Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the 4th annual Big Omaha conference in Omaha, NE, organized by the awesome folks at Silicon Prairie News. If you’re not familiar with Big Omaha, you can read why I love this entrepreneurship conference so much here and here (this was my third time attending).

In addition to an amazing group of entrepreneurs attending the conference, this year’s festivities included a fantastic group of speakers. Below are the 7 big lessons I took away from this year’s Big Omaha conference.

1. Determine your why.

from Sahil Lavingia (founder of Gumroad)
Sahil spoke a lot in his presentation about determining why you do what you do.  Ask yourself, why am I doing this?  Sahil determined he was trying to scale himself, to try to increase the amount of impact he had on the world.

2. Permission is unnecessary.

from Jim Mckelvey (co-founder of Square)

Jim spoke about how today, permission to create is unnecessary.  He’s made a great living off glassblowing and talked about glassblowers used to have to use giant furnaces that took a large amount of time and effort to work with.  That is, until the Toledo furnace came around and enabled glassblowers to work at home, without needing the giant furnaces.

3. Start playing.

from Brian Wong (founder of Kiip)
Brian talked about not be afraid to just create, and stop worrying about getting it done perfectly the first time around.  You’ll improve over time, but the first step towards doing anything worthwhile is to simply start doing it.

4. Push intelligence and decision making out to your community.

from Charles Best (founder of DonorsChoose.org)
When the devastating tornado hit Joplin, MO in May, 2011, a woman flew down to Joplin and went door to door to spread the word about DonorsChoose.org.  She asked teachers to post projects for supplies they needed to rebuild Joplin’s schools and she asked people to donate money to fund those projects.

This woman was a teacher on DonorsChoose.org, a website that lets teachers post projects for their classes and need, and lets anybody in the world donate money to help fund those projects.  Charles didn’t ask her to fly down to Joplin – she did it on her own.  Charles explained this was because he tried to push the intelligence of his creation and the decision making power out to his community.

5. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

from Sarah Prevette (founder of Sprouter)
When Sarah Prevette first founded Sprouter, it was a mobile app that tried to be Twitter but only for entrepreneurs.  She thought the solution was amazing, but it didn’t work out.  She pivoted to a Q+A site for entrepreneurs and was on the verge of shutting down the company before it was saved and sold.

Sarah talked about the importance of falling in love with the problem and truly understanding that problem, rather than focusing on the solution.

6. Fix your personal problems in tandem with your company – not after your company.

from Mena Grabowski Trott (co-founder of Six Apart)
Mena’s presentation was a bit heart-breaking.  She separated from her husband (and Six Apart co-founder) about 6 months ago, and officially divorced about a week before the Big Omaha 2012 conference.

A big lesson I took away from her fantastic presentation was that your personal problems need to be addresses in tandem with your company.  Don’t think it’s ok to wait until after your company is sold or done before finally addressing any problems in your personal life.

We’re excited to announce that early bird tickets are now on sale for our June Chicago event entitled “Make Your Passion Your Next Startup“.  Join us the evening of June 19 at the Chopin Theatre in Chicago to hear 3 amazing entrepreneurs share stories about how they turned their passions into real businesses.

Click here to buy your early bird tickets now and save 33% off the door price!

Join us for an intimate evening of networking, quality Q+A, and real stories from real experiences.  You’ll learn actionable lessons and get great advice from:

• Jake Nickell - Co-Founder of Threadless
• Desiree Vargas Wrigley - Co-Founder of GiveForward
• Joshua Hernandez - Founder of Tap.me!

Click here to buy your early bird tickets now and save 33% off the door price!

This is a guest post from Abbie Steinbacher, who is CEO and founder of the kids wellness company, My First Yoga. My First Yoga provides kids yoga outreach to schools and has a growing line of kids yoga products. Abbie and MyFirstYoga have been recognized in outlets such as The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Parenting Magazine, Parents Magazine, Yoga Journal and The Boston Globe. Abbie has a degree in Psychology from Harvard, and is a certified adult and children’s yoga instructor.

