What do you wish you had known before starting up ?
webwright: - Charging money is a whole new learning curve.  Our free product was humming along.  We launched a premium product and...  "What?!  It's not taking off?!"  There's a lot to learn about where to put the "pay wall" with a freemium offering, how to get users to upgrade, how to optimize a public/brochureware site for paying conversion, etc.  With content sites, I imagine there's a lot to learn about selling ads, remnant ad space, ad networks, etc.- Work on your public facing site a LOT.  And measure it.  In the early days, it's a constant salesperson for you.  We all remark on how bad/confusing sites are, but lots of us treat the brochureware part of our business as a red-headed stepchild.  After over a year of having a paid offering, we just redesigned our site and there was a 400%+ increase in conversion rate.  Thinking about the revenue ramifications if we'd done that a year ago (or even 6 months ago) makes me wince.  We were leaving lots of money on the table.- Don't pitch big VCs unless you want big money.  They take LOTS of meetings to get to a yes/no and make very few investments.- Focus on relationships when fundraising.  Almost every investor we got was through an introduction (social proof wins).- How fast your site/app is is REALLY important.- Focus on retention as a metric.  The compound interest effect of retention (or return visits if you're a content site) are HUGE.  Do the math.- Keep your burn low and don't underestimate how long it takes to get to profitability.  We raised more than we wanted to and it turns out we needed it.- Marketing/sales wins.  Almost always.  The quality of your product is a multiplier on the success of your business.  It's easier to build a great marketing engine on top of a great product than the inverse.  VERY VERY few businesses launch a product and ride word of mouth to greatness.- PR isn't all that.  Great for SEO and social proof, but it's NOT a substitute for a sales/marketing engine.