What is spam? Getting inundated with ads you don't really care about. But what if you suddenly cared about the ad or the product? It's no longer spam!

Spam is not whether you have permission to talk. Spam is not whether you are on solid legal footing. All of those are business procedures. 

For example, say you have permission to email Betty. Betty is 18. She goes to high school. She cares about buying cool clothes. But you, the dumbass marketer, thinking that because you have permission to email her, decide to email her a pitch for life insurance. Why the hell will Betty care about life insurance? Forget that you had permission to email Betty, your email is pure spam to her.

On the other hand, let's talk about Viagra spammers. They email millions of people everyday. A super vast majority consider their email to be spam. But for every million emails they send out, they find a couple guys that buy their product. Think about those couple guys. Do they consider the mail about Viagra a scam? The customers of Viagra spammers do not consider the emails as spam!

So who is better off between the viagra spammer and the so-called permission marketer? Tough to tell. But probably neither. The permission marketer is pitching products that Betty does not care about. The spammer is pissing off 99,999 people to find his one customer. Again, bad idea.

What you want to do is email 99 people who are all very likely to care about. It can bring you more business and fans than emailing the whole world.

I'd like to argue that most of the marketing spend by startups on items like tshirts, hats, flyers are an utter waste of money.

So how do you build a brand on a single campus? Then do it consistently on other campuses? By anally focusing on the bottomline: getting students to use your damn product. 

Now, go back to my original argument about tshirts, flyers etc. There is nothing inherently wrong with them. In fact, they can all work. But the tshirt is not the strategy. Doing the leg work to calculate the # of tshirts it takes to get x number of users on average is the strategy. Most startups that go the whole give-stuff-away route are really copping out from their real duty of meticulously creating a marketing plan which at its backbone is focused on quantitative measurable results.

For college campuses, the best example is RedBull. How many times have you see some random dude on campus with a redbull tshirt on? Very few. How often do I see RedBull chicks giving out free RedBull? Very often! RedBull is not leaving it up to luck and randomness that you might end up trying and liking their product. No, they have it down to a formula that if x number of their reps on y number of campuses give out z number of cans, over the longterm they can make _____ dollars of profit.

The exception....

Here's what tshirts and other free goodies pushing your brand are really good for: making you and your team feel good. Wearing my brand's tshirt does not really make me more passionate(probably because I've hit a ceiling) but the idea of seeing your team, wearing the same t-shirt, can be uplifting. This goes back to psychology 101.

Another thing...if you have money and you can give away TONNES of tshirts, it may help you SOLIDIFY your branding. But here's the deal: branding does not equal business. Just because tonnes of people have heard of Redbull does not mean tonnes or even a fraction will try it out.

So if you are doing a tshirt campaign or a flier campaign, you have to do it at almost a massive level. You cannot have lazy ass people passing out 50 flyers in a marketsize of 20,000 students. It will hardly register. You can pass out 50 flyers every single day for a year and people will barely know your brand. Instead, you may need to pass out 50,000 flyers over the whole year to get ____% brand recognition. And don't be surprised if you have to pass out many many times more to get product use. 

Bottomline: (a) know why you are giving stuff away for free on campus (b) don't do it if you cannot answer A or if you don't have a lot of money to throw.

I've talked about the Dope Test. It's only appropriate to talk about the Crap Test.

Actually, this one is a lot simpler: you build something for free, get a tonne of people to your site only to see them leave and never come back.

Really, that's it. Your product is crap. Go back to the whiteboard and get back to work. No worries, you're not alone. Almost every successful dude in the industry has done that.

How many times have you read a testimonial that goes something like "blabla is just an awesome book! OMG I just love it!"

Bullshit.

You don't really dig that product. In fact, I doubt if you've even read or used it. Perhaps you flipped through pages of it. But when you are an exec of a top firm and you have a testimonial for every other book that comes out in a genre, it's not too hard to connect the dots. 

If you are somebody and you're doing a testimonial for a friend's product, I don't mind you bullshitting. Just do it well? Please?

Example: I am checking out Rework, Jason Fried's latest book on Amazon. I scroll down to the testimonials. There are almost a half-dozen of testimonials from some of the big ges t names in the industry. Here are two random ones:

"Inspirational...REWORK is a minimalist manifesto that's profoundly practical. In a world where we all keep getting asked to do more with less, the authors show us how to do less and create more."--Scott Rosenberg, Co-Founder of Salon.com and author of DREAMING IN CODE and SAY EVERYTHING

"For me REWORK posed a new challenge: stifling the urge to rip out each page and tape it to my wall … Amazing, powerful, inspirational -- those adjectives might make me sound like a fawning fan, but REWORK is that useful. After you've finished it, be prepared for a new feeling of clarity and motivation."--Kathy Sierra co-creator of the bestselling Head First series and founder of javaranch.com

Can you see the problem? We have two fans of the book just going "ZOMGGGG!!!!". If you are Kathy Sierra or Scott Rosenberg, it would be a lot better to pick out a thing or two that you kind of liked about the book.