The opposing forces of the economy tanking and technological advances soaring have created a prime environment for first-time entrepreneurs. That said, “entrepreneur” has become a buzz word associated with the few startup founders we’ve watched become millionaires, and even billionaires, overnight. As the media catapults these successful entrepreneurs to celebrity status, the separation between “us” aspiring entrepreneurs and “them” — the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world — grows. This growing separation can cloud your entrepreneurial pathway with unnecessary mystery.

From my experience as founder of the kids’ yoga company, My First Yoga, I have found that as different as each startup may be, the path to success always involves making smart decisions. For those of you toying with the idea of becoming an entrepreneur, here are three common mistakes to avoid:

1. Hiring too many, too soon.

For most startups, hiring employees before there is an absolute need can lead to disaster. Yes, delegation is an important part of being a leader, but before jumping into delegating, I encourage you to allow time for the startup dust to settle. Running lean early on requires you, as a founder, to wear many hats.

While this may seem overwhelming, look at it this way: in addition to saving funds, you are spending valuable time becoming intimately familiar with the ins and outs of your business. Wait to hire until there is an absolute need; this will give you the hands-on experience necessary to build true domain expertise and therefore, the know-how to make important, informed decisions down the line.

2. Starting with an unidentified target market.

While we would all like to build a product that suits everybody’s needs, doing so is next to impossible. It is crucial to identify your startup’s target market early on in the planning stages. Who will your customers be? If you put off determining your target market until after your launch, you risk being pulled in opposing directions by a wide range consumers groups who only like your product a little bit.

To avoid this, spend time thinking about specifically who your product is built for — remembering to think beyond your own demographic. What gender? Age group? Profession? This thought process will help to focus your launch more narrowly on a group of consumers who you believe will be most enthusiastic about your product, and hopefully be willing to give you constructive feedback. Your true target market can only be dialed in overtime, but it helps to start somewhere.

3. People-pleasing.

It is also important to have a firm understanding of your overall vision for your startup. You will receive invaluable feedback from consumers about what they like, what they dislike, and even suggestions for ways you can change and grow. Making changes to meet customer’s needs are crucial, but it is important to set a precedent for evaluating each change against your long-term vision.

Will this change bring you closer to your end goal? Or will it drive temporary sales and lead you in the wrong direction? It can be tempting to make changes to ring in immediate sales, especially when budgets are tight, but I encourage you to evaluate the long-term impact.

Abbie is a member of The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), which is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC recently published #FixYoungAmerica: How to Rebuild Our Economy and Put Young Americans Back to Work (for Good), a book of 30+ proven solutions to help end youth unemployment.

A few weeks ago, I watched a TED talk that won’t escape my mind. It was about embracing vulnerability, something seemingly simple, but actually extraordinarily difficult. See people have a hard time dealing with emotion and expectations. They are much more likely to put something they can’t deal with in an emotional jar rather than confronting it. For example, people thrive on connection. Yet they are afraid to make connections (like go out and join a club) because they are afraid of rejection. If they can overcome the fear of rejection, they can embrace opportunities to meet new people and have new experiences (also known as factors of happiness).

This is supposed to be about Code Academy. Why am I writing about vulnerability?

The thing is, most people are afraid of failure…that’s what keeps them back from doing great things. Learning Ruby on Rails is a great example. It’s an emotional roller coaster…one minute I feel like I can do anything, the next minute I fee like an utter failure. Many people intimate that they’d love to do something like what I’m doing. When I ask them why they don’t do it, they usually give me a shrug and some half ass excuse about not having time.

I know what is really going on. They, like me initially, are afraid of failing. They haven’t embraced their vulnerability and accepted that failure (although unlikely) is an OK outcome. What’s more important however, is the journey and learning process.

