Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, spoke this week at Webstock in Wellington, New Zealand and covered 10 amazing tips for entrepreneurs. They were truly insightful and obviously came straight from the heart and soul of someone who worked a day job and built his dream after hours. This is our take of what he had to say.

1: Just Build It: You don’t need anyone’s approval and in fact, you probably won’t get it, so don’t even try.

2: Iterate: Build, release and iterate. Make a list of the features you want to create over the next six months and get going! For small companies, once a week; for larger companies, maybe twice a month.

3: Hire Your Boss: Make sure you hire people that you would want to work for, who challenge you and you can learn from.

4: Demand Excellence: Ensure staff are committed to and understand your vision. Passionate, committed staff have a tendency to rub off on people. There is nothing like a new junior developer who runs circles around everyone to get people hyped up and raise the bar! Stay involved in the hiring process as long as you possibly can.

5: Raising Money: The higher your evaluation is, the more equity you have to work with. Beg, borrow and steal. Be creative about finding ways to cut costs. For example, tell the bar you are having a “birthday party” instead of a corporate event (which they would charge you $5,000 for). Rent servers, don’t buy them. Don’t just take the cash, make sure your investors can add value. Stick with angel investment. Venture capital mean board meetings, which is a huge sap on time and resources.

6: Hack the Press: Hit up the lower-end bloggers at your favorite tech blog. They have just as much opportunity to write about your product as any other blogger on the team. Attend the after-event parties. The same crowd that attends the events also goes to the parties, but the parties are free.

7: Invest in Advisors: Give away a small amount of stock to advisors (which they can vest after a few years) who you can call on in a pickle or for general advice as issues arise. Set the ground rules so you and the advisor know how much time you have access to.

8: Connect With the Community: Hold a live town hall where you can collect feedback and get advice from your users.

9: Leverage Your User Base to Spread the Word: Facebook notifications is a great example of how to do this.

10: Analyze Your Traffic: Pay attention to how people are using your site, and then learn and evolve. Use Google Analytics to understand and track traffic sources and entrance and exit paths.

Source: ReadWriteStart

There’s a simple reason that change efforts are difficult, and it’s not that people are lazy or resistant or stupid. Change is hard because it disrupts behaviors that are on “autopilot.” If you were forced to start brushing your teeth with your opposite hand, you’d struggle. When you ask your employees to start acting in a new way, they’ll struggle, too. But here are five ways you can ease that struggle:

1. Find your bright spots and clone them. Psychology tells us that we’re wired to look at the negative. In times of change, we tend to obsess about the problems we’re having, but we need to flip that mentality and search out the “bright spots”–the early signs that things are working. Once we find them, we can clone them. Let’s say you’ve launched a new sales process, and the results have been mixed. Two sales reps have doubled their sales, five others are neutral, three others are down, and one is threatening to quit.Most managers would spend their time dealing with the four struggling reps. Instead you should go study your two “star” reps. What are they doing differently? If you understand how they’re succeeding, you can spread their practices to others. When undertaking any change, ask yourself: What are we doing right now that is working, and how can we do more of it?
2. Shape the environment to support you. Consider Rackspace, an internet hosting company. Early in the company’s history, founder Graham Weston was frustrated with the company’s poor customer service, so he asked where he could find the phone queueing system. (That’s the gizmo that picks up the phone and says, “Press 1 for worthless info, Press 2 for a directory of unfamiliar names, and Press 3 to repeat these options.”)Once he found it he unplugged it. “When a customer calls, that means they need our help, and we’ve got to answer the telephone,” Weston said. What happened? The support reps started answering the phones, of course! By changing the environment, Weston changed his team’s behavior. How can you change your team’s environment to make it easier for them to change?
3. Get behavioral. One of the main mistakes leaders make is that they articulate a new vision but don’t translate it into terms that people on the frontlines can execute. We talked recently with an entrepreneur who wanted his employees to have a “mindset of customer service.” If you’re an employee, when you hear that, all you hear is “buzzword, buzzword, buzzword, jargon, jargon, jargon.” What are you supposed to do?A big-picture vision is great for building morale, but successful change demands specificity, so show people exactly what’s expected of them at the behavioral level. Don’t ask people to adopt the “customer service mindset,” instead, say, “If a customer asks you where a product is, don’t just point in its direction–take the time to walk them to it location.”
4. Conserve self-control. There’s some fascinating research in psychology that demonstrates that self-control is exhaustible–like a muscle. We’ve all experienced this‚Äîyou have a stressful day at work so when you come home you snap at your partner or you have one drink too many.You burned up your self-control at work. And this is critical for change, because all change requires self-control. Not just in the sense of resisting a temptation, like a cookie or a drink, but in the sense that you have to manage your behavior deliberately. Oone implication of this is that you shouldn’t pile on too much change at once‚Äîdon’t pick a handful of New Year’s Resolutions and don’t overhaul every aspect of people’s routines at once at work.
5. Use the power of social pressure. If a third of your employees aren’t filling out their expense reports on time, make sure they know that two-thirds of your employees ARE getting it done! Social norms are powerful. For instance, you might have seen those signs in hotel rooms that urge you to reuse your towels to “save the earth.”A group of researchers changed the signs to say, “Most people in this hotel reuse their towels at least once during their stay.” Immediately, towel reuse rates went up 26 percent, and laundry bills went down. If the social norm is in your favor, publicize it. If it’s not, then you need to protect the minority that supports your change. Consider carving out a space‚Äîan offsite space or even a dedicated conference room where your change advocates can meet and collaborate to escape the negative social pressure.

Change takes time. It took months or years for people to learn the “old way” of doing things, so what makes you think they can shift overnight? Stumbles are inevitable, but if you’re patient, the new behaviors will kick in on “autopilot,” and the change that was once met with great difficulty will become effortless. (Until your next change….)

Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, and Dan Heath is a senior fellow at Duke University’s CASE Center, which supports social entrepreneurs. Their new book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, reveals some simple principles for creating change, whether you’re trying to change the world or change your waistline. You can also change your reading habits by frequenting their blog.

Source: Open Forum