11.    Stop avoiding your team. There are often times you want to curl up and cry, but a leader can not hide behind his desk, no matter how much he might want to. A leader must be visible in good times and in bad. Especially in bad times. When a child is scared and hurt, he needs his parents the most. Your team is your company; keeping them happy is one of your top priorities.

12.    Stop pretending to be Superman. A leader doesn't need to be perfect. Don't pretend that everything is always fine and that you never make mistakes. You might think it makes you look strong and brave, or makes people look up to you. In reality, it comes off as inauthentic. You don't have to flaunt your failures, but hiding them is unnecessary too. Just talk about them honestly, and ask people how they think you could improve.

13.    Stop being so secretive about your idea. You may be scared someone will steal your idea. Don't be. Just don't be. Such a beginner mistake. Not even an amateur mistake. It is just a total rookie mistake. You will never find product-market fit by keeping your idea secret until it is perfect. You need to talk about your idea. A lot. To a lot of people. Because honestly, your idea probably sucks just as much as you are secretly afraid it might. One of the reasons many founders are so secretive about their ideas is because they don't want to be told it is a stupid idea. This is just denial. Don't be in denial. Anyhow, the people you are so afraid will steal your idea are too busy working on their own big ideas to steal yours.

14.    Stop falling in love with your idea before product-market fit. "The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death." --Steven Pressfield. The more confident an early-stage startup founder is, the more concerned I am for them. Of course they can't just go around telling people they are scared to death all the time. But when you are an early-stage founder and really in love with what you built, you will never seek the changes necessary to really make your product great. Read the Instagram Story to get a great example of a team who wouldn't stop until they really found product-market fit. If their love of Burbn (predecessor to Instagram) had held them back, they would probably be out of business by now.

15.    Stop ignoring marketing. Even before you launch your product, you should be marketing. By marketing, I don't mean press releases and media attention. The best marketing is word of mouth. Getting people to talk about you. You only get word of mouth by creating real fans. You create fans by adding real value to people's lives. You can add value to people's lives in many ways besides your product or service. You can write tutorials and provide useful blogging content that isn't directly related to your startup at all, but related to your industry. Some excellent examples of this include Signal vs. Noise from Basecamp, DigitalOcean Tutorials, and The Buffer Blog. Create fans, not just users. Most startups don't even try.

16.    Stop comparing yourself with other startups. Startup envy isn't a good enough motivator to get you through the tough times. Thinking that such-and-such startup was just acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars and you are so much smarter than they are is not a productive thought. I have written about how to cope with startup envy before, but it is better if you just prevent yourself from getting envious in the first place. In fact, it is probably a fantastic idea to stop reading Hacker News and TechCrunch altogether until after you don't work for your startup any more.

17.    Stop ignoring history. Trying to raise venture capital for the first time? You are not the first person to do this. Read as much as you can, and surround yourself with people who have raised money recently (not 10-plus years ago; within the past two to three years). Trying to build a payment company but you've never built a payment company before? Don't try to rediscover everything that worked and didn't work for others. Surround yourself with advisers who have done it before. Get introduced to Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. Read their biographies before you meet them. Pick their brains. Offer them stock in your new venture. Hustle smarter, not harder.

18.    Stop procrastinating the launch of your company. Procrastination is just giving into your inner demons. You don't want to know if it will succeed or fail, but all you are doing is shooting your own feet and cutting off your legs and arms. Go read The War of Art, now. I'm serious. Steven Pressfield calls procrastination a form of your own personal "resistance." The closer to launching your startup, the stronger the resistance feels. You will make up excuses; you will do anything to put it off another week, another month. You can't find product-market fit unless you have a product to try to fit with.

19.    Stop launching too early. Launching a "minimal viable product," or MVP, does not mean building the crappiest proof of concept and launching it as quickly as you can. Though "lean" startups are a hot trend right now, many founders misunderstand what an MVP is. Build a product worth using, not a proof of concept. If an MVP was a proof of concept, it would be called a POC instead. Build something that someone would pay for. This means making the product look professional and polished. This means finishing enough details that it doesn't look like a fly-by-night endeavor.

20.    Stop avoiding thinking about revenue. Stop comparing yourself to Twitter and Facebook, which didn't worry about revenue until many years after being founded. Stop saying you are the next Instagram. I'll believe you about as much as I would believe you telling me you are holding a winning mega-lottery ticket. Growth is great, and great growth can be wonderful to experience, but cash flow is king for almost all startups. Don't tell yourself that you are an exception; you are risking too much if you are wrong.

SOURCE: Answer by Lucas Carlson, CIO at CenturyLink, Craftsman Founder at AppFog, on Quora