21.    Stop using your lack of funding as an excuse. With today's technology, you do not need to spend millions of dollars to validate most startup ideas. You can usually validate with just a few thousand dollars that people want your product in some form or another, or will even pay for it. Haven't built your product yet because you think you need funding first? Build another product that won't cost so much. Haven't started selling your product because you think you need funding first? Richard Branson built a billion-dollar business without venture capital. You are making up excuses; go find solutions.

22.    Stop just following your passion. Passion is an energy that can power and motivate you, but easily blind you too. Passion can blind you to truth; it can deceive you. I have seen many founders blind with passion. Passion can blind you to knowing when you need to pivot or change your product. If the Burbn founders had been overly passionate about their first app, they would have never created Instagram. The trick is to get passionate about product-market fit, not about the product as it is today. Keep tweaking until you find the fit. You will know when you find it; there won't be any doubt. "When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion." --Scott Adams

23.    Stop asking people to sign NDAs before discussing your startup. Early-stage startup ideas are not worth protecting, because they almost all suck. Yes, your baby is ugly. Sorry, but it is the truth. After you raise a few million in venture capital and you are setting up a meeting with a large public company, then you can ask to put an NDA in place. However, even then, you will have to sign their NDA (they don't do special NDAs for every startup they talk to), and thus you probably won't get much protection.

24.    Stop lying to yourself when things are not right. How long have you been telling yourself that the employee (you know which one I mean) is not pulling his weight and is causing more harm than good? How many times have you turned the other way hoping the problem will go away? Stop it. Deal with it. Today. Now. Really. You can't afford to put problems off to the side at a startup. There is no time. Deal with your problems today; stop putting them off. Stop hoping they will resolve themselves. This is business; do your job. Deal with your mess.

25.    Stop trying to get away with not knowing your unit cost. Unit cost is how much your service costs you to run per customer. "But I'm a SaaS, Lucas!" Stop it. You are a business, right? You have customers? You have service bills? Take out the fixed costs, then divide the rest of your service bills by the number of customers you have. Find out how much it costs you to support one more customer on average. Make sure you are charging your customers a lot more than their unit cost; otherwise you are a charity, not an investible business. You can't start calculating unit cost too early. It is key to understanding cash flow and profitability.

26.    Stop believing that hiring salespeople will cure your revenue problems. Reality check: Salespeople don't figure out how to sell your product. You do. The only reason you should hire a salesperson should be because you don't scale and you have been doing more sales meetings than you can handle lately. A founder/CEO doing sales calls? Yes. Never done a sales call before? Doesn't matter. Start now. It is your job to figure out how to sell your product. You need to perfect your sales pitch. You need to create a great deck that works. Once you know it works, you let a salesperson shadow you until he or she can say the same things you do.

27.    Stop postponing the calculation of your cost of user acquisition. Cost to acquire a customer (a.k.a. CAC) is one of the most important metrics an online business has. If you watch Shark Tank, you know they always ask entrepreneurs for the number up front. It has been extremely well studied by top-tier investors such as Bessemer, which has published great resources on learning about CAC. To calculate CAC, you will need to know your business numbers inside and out, which you should already know. If you don't, then figuring out how to calculate CAC will get you asking the right questions. Hire an accountant to help you double-check your work and assumptions. Like lawyers, don't try to skimp here; you future self will thank you. Like unit cost, you can't start calculating CAC too early.

28.    Stop hiring contractors instead of employing great engineers. It is so, so, so tempting to just say, "Fuck it. I'll just hire a part-time contractor to build out my prototype." Don't do it. Don't give in to the temptation. Hiring full-time employees takes longer and is harder and can cost more, but the long-term benefits will always outweigh the short-term gains. A startup is not about the product; it is about the team. A great team will always outdo a great product. Hiring full-time employees is about building a team. Hiring contractors is a Band-Aid full of dirt and bacteria. Startups are a marathon, not a sprint. It is more important to slowly build an excellent team, a motivated team, the right team ... than it is to get your product out of the door faster.

29.    Stop ignoring your Ideal Customer. "All novels are really letters aimed at one person." --Stephen King, On Writing. That person is called the Ideal Reader. Novels are subjective; not everyone will like any given novel, so you don't even try to please everyone. You try to please your Ideal Reader. Stephen King's Ideal Reader is his wife. Whenever he gets stuck, he thinks of his wife and asks himself: What would make her laugh/cry/pee her pants? When you get stuck, always ask yourself: Who is your Ideal Customer? Whom are you trying to make pee their pants?

30.    Stop picking such small problems to solve. Will someone pay for your app that increases Twitter followers? Yes. Can you grow that into a $100 million a year business? No. It is a small idea. It is a small market. There is nothing wrong if your goal is to create a small business that augments your income or might even support your whole lifestyle. But that kind of business will never get venture capital, nor should it, so don't even try. You are wasting investors' time and your time. A real startup's goal should be to change the world for the better. If increasing Twitter followers is a temporary revenue-generating bootstrapping step to a next-gen marketing platform that improves the connection between brands and customers... that is a big problem to solve. That is an investable idea.

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