Since going fulltime on my startup inDinero.com, things have been crazy to say the least. Many of you probably noticed that we just launched on TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, WebWorkerDaily, and various other blogs on Friday July 2nd. And since launch, business has been even more exciting! I haven't talked much about inDinero in the past because I didn't think I had much valuable information to share with others. But I learned a lot from the launching experience, and it made me better understand lean startup principles: how to build a startup with very little money, and with very little time to experiment with ideas. Room for failure is super low because there's only so much time you have before running out of cash. Here are some things we did and why they worked for us: 1) We built vaporware, and lots of it. I recently wrote that advertising a feature before actually building it should be highly encouraged while building a startup. For example, on inDinero, we would supposedly allow people to integrate data from web applications such as Freshbooks and Shoeboxed. (screenshots below) - but if they wanted to use the functionality, we would instead send them to a page that told them the feature was coming soon. As a result of that, we quickly figured out what our users wanted us to build. And dozens of people would email me asking for Freshbooks and Shoeboxed integration, and others would even suggest Quickbooks Online integration. Nobody was upset that we advertised vaporware. :) 2) Making real money. I'll admit that I was scared that introducing a free plan would divert attention away from the paid plans, but people continue to upgrade everyday. I was also scared that our pricing structure wouldn't be right out of the gate, but ends up that it doesn't matter too much - it's a continuously iterative process, and we're still trying to figure out what fair and ideal pricing looks like. One thing that's definitely helped us was publishing a phone number on the plans pages. When people are uncertain, they want to know that humans are around - so we've answered peoples' questions on pricing, learned about our users' needs, and even got customer testimonials just from offering a phone number. As Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com says, great customer support (and especially great phone support) is a fantastic way to get users to evangelize and love you. 3) Continuous Iteration. This is just the start of inDinero. I have no clue where we'll be in a few months from now, and it's hard for me to even know what the product will look like in four weeks from now. But I'd highly stress launching sooner rather than later, even if your bugs aren't fully fleshed out, because you'll realize what the actual top priorities should be. At inDinero, we hesitated launching on the basis that our screws weren't bolted in tight enough. But it ended up that after launching, none of our users cared about the problems we would have spent our time working on. If you're asking yourself the question "are we ready to launch yet or should we continue solidifying product?", I'd probably lean towards launching. You'll know exactly what's wrong with the product, you'll get emails from hundreds of people excited to use your product, and it'll give you enough adrenaline to continue during times good and bad. Curious with where inDinero is going in the next few weeks? Read my blog post called "inDinero's Vision for August".

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.

Everybody has been talking about TED this week. My question is, why does everybody care so much?

To be honest, I haven't put so much thought into this until recently. I always thought of TED as a great conference for brilliant people to exchange ideas and help each other, but I didn't know that everybody in the valley has been talking about it. Just a few hours ago, I was reading an article on Business Week by Sarah Lacy titled, "Why I'm Fed Up with TED." I'm sure this Sarah person is an incredibly kind and awesome person, but the many articles are telling me that people want to go to TED mainly for the status symbol. Sure, it's a resume builder, but it's as if everybody lost sight of what being part of TED is supposed to be about. Perhaps its my ignorance of this "status symbol" that got me into TED in the first place?

I wanted to go to college early not because it would make me look good. Matter of fact, it was a terrible decision for my social life and for my future as a "normal" college student. Going to college early means that I would have to transfer into another college as a junior, but most colleges have a much lower admission rate for transfer students. I went to college early for other reasons: to be in an open environment where students were actually motivated to learn. Kids here don't care so much about looking good. They want to learn, regardless of the grades they receive. I feel as if TED is similar in this regard. They actively seek members who want to inspire each other with brilliant ideas. They're TEDsters because they want to help each other and help the world more than they want to help themselves.

This does NOT mean that people who aren't part of TED are dumb. It simply means that they have an extremely limited number of spots and they want to attract quality attendees who think less about status and more about the core reasons for being a TEDster.

Just think about. What are your true reasons for wanting to go to TED? One reader suggested, "would TED matter if you couldn't wear nametags?"

I was reading a techcrunch article about the virality of youtube videos, and the author has done something right. Basically, the guy claims that youtube videos are successful and viral because companies such as the one he owns helps do the marketing. Here are my thoughts:

1) The guy's smart. He gets an opportunity to brag about his skill on techcrunch and it comes off as great self-advertising.

2) His guest blog post has amassed over 400 comments and trackbacks. A conversation was created, and people were pissed off at him and decided to interact more than they normally would. Also smart.

3) This blog post in particular got many trackbacks, likely because he asked bloggers to write their responses to the blog post. And no, I'm not one of them.

4) Techcrunch readers seem to be pissed off by how "unethical" he is. This may mean being part of the conversation by creating multiple youtube accounts. This may mean deleting all of the super negative comments. This may mean creating a stir just for the sake of bringing back traffic. If you ask me, that's being smart, but if not done right, can really bite you in the ass.

