I've been talking a lot about "everything is a process" and how you should incorporate this mentality into your every project, if you want to become successful! This article is to prepare you for the challenges a project might have, sort of like "what you should know before jumping into building you business"

Goals are a great thing have, they give you a target to achieve and motivation to achieve them but most often we disregard the challenges that we might have to face in favor of the sweetness of the outcome. The truth of the matter is if your goal is to make a $1,000,000 (1 million dollars) you won't wake up one day and have that in your bank account, the fact is you have to first make a $100, then $1,000 and over come more challenges, innovate more solutions to get to $10,000 then $100,000 and if everything works out then you achieve your first goal. It takes time and a lot of work, consistency and efficency are the absolute requirements.

But before you set a Million Dollar goal for your self, there are a few things you should know:

1- How well do you know your self?

• if you want to get into business you should NOT wake up later than 7am. I'm practicing to move my current wake up time from 6:30am to 5am. The Earlier you wake, the longer day time you would have to work. Contribute the early hours to answering emails, reading the news, making comments, discovering new sites and working on your blog if you have one.
   
• We all need to have routines, we need to be disciplined that way. Try to make plans for your entire day, hour by hour and stick to it. If everyday you tend to do different things that do not relate to each other then you are very confused. Organize you time and manage it within your abilities. After a while your routine will become natural to you and as a result your productivity will increase.
   
• Measure how long it takes to do the basic humans needs, like how long it takes you to eat lunch, commute to work, shower, shopping, and etc. When you are aware of the minutes you spend  doing everything you have to do everyday then you you can find better more efficient ways to increase your working times. Don't over kill your self, what i mean is taking a shower should take about 10 to 15 minutes at max but if you're spending an hour in shower then here is an opportunity to save 45 minutes and put it towards working on your blog, making phone calls, making new connections and finding more ways of making your business better.

2- Do you REALLY know what you're doing?

• if you're going to start a blog, are you familiar with the blogging world. Regardless what the topic of your blog is about there are several key blogs working in that category already, familiarize your self with them and everything they do, the last thing you want to do is to have a blog that has the exact same topic and discussion, what you want to do is to find out where these key blogs are lacking and start your blog knowing that you're filling a gap and contributing to the well being of the category. Having a complimentary blog grows much faster than a copy blog, over time when you have a lot of traffic then you can move into other blogs' category.
   
• if you starting your own web app (web 2.0 or semantic) project, then how well do you know the industry, you need to know how it works and how you're going to make it big. Promoting a web app has its own set of challenges and before you jumping into programming you need to consider all the roadblocks. Getting traffic is a big issue and before you assume that you're going to get a lot of traffic consider why people would want to use it and why it should become a part of their routine. The worst thing you can do when building a web app is to assume everything will workout on its own, trust me it doesn't. Always prepare with the worst case scenario in mind!
   
• Know everything about your competition (small or large). for example, If you're going to make something that compliments DIGG but you don't know about MIXX then that's a huge problem because if you don't know what everybody in the category is doing and how they are doing it then you probably won't be able to come up with a solution that solves big problems. You also don't want to be compared to other websites, avoid "YET ANOTHER WEB APP" attribute at all cost!

3- How well do you know BUSINESS?

• Business is a game, a dog eat dog world. Just because you can make a great site doesn't mean you can make a big business out of it. In business you have to know how to manage people, employees, PR people, your network and etc. If you can't manage people then you cannot attract talented people to do the tricky parts of your business, they just won't stick around. If you don't know how to make deals or negotiate to get maximum benefits then you're business won't have a chance to grow. Managing innovation, money, growth, revenues streams are a few of the other things you need to be very familiar with.

I'm not trying to scare you, but i'm trying to prepare you. remember if it way easy everybody would have done it, it's difficult and that's what makes it interesting and appealing. Now i only mentioned a few things you should know before jumping into muddy waters, there are many other things you need to consider such as choosing the right business partners, knowing your audience, optimum design, naming and branding, strategy, and last but not least knowing when you want to launch, how you're going to do it, and what you need to do to promote it. The list goes on and on, the more you know the better you will do.

While all projects are different from one another but there something they all have in common. To have a successful website or any other type of business you have to go through the process. If you think success goal is a million dollars you have to realize that before you can make a million you have to make your first $100, then your first $1000, then $10,000 and so on until you get to your goal. Even if you achieve your goal doesn’t mean that all if safe and you don’t have to worry anything else. With every dollar you make you add a dollar to the things you have to worry about.

Things to consider, if you’re starting a blog or have blog, there are more 125,000 blogs that come out everyday, more than 2,000 web services launch every week and many more other sites like ecommerce, corporate and portfolio sites. The biggest problem is that the internet users in general grow by only %3 to %5 a year, so all the new sites as well as the older sites compete for relatively the same piece of the pie