If you have a blog, Website or Web 2.0 application and want to add an online shopping cart to sell any type of product, you should take a look at PutACart. The company promises that you "can have products online in less then 3 minutes and can manage products and orders just as easily". It even works on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Squidoo.

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

In our 10 Things to Be Clear About Before You Start, we suggested that you decide whether to build a team of partners or fly solo. If you have decided to build a team of partners, even a small team of two, you'll need to also decide how this partnership will work. Your only currency will be equity in a company that has not been formed and a venture/Web service that is no more than a gleam in the eye.

Zimplit is the "open source web creation tool for dummies," according to Mattias Lepp, the company's executive leader. "Our team doesn't know anything about the web and software. Oliver Pulges is chemist, Silver Sikk is philologist, and I am old music orchestra conductor. This gives us unique advantage to see and make software for normal people, not for programmers."

As commerce, socialization, creativity, and identity become increasingly digitized and uploaded, the number of non-technical, "normal people" who need free, simple web design solutions increases. And for allowing non-techies to create quick, customizable, easily editable pages, Zimplit is a good resource. If you're too skilled for tools like Zimplit, keep it in your back pocket for the next time someone asks you to build a website and you'd really rather not.

We have heard the VC's side of the story in many interviews. In this interview, we get the perspective of an experienced entrepreneur who is highly critical of the current crop of top-tier VCs. He says the emperor is not wearing clothes.

One question we put to many of the VCs we have spoken to is:

"How is the VC model changing, if at all, and how does the global financial crisis impact this change?"

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

Figuring out which wave to ride (secular trends) is vital. Figuring out when to get on and when to get off is also important. You will never get the timing exactly right. It is like calling the top or bottom of a market. If you do manage to make exactly the right call, it is probably luck. But you can get the basic timing right. It doesn't take a genius to see which cycle you're in at any given time. What matters is figuring out what to do in each stage of the cycle.

We spoke recently with Joshua Baer and Bryan Menell of Capital Factory, a technology incubator/accelerator based in Austin, Texas. Capital Factory puts on an intense 10-week summer program that gives participating startup companies up to $20,000 in cash, more than $20,000 in free services, and mentorship from a group of successful entrepreneurs. The program culminates in a demo day when the startups present to investors, the press, and the world. For more on incubators, see our post on Josh Catone.

Incubators are local by nature. So we wanted to find out more about the innovation scene in Austin. We also wanted to get Capital Factory's take on how the incubator model is changing.

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

Surfing sure sounds like more fun than work, but when you catch a technology or market wave just right, it seems almost as good.

But you need the right-sized wave:

With this interview, we are again branching out. Naval Ravikant is not a traditional VC. He is an angel investor, a serial entrepreneur, and he writes the very entertaining and informative Venture Hacks blog, a must-read for entrepreneurs. Listen to the MP3 below if you want to learn more about how to get viral growth, how to think about native revenue models for social media, and why hackers are making serious money with virtual currencies.

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

This was a hard chapter to write. It feels like a chapter that would work better in the final book. You have to have a mission and strategy and plan, right? So why does writing them feel like one of those make-work projects you have to do to keep investors happy? Come to think of it, you could outsource the production of your vision, mission, and strategy via Mechanical Turk?

One of the great challenges of starting up a new business is being good at everything the business demands: Marketing, investor relations, inside sales, development, operations, IT, project management, the list goes on. Most startups don't get the luxury of being able to grow their staff quickly and must carefully choose who comes on-board. The natural result of this is that hard decisions are made every day on what part of the business requires attention.

One vital part that can easily be overlooked in the startup environment is business intelligence. The problem usually isn't with acquiring critical data, but rather in making sense of trends and other signals buried in that data. That is where Bob Moore and Jake Stein of RJMetrics have been focusing for the past year, developing effective and affordable solutions for their internet startup customers, helping them see trends, create timely reports, and interact more effectively with their investors and employees.