5) Average joes like to believe that videos and business succeed by luck. I've asked many of my peers about how they think Youtube succeeded - most would say the founders just so happened to be at the right place at the right time, but that's only half the battle. Every creator of every popular piece of content worked their butt off to bring it to its level of success.

The bottom line: This author is smart. His business tactics debatable, but smart, and show how success doesn't come from waiting for money to fall from the sky. For all we know, half of the comments made to that techcrunch post were made by the author himself.

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.

I was surfing through PayPerPost.com after reading about how bloggers who make money from the site lost their Google PageRank! I clicked to check out one of the featured members' blogs, and I laughed at my discovery...

I was sent to a website called texas-sweetie.blogspot.com, a blog written by a pregnant Texan woman trying to make money on her blog by taking on PayPerPost advertising opportunities. Only problem being, most of her blog posts are clearly advertisements that she's paid to post, so who the hell would want to regularly follow her "writing?" Below is a sample of her daily writing:

... Chemises are mostly on sale now that saves you a couple bucks when you buy one or more. Check out the website.You will find sexy costumes,sexy clothes,plus size lingerie and many more. You can also pick a sexy gift set for her under $25. Go shop now and let the woman you love be feel even more sexier and beautiful...

Wow, I'm now more compelled than ever to buy myself a chemise... but not really!!!

What's even funnier is, the blog posts on her front page that ARENT advertisements talk about PayPerPost. Observe:

Strange as it is,PPP suddenly got exciting with a lot of opps coming out minutes ago and then quickly got quiet. I don't understand.They seem to give all the opps at once then if you are slow,you end up grabbing one or two opps.

Luckily,I learned how to be fast so I can have few opps to post. I am just hoping that all of my newly posted entries are gonna get auto approved as it my only way to now that I am doing well in my blogging. Still pretty sleepy here but it's ok. Me and my baby are gonna be fine because God is taking care of us.Happy Friday morning everyone!

Hah, no way! So you're basically admitting that the entire purpose of your blog is to make money through PayPerPost opportunities, eh? I'll give her a little credit for trying so desperately hard to make money for her baby, but seriously - blogs like this represent what PayPerPost is. I've seen other blogs who do a way better job at doing "social advertising," but how is this one woman able to get away with such bad writing?

I guess Michael Arrington and Nick Denton aren't far off when they say PayPerPost has some serious problems... As a disclosure, I signed up for PayPerPost to see what it was like and how it worked, but never would I accept money to write positively about a company... When companies send me something, they do so full knowing that I might just call their product/service lame.

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.

It's a pity that Rackspace, a company with a stellar reputation for uptime and "Fanatical Support" experienced hours of downtime for clients in the Fort Worth data center. After putting in millions of dollars into infrastructure, how could something like this happen?

First, disclosures: I used to be happy Rackspace customer. I studied the way they did business and implemented it in my own dedicated server solutions business back in 2004. I'm friendly with the founders/former management of Rackspace and Serverbeach, and I've learned so much from their advice.

Just a few weeks ago, Serverbeach experienced a power outage. They took the necessary steps to get people back online within a few hours, but it was sure to cost clients thousands of hours of man power and money to fix. The damage is still there - downtime puts full time businesses out of order.

When a hosting company goes down, so many levels of the business chain are hurting. For example, I used to have servers at Sagonet, and when they had problems, all of my racks there were down. When my racks were down, thousands of websites were shut off from the world. Thousands of websites shut down mean that not only are my clients mad at me, but their clients are mad at them. And those clients may have to use these websites to serve THEIR clients, and so on. The loop can go on forever, and it all comes down to a datacenter hickup.

At that point, there's nothing you can do but wait for the machines to come back online. And once they're online, a shit ton of complain emails are bound to go to the datacenter, the leasers, the resellers, the clients, and even the clients of the clients. Companies like Rackspace who manage both the datacenter and the actually sold services are forced to compensate for lost time, or face terrible press and a huge loss of clientele.

It's particularly frustrating for Rackspace that all of this happened from a stupid truck accident that brough a transformer down. The open letter says that they had to shut some infrastructure down just to get to the accident victim. I'm sure the high level Rackspace clients wouldn't have minded leaving that poor soul to suffer if it meant keeping their websites running.

When I was in the business, problems weren't as terrible, because I targeted small businesses. Many of them wouldn't even notice downtime! Rackspace, on the other hand, serves clients such as Motorola and JC Morgan Chase. And when their services go down, the entire world is bound to know.

I'll give Rackspace credit for doing the right thing. They wrote an open letter to their clients, took responsibility, and promised compensation.

Unfortunate for them, their reputation may be somewhat tarnished from this stupid accident.

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.