“Do you have a startup?” Everyone’s hands shot up.

“Do you have a product? A real, functioning product?” More than half the hands dropped.

“Do you have traction? Users who like your product and come back to use it over and over?” The remaining few hands dropped.

“Good. That’s what I’m here to talk about today.”

In a packed classroom at Internet Week HQ, Yipit founder and CEO Vinicius Vacanti played the role of startup professor, challenging attendees to get their ideas into the world. Vacanti articulated a plethora of tips and tricks, many learned from his personal experience in building Yipit, the internet’s most popular daily deal aggregator.  The best of Vacanti’s advice is summarized below.

1. Idea

Identify a real problem. The biggest mistake most entrepreneurs make at this stage is getting excited about an idea that isn’t solving a real problem that people have.

Make sure it’s a very big problem. Vacanti used a personal example of replacing a broken remote control for one of his televisions. Problem? Yes. Big problem (market)? No. Vacanti explained that when pitching entrepreneurs need to convince VC’s they’re building a billion dollar company.

Come up with a name and setup a landing page. Collect emails while you’re working away getting a product up to speed.  To do this quickly and easily, Vacanti recommended one of my favorite new startups, Launchrock.com. He explained a few simple ways to promote the landing page, such as including the problem you’re solving and the landing page URL in your email signature.

Come up with a less than 7 word description that succinctly explains the problem you’re solving. Tumblr’s is simple, “The easiest way to blog.” Yipit’s is “All the best daily deals in your city.” The original Apple iPod was, “A thousand songs in your pocket.” The shorter the better.

Don’t add features, throw them out. Vacanti explained that by trimming features and functionality, Yipit reduced it’s production time from a year and a half for v1.0 to four months for v2.0 and then down to three days for the current iteration of the product.

Forget a formal business plan. Forget business plans and business plan competitions. No business ever succeeded because of a written business plan. Get a real product in people’s hands as quickly as possible and get feedback.

Validate your core idea as quickly and cheaply as possible. Building a website or an app is not difficult anymore. Identify and validate the key assumption. For RentTheRunway.com, the founders needed to prove that women would pay to rent dresses, so they bought ten dresses and manually rented them out of their Harvard dorm room with no website. Validate your idea, then build it.

Forget perfection and scale initially. Hack it together. Yipit aggregates daily deals, so Vacanti had to figure out how to collect all the deals. The high-tech solution? He found people on Craigslist and paid them to copy and paste deals every morning starting at 4am. Even today, 30% of Yipit’s deals are still manually entered.

Don’t ask for permission. Ask for forgiveness. Vacanti explained that even if Yipit could have secured meetings with decision-makers at Groupon and Living Social, the new startup wouldn’t have been taken seriously and the answer to “can we aggregate your daily deals so we can take a cut” would have been “absolutely not”. Only after they hacked it together and achieved scale could they negotiate.

Make it rely on you and you only. Nobody else has a vested interest in getting your product out. If you need to rely on others, tweak your model so you don’t.

First to market is important. The press essentially gives you a patent on your idea. When the copycat comes along, the press will usually ignore them. The press generally refuses to write about copycat products.

2. Product

Simplify, simplify, simplify. Your product needs to be as unbelievably simple as possible. Very few products take off because they have a lot of features. If there is an “and” in your product description, as in “We do A and B…” simplify even more. Take things out. Feature creep is disaster.

Aim for failure. Get the first version of your idea in customers’ hands. Success at this stage is feedback. The product is supposed to fail. It’s not supposed to work. Fail fast and gather feedback.

Talk to early customers. Vacanti described how in the beginning, Yipit would personally email anyone who unsubscribed from the service, offering them a $10 Amazon gift card to explain why they unsubscribed. People were happy to do so and Vacanti recounted that one of these customers was the head of all business programming at CNN. It led to a big story and Yipit’s biggest traffic day ever. Early customers include investors and technology bloggers. Their job is trying out new products. Reach out to them.

Focus on users. Lots of users. If you build a service that gets a million users, you will get funded. If you have ten thousand users and you’re adding five a day, with no real business model, you won’t get funded. If you don’t have a real business model, you need explosive user growth.

Find the right co-founder. Vacanti noted that he has written about this extensively on his blog.

3. Traction

You don’t have a marketing problem. If you release your product and it doesn’t grow, you think you have a marketing problem. You don’t. You have a product problem. If your product was really good, your friends would tell their friends. Don’t blame the market or the press. If nobody is writing about it, they don’t like it.

Be your product’s first superuser. When Foursquare launched, founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai manually added thousands of tips themselves, making the initial user experience better for everyone else. When airbnb started, the founder Brian Chesky went homeless for months, using his own service to stay at a different place every night. Jump in with your first few thousand users and make sure they’re elated.

Start small. Focus on a geography or organization. Facebook started and gained traction with just Harvard first before expanding to the rest of the Ivy League and then other colleges. Don’t try to get everyone right away.

Build marketing into the product. Hotmail initially included a link in the email signature inviting people to signup for a free Hotmail account, so early users became willing marketers.

Embarrass people. More specifically, give people a metric to work on that they’re embarrassed about. When new users join Facebook and Twitter, their first instinct is to get more friends and followers.

Find the right metrics. Total users is a vanity metric. People signup and abandon services all the time. Active users is a much better metric of success. Beyond that, determine the specific success metrics of your startup. The right metrics are different for every startup. Measure. Tweak. Optimize.

As a startup founder myself, I found Vacanti’s session both entertaining and informative. Based on the furious typing and note-taking from the attendees, I wasn’t the only one.