As soon as you can recognize those aspects in your life or business that are holding you back, you can learn to become ok with the associated outcomes. You see this kind of thing very often in entrepreneurial success stories. Take Sara Blakely, founder of SPANX.  It was only until she was beat down in sales that she learned that rejection is not that bad. That allowed her to have the chutzpah to cold call the biggest potential customers for her product: department stores, knowing she only had a slight chance of getting in.

So embrace vulnerability. Embrace shame. Embrace failure. You are not maximizing potential opportunities to grow your business (and personally) until you do.

Enerspace

I’m always on the prowl for a new spot to plug in, get my caffeine, and work. Luckily, three new Chicago spots have recently opened that offer an alternative to Starbucks.

1) Topics- Nestled on Halsted Street between name brand shops, Topics is the work of a real estate broker turned entrepreneur when he became frustrated that traditional coffeeshops lacked necessary business tools like copy machines. “I wanted to create a place that had the casual feel of a coffeeshop with the practical tools an office would have,” said Lou Vidaillet, owner of Topics. While art adorns the wall of this coffeeshop, the back is literally a back office: conference rooms, phones, a copy machine and desks are available for use. If you’re looking for an awesome spot to work in Lincoln Park, ditch the nearby Starbucks and check out this new local gem.

2) Enerspace Chicago- If you’re looking for a creative coworking space in the West Loop, check out Enerspace. It’s a beautiful loft space with modern furniture and a yoga studio right in the middle. “At Enerspace, my goal is to emphasize healthy living. Too often entrepreneurs are so busy they forget to do things like exercise,” said Jamie Russo, serial entrepreneur and owner of Enerspace. Ain’t it the truth! I was blown away by the amazing view of downtown Chicago, visible from any place in the office.  The energy is palpable and I envy the startups that call Enerspace their home.

3) Fabcakes- River North lacks local coffeeshops, so Fabcakes is a unique and delicious new find. Located on Wells right by the Chicago brown stop, it offers a European vibe and plenty of free WiFi. Syrups are made in house so treat yourself to a lavendar latte (to. die . for.) while you work away. This is my go to stop in River North although there is literally a Starbucks on every corner.

This is a guest post from Shama Kabani, the award winning CEO of The Marketing Zen Group, a full service online marketing firm in Dallas. She is also the author of the bestseller, The Zen of Social Media Marketing (2nd edition, 2012) and an international speaker.

Being an entrepreneur is similar to being a newlywed: everyone has a piece of advice to “gift” you with. Some are helpful—hire people who have a proven track record; some aren’t—don’t be an entrepreneur, you’ll never have a life! Some advice will be just plain weird—spray your business cards with perfume to make yourself more memorable (huh?). Among the mixed bag of advice you’ll hear throughout your career, here are three best pieces of advice I ever received and will always treasure.

1. It’s more important to ship passion than wait on perfection. It’s terrifying to put your ideas out into the world; you could be laughed at, ridiculed, slammed, and so much more. It’s easier to keep chipping away at a project until you are absolutely sure of its perfection than to reveal a work in progress. But, today, every piece of a work has to be a work in progress. It’s the only way to stay relevant.

Embrace the editor within which allows you to put out a beta version, and then tweak it to perfection 2.0. People will respect your passion, and if they don’t, it doesn’t matter. One of my favorite quotes is by Theodore Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

2. Beware of the ugly baby syndrome. While getting my graduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin, I took one of the most challenging and useful classes of my educational career—one that taught how to evaluate a business idea. We went through countless case studies, trying to determine if they would succeed of fail based on the facts given.

During these discussions, our professor often referred to “the ugly baby syndrome”—similar to the tendency for every parent to think their bundle of joy is the cutest baby in the world, he said some people love their ideas so much that they refuse to see that it actually isn’t very pretty. He was trying to stress the importance of objectivity in business. Don’t love your idea because you created it. Be open to objectively analyzing, changing, and—if necessary—moving on from a bad idea.

