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LinkedIn employees get a 24-hour gym. Twitter workers get free laundry service. Googlers get Japanese toilets with a cool "rear-cleansing" function. How can your startup compete with that? It's not easy.

When tech giants such as Facebook give their workers six-figure packages and everything up to and including free leather repair (leather repair?), a salary in the low 80s isn't going to land you any elite tech talent. But you can still reel in good people - if you're generous with your equity.

Late last year, Mark Cuban (self-made billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks) wrote that entrepreneurs should ignore what their customers want. This may sound shocking, but it's nothing new. In fact, it's practically common knowledge for start-up companies; many entrepreneurs (including Steve Jobs) consider it one of the "best practices" of developing a product.

In Cuban's words, "Entrepreneurs need to be reminded that it's not the job of their customers to know what they don't. In other words, your customers have a tough enough time doing their jobs. They don't spend time trying to reinvent their industries or how their jobs are performed." While it's important to stay in touch with a customer base, we shouldn't ask customers to solve a problem that they expect us to solve. This scenario can be called the "Doctor's Dilemma." Many startups would benefit from tackling their product feedback with the Doctor's Dilemma in mind.

What's in a name? For startups, not as much as you might think. For example, you might expect a company called whorepresents.com to quickly hit the skids. But the online database of talent agents has been around since 2001 (capitialized as WhoRepresents?com, natch). And the fashion site Fashism is thriving. (Maybe its followers were too obsessed with clothes to bother with history class in high school.)

Then again, if your new company is deep into a brainstorming session and somebody suggests Fartronics, you should probably keep thinking. (Besides, that name's already taken.)

Piles of data, piles of dough, right? Not so fast. Despite an increasingly urgent, broad range of needs around processing data juggernauts, we're seeing just as many startups go *poof* when it comes to turning Big Data into Big Money. Or Mini-Money, for that matter.

Data-driven startups should know by now that out of the gate, transforming data into cold hard cash requires a lot more than just showing up with a great team and a great idea. A holodeck would be ideal, but until we live in the future, we found one useful analysis that breaks down steps to filling up your bank account with data - and our translation of his model for wider application.

When Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey spoke at the 99% Conference in April, he shared some tips that he found key to the successful development of his own business ideas. One of Dorsey's suggestions was to "draw it out" - to commit your ideas to paper well before you start to worry about committing those ideas to code.