Businesses often fail when it comes to doing something as simple as talking to their customers. I'm not sure if it's because they're lazy or if because they don't feel the need to, but it's probably the one big thing that can make or break a company Don't ignore your customers! Few thoughts:

1) Ignore the customers and they'll flock to the competitor. When I board an airplane, I expect the pilot to greet me. (thank you, Jetblue) When I buy my clothing from Barney's, I expect store assistants to help me with figuring out what I want to buy. When the help isn't there, I'll just cross the street and buy from the better company.

True story: I was looking for sun glasses in a shopping mall, and I was prepared to buy. I walked in, but the store assistant was too busy tooling around with his Facebook, so I left. I went to the store next door and spent $400 because the man at the door greeted me and gave me his honest feedback on which sunglasses looked good and which didn't. Lesson of the story, always talk to your customers.

2) Ignore your customers and miss out on what they're actually looking for. Company executives are apparently so busy working on their companies that they have little time to solicit the feedback of customers. Problem is, how are the execs to know what's working and what isn't? I think a great example would be Mattel: they sell Barbie dolls to preteen girls, but the execs are probably in their 40's. Unfortunately, girls don't aspire to elegantly dressed dolls anymore. How are the execs to know that the girls of today aspire to be anorexic sluts? Without the constant feedback, the execs would never have known this!

3) Talking to users = Making new friends. I love it when people talk to their users, whether it be about the product or about nothing at all. Hair stylists do this best: You're stuck in a chair and they're cutting your hair. What else is there to do besides talk to the hair stylist about the latest gossip on Valleywag? Encourage casual contact between you and your users and maybe you'll meet your most loyal word-of-mouth marketers.

All of this comes back to how I run this blog. I write a lot, but I want to hear from readers. Matter of fact, this blog post was inspired by a blog reader! Without the feedback, I wouldn't know what you guys wanted to hear. As always, please feel free to reach out and/or comment with your thoughts.

With much love to my passionate readers,

Jessica

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college.

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.

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.

Wow, what is it with Thursday, February 7th? I've been having terrible experiences with not just United, but now with Comcast. I first tried setting up recurring payment on their website, but apparently they aren't processing my card. So I get a phone call from a rep, telling me to call them immediately to figure out billing. I call them up, press 2 for billing, and get sent to an operator. I wait. I listen to hold music for about 12 minutes, and nobody's picking up. It's midnight. How can this be? Usually, the billing department is fastest to pick up and the support department takes the longest.

On another note, I got an email from a pilot at Virgin America! He showed that he actually cared about my experience with Virgin... now how many airline pilots do that? Only the ones who feel passionate for the company they work for.

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. 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.

Ugh. ServerBeach killed our server this morning at about 4AM PST. Their support forums tell us there was a power outage, but then our mysql server wouldn't boot up and all of that means lost users and lost revenues over a stupid power failure.

Our first reaction was to go ape shit and yell at them, but having been in the hosting business before, I understand what they're going through. Most of this isn't directly their fault, but they do promise us almost perfect uptime. Serverbeach hosts companies such as Youtube; and when infrastructure goes down, a lot of money is lost by everyone. Even if the root cause of the power failure was environmental, fingers will be pointed at ServerBeach because of their promises of superb service towards businesses.

Although I did say I'd forgive them, I would like some reimbursement. Their SLA reads:

In the event ServerBeach fails to meet the Replacement Guarantee or customer experiences Infrastructure Downtime or Network Downtime as outlined herein, provided Customer follows the procedures outlined herein, ServerBeach will apply a credit ("Credit") to customer's account in an amount equal to five percent (5%) of the Net MRC for the affected account for each half hour of downtime or fraction thereof. "Net MRC" means the monthly recurring charge for hosting service for the server experiencing the issue excluding any add-on or optional services which are not included as part of the standard hosting plan but are included as part of such customer's monthly recurring charge.

That's just lame. I want 3 months of free service!!! Now I remember why I got out of the dedicated server business back at age 14... because I had to deal with customers like me.

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, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.