3. Differentiate or die. I miss the early days of the Internet, where you could find yourself a “niche” and suddenly own the marketplace. Today, you should expect stiff competition in almost every industry and it is more important than ever to differentiate yourself. When I started an online marketing company almost three years ago, there were tons of agencies out there, but no one seemed to truly understand the pain of the client.

Our clients wanted us to do more than consult; they wanted a company who could customize a turn-key web marketing solution for them that would result in greater leads and visibility for their business. When we began to offer to take over web marketing for our clients, revenues skyrocketed. We found a differentiator within the industry. No matter what business you are in, find a way to stand out.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC recently published #FixYoungAmerica: How to Rebuild Our Economy and Put Young Americans Back to Work (for Good), a book of 30+ proven solutions to help end youth unemployment.

This is a guest post from Thursday Bram. She’s the editor of 21times.org, a daily newsletter on how to turn a side project into a startup.

You’ve got that perfect idea for a startup — the one that you know is going to revolutionize the way everyone spends the time they currently spend on FarmVille. It’s nothing like anything that’s come before, and that’s something of a problem. Unless you are one of the best programmers the world has ever seen, a revolutionary startup may come with some serious technical challenges. And if you aren’t even a programmer, handling the technology at your startup can be a serious challenge.

So how do you get from an amazing idea to a world-changing startup?

The Magic of a Technical Cofounder

Even if you’ve got some mad programming chops yourself, your best bet is to look for a technical cofounder — someone who can take on a big share of the development work, without needing to be a fully salaried employee right off the bat.

It’s tempting to try to avoid cofounders. Some of us have a little voice in our heads that tell us a project needs to be ours alone and that we’re better off just bringing in help as needed. But there’s more ego in that line of thought than entrepreneurship. The right person can take your business to a higher level, but only if you can make sure she’s invested in what you’re doing. A contract coder is only invested to the point he gets paid. You may not always agree with a cofounder, but you’ll know that she’s in it for the long haul.

You can find someone to work with who will challenge you to find new solutions and to build the best company you can. Finding the right cofounder is as much a matter of finding someone who motivates you as a question of bringing on a new skill set. Together, you should be more than the sum of your parts.

Finding that Perfect Cofounder

There are several matchmaking sites out there that allow people interested in creating a startup to advertise what sort of cofounder they’re looking for. This seems like a pretty bad idea: while a stranger isn’t necessarily the wrong person to work with on a startup, you do want to at least know a little about his skills.

Working on a few small projects that can let you get a feel for how someone works and if you make a good pair is an ideal way to start. The open source community can be an amazing place to build the sort of connections you need to found a startup and, even better, you can get a very objective look at the quality of the work done by any prospective partners you’re interested in. Just counting the number of commits a coder has under her belt can give you a lot of insight into whether you want to work with that person.

Once you’ve got the right partner, actually executing the idea you have in mind becomes a whole lot easier.

Sharing Your Ideas the Right Way

You don’t need to slap an NDA down in front of someone before you start telling them about your idea. There’s a certain sense that you have to protect your ideas, but the truth is that there is ultimately no way to do that. If you trust a person enough to ask them to partner with you, skip the NDA. Your first sit down should be casual: it’s as much a brainstorming session as an opportunity for you to share what you’ve been thinking about.

Any cofounder you bring in is going to need an opportunity to put his stamp on your idea, no matter how much you’ve already done. That can be difficult to handle — we tend to start to think about our ideas as our babies. But don’t get too protective. If you chose a partner whose abilities you respect, the insight she may offer could be exactly what’s needed to take a concept to the next level (or to turn it into something that is actually feasible to build).

At the end of the day, execution is just as much a question of who you choose to work with as picking up the technical skills necessary for a particular idea.

I get a kick out of telling people I am currently a developer. While going through Code Academy, I have gotten a rare glimpse into what every non-technical entrepreneur both reveres and is mystified by: the mind of the developer.

