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.

I've read in many books and blogs that six or seven is the magic number for how many times you must ask someone to do something before they buy in. The more I think about it, the more I believe it. This applies to both salespeople and average Joes.

Lets start with a salesman example. Back when I ran immature dedicated server company #1, I remembered having to follow up on my leads several times before they would convert into a sale. Most people in the business didn't bother. Either someone bought or they didn't, and other companies would dismiss their leads if the leads didn't buy on first glance. I found myself chatting with prospective clients, sending them fact sheets, sending them follow-up emails, and occasionally becoming friends with these prospective clients! It takes a little more effort than salespeople prefer, but commitment truly works.

The next example applies to the average Joe. When you don't get your way in regards to anything, it doesn't help to ask again. For example, I was having trouble redeeming my United frequent flyer miles for my trip to Vancouver. I called a total of seven times and wasn't able to get help five of the seven times I called. The first two times, the operator told me that there was no way that I could book a flight from New York to Vancouver, then from Vancouver to San Francisco. Why? They didn't have a good reason. They claimed that it was just "part of the rules," but I think they're just ignorant. I'm the customer; therefore, I'm always right no matter how wrong I probably am.

On call attempt #3, an operator told me that I could redeem my flyer miles going multi-city. Great! Unfortunately, I had to wait for some other charges to apply to my account and call again the next day. I called again the next day and the operator gave me a new problem: that my mom would have to pickup my plane tickets from the airport because I was using her frequent flyer miles. Knowing my mom, she'd probably go ape shit on me. I called three more times, and I finally got through. This non-Indian gay guy operator was probably the friendliest and best-informed United phone operator I spoke with. He mailed my tickets overnight and the rest is history.

All of this feeds back to the main idea: If you don't get your way, ask again. If that doesn’t work, ask again. And again. Seriously, it works!

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. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

So many books talk about how entrepreneurs did this or did that, but it's all about the team. I didn't do jack compared to my counterparts. I found a few super motivated kids my age who wanted to join in on the business venture, and we split the work out depending on where our skill sets were. I did business, sales, marketing, and intermediate level tech support. Alan was a hardcore techy. Tyler filled in for both me and Alan. This brings me to my next lesson from when I supposedly ran a business back when I was 13: Your team matters more than you do. Make them happy, and they'll save you when you need them most.

Mishap #1: (4 months in business, 300 customers) I was driving down the freeway with my family on a rainy day in July. We were driving up the Jersey Coast, going to our next vacation destination. All of my responsibilities were temporarily designated to one of my co-founders, Tyler, and I received a terrible phone call:

"Hey umm... our servers are down! All of our customers are bitching at us!"

Oh. Bloody. Hell. We had downtime for the next 48 hours and eventually found out that one of our customers, once again, was phishing. In other words, somebody with an account on our primary machine was pretending to be PayPal and sent out fake emails. All of this from OUR server. This cost the company a few hundred dollars in revenue and thousands more in potential business, but it was a good lesson that I learned young. a) invest in security, b) figure out ways to get your customers online if such a problem ever happened, c) compensate them for having suffered through your stupidity, and d) be transparent and honest as to what happened. We failed to do all of the above when we needed to. Fortunately, we learned from these mistakes. We ended up giving out heavily discounted services and emailing updates to customers when they suffered through our careless mistakes.

Mishap #2: (9 months in business, 700 customers) I was in a hotel room on December 31st a few years ago. It was 11:59 and 15 seconds (+/- 10 seconds) and suddenly I get a phone call. Of course, another problem while I'm trying to enjoy my vacation. Co-founder Tyler tells me that some f**khead hacked into all of our servers and wiped off our clients' accounts. Not. Funny. Except this time, we learned from our mistakes. My other co-founder, Alan, was also a nerdy Asian. He was brilliant. An absolute genius. He found out what happened and he patched the problems up within 15 minutes by reverting to our backup machines. Since this was new years, nobody was looking. We were so fast with getting things back online that not a single customer sent us a support ticket. This brings me to my next super important lesson: Always critique yourself and learn from your mistakes. If something terrible happens, (such as if some dickhead deletes all of your customers' accounts,) then learn. Figure out what happened, patch it up, and promise that it'll never ever happen again in the future. And if somehow it does, you're going to lose business.

More to come on my stories from when I was a stupid, arrogant, teenage entrepreneur!

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. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

From Valleywag: How is it that major retailers aren't prepared for black friday and cyber monday? Sears.com went down after having "high volume," but that's just sad, considering that this weekend was huge for sales.

Not only should they be prepared for a huge traffic spike, but they definitely should embrace internet sales more. Brian Solis suggested that internet retailers make huge sales that happen from midnight until 5AM on "Cyber Monday" - only problem being, major retailers are scared that it'll take away from their retail sales. While the excuse is to be expected and somewhat understandable, there are plenty of people like me (and Brian) who wouldn't bother waiting on line at such an early time Friday morning just to save some money. If we could buy from the comfort of our own homes, that would be amazing. Not to mention, I'm much more compelled to add things to my shopping cart if all I need to do is click.

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. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.