See, the fact that you are doing a testimonial has already told me you like that book. Now use the words to tell me why you like it. Cite a page number or a chapter that really blew you away! And no, saying the book is "powerful" or "inspirational" is not telling me why you like it. It's the worst kinda bullshit you can serve.

Building a successful company boils down to how much crap you can take before giving up.

That's not a new sentiment.

The question is, how can you prepare for the shit that is ahead? Here's how I have been doing it:

1. Create a running list of milestones for next two months(update it every two weeks)
2. For each milestone, note down every kind of problem that can come up

Look, there is a breed of people who excel at whatever challenge that comes up. I am not one of 'em. It's a lesson you learn once you've been burned enough. For me, it helps to know what kind of danger and caution lie ahead. That way, I can give it all to make sure the shit does not happen. Or that if it does happen, that I am ready to address it.

What actually happens is once you are aware of the possible problems, they become part of your peripheral vision. Throughout the day, your brain can now map out solutions to address it. It's no longer surprising for me to run into a solution to a problem while having breakfast or just slacking around. None of this would be possible if you never told your brain what problems you need a solution to.

So plan out your shit. Then hand it over to your brain.

One of the biggest lessons of my entrepreneurial life is that people don't either like or dislike a product. Instead, it all happens on a scale. On the left end of the scale, your product is absolutely disliked. On the right extreme of the scale, your product is so liked it passes the Dope Test.

What's the Dope Test? It's when your customers want your product soooooo badly that they are willing to do royally embarassing things to get access to your service.

I was selling a Dope product in my freshman year. I won't talk a lot about it. But basically, there were a bunch of people that really really wanted it but for one reason or another could not pay for it. So I thought to myself "what's the absolute most embarrassing thing I can get these people to do to prove they really want my product?". I picked a really embarassing Hindi song and if you wanted to get access to my product without paying, you'd have to sing this song, send me the audio, and give me rights to broadcast it. I got over a dozen submissions within an hour of making this offer. Pretty dope!

This model has now been perfected by businesses like Gambit and Peanut Labs. These companies work with partners who have a Dope product. Gambit and Peanut Labs bring in the "embarrassing"--such as filling out stupid offers. It's a win-win for everyone. Users get to experience the service for free. The owners of the service get paid by Gambit. Gambit gets paid by the parent company that hired Gambit to find the people to do the stupid stuff. 

There is so much buzz about Zynga's incredible revenue numbers. But if I am Zynga, I would be seriously concerned about the company's longterm sustainability given how much it relies on Facebook.

You cannot tell me that a company can be making hundreds of millions on my platform...and that I wouldn't envy them in some way. Yes, at first it is very flattering if I am facebook. In the longrun, when you have revenue and profits to worry about, you will not think that much about screwing some of your top earners like Zynga in order to get a slice of their $. If I am Zynga, I probably don't mind giving Facebook a slice of my earnings. In fact, I probably want to give Facebook a slice if that means my business gets some certainty and protection from the random nature of online platforms sans formal agreements.

A lot of people cite Microsoft Windows as an example that platform plays don't screw up the little guys. Very True. Except Zynga is no longer the little guy. And when Microsoft saw the potential of a word processor, they didn't sit back for another vendor to use their platform. Instead, they built Office.

What stops Facebook from setting up a hugeass lab to make games? And then deeply integrate the games into every Facebook account? I wonder if this would lead to any anticompetitive lawsuits like Windows shipping with IE? Regardless, it would definitely spice up a new genre of conspiracy theories if Facebook gets into gaming and random gaming apps on facebook have mysterious downtimes. 

Facebook will have an unfair advantage the day they get into gaming. That should worry every one of these super performing gaming networks, especially if Facebook fails to find another sustainable and promising revenue model. And remember, the bar for "sustainable" and "promising" is incredibly high for a company of Facebook's size.

When running a startup, you are making an INSANE number of decisions day in and day out. The source of most of these decisions is your experience. Experience failing, experience succeeding, experience reading about others in similar situations. You associate the x decision with y result because you come across it beyond a certain threshold. 

There are times where I literally make a judgement on my idea or another person's idea...and STOP myself to think for a minute or two. Problem is, if I did that about most decisions, I'd spend all day busy running analysis. If I don't do this, I fear turning into a pessimistic hag wayyyy before my time.

My most common reply when people pitch me their ideas is DON'T ASK ME! I can only be clueless. Go try it and find out for yourself! I am sure there are people with sounder judgement whose advice is worth seeking and taking. I'm not it. And 99% of folks giving out advice aren't it.

My advice is just a buncha biases formed over years of many losses and small victories. Next time I offer you advice, please consider me a fool. 

Recently I heard a speaker give a great talk. At the end, I asked him a question relating to his success. I followed it with a request for advice. His answer consisted of the most common cliche.

"Damn it." I told myself. I know that answer. If that is what I was looking for, I wouldn't come talk to you.

I was hoping we could cut through the cliche. Instead, that is all you have to offer me?