There are consistently two paradigms I think every entrepreneur, technical or non, should adopt.

1) DRY Principle- Programmers optimize writing as little code as possible. It’s a way for them to show their expertise…how little code can you write that still accomplishes the task? The DRY principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself) applies to not rewriting similar lines of code when they can be refactored (rearranged/condensed) into something more elegant. Entrepreneurs should really listen to this one: DON”T REPEAT YOURSELF!!!! Too many entrepreneurs follow the same elevator pitches, mumbo jumbo acronym ridden synergy punchlines instead of actually saying what they mean. This is the most evident in business plan competitions or any weekend competition where startups have memorized lines to common questions and will say the same thing over and over instead of a simple “I’m not sure” or “We will look into that” when they are stumped.

I recently coached a startup team going through a social venture competition, and hammered this idea home. “What is your customer acquisition cost(CAC)?” I asked the “finance’” guy. He went back to his finance slide and repeated the same script he did during the competition, with no mention  of CAC. “What is your CAC?” I asked again. He started spouting some finance lingo until I interrupted him (rudely, but to get the point across) “Just give me a number. What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Perfect, that is what the answer should have been the first time instead of repeating what was already said. Case in point and happens much too frequently.

2) Pair Programming- I love, love, love pair programming. It’s my #1 favorite thing about learning Ruby on Rails.  As a former psychology major and intensely social person, I vastly enjoy pairing (basically writing code with a partner) with other people in my class.

•  I get to actually meet new people. This is hard! Usually in a class, people tend to sit in the same place and talk to people they already know. Pairing with different people in class forces interactions which lead to actual relationships. Yes!
• I get to see how differently people learn and code. This helps me see the variety of ways to approach problems.
• Learning a brand new skill is a mental game. It’s all about perception of your progress pitted against others and beating yourself up. With pairing, you get to see exactly how you compare (and now how you think you compare) to many other people. It opened my eyes to my progress.
• You get to teach others. Teaching others is the way to instill lessons you’ve learned.

It’s no surprise that pair programming leads to 15% decrease in bugs and huge leaps in productivity.

It’s hard to believe that a month of Code Academy has flown by. On one hand, I feel completely exposed to an amazing new world and language I can relate to. On the other, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface and there is an ocean of knowledge I will never be able to acquire. The more you know, the more you realize you truly don’t know.

This week there were two defining moments in class.

1) Jeff randomly mentioned “muggles”- Our teacher let it slip that “muggles” don’t realize this, but Ruby on Rails performs this type of magic (I think he was referring to forms). The reference to muggles made me realize that what we are learning really is magic. We can make things happen that seemingly occur out of the blue. It’s almost like when you hear someone speaking a foreign language and then recognize one or two words. You get insight into a piece of what is going on. Now that I’m learning magic, (and I’m a huge Harry Potter nerd) it gives me new perspective to help me get through rough spots.

2) Speaking of rough spots, this week is definitely the worst so far. With the opening of 1871 last Wednesday and free caffeine available during class, I was barely able to pay attention. I came home and had no idea what happened. In addition, I started in full force to pursue the business side of the project I’m supposed to be developing for CA, and my coding skills have greatly suffered. Now when I get stuck on something, I will find other things to do instead of getting through it. I feel behind in class and feel like it’s starting to go over my head. I have to remind myself that no, I do not want to be a professional developer but I want to get as much out of this as I can. I think now in class, there is a divide between the people who have found their calling and spend all hours coding and people like me, who have a million other things going on and can barely keep up.

I hope this week I find new focus and catch up.

Rona Borre is the founder and CEO of Instant Technology, an IT staffing and recruiting firm. After running a $30 million book of business at a global recruiting firm, Rona left to start Instant Technology with the goal of adding a personal touch to the staffing industry.

In the video below from our March Chicago event about founding teams, Rona shares her stories and experiences building Instant Technology as a sole founder.