their name, everything!" While that idea sounds incredibly appealing, I enjoy having people not hate me. :)

More to come!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. She's totally overrated and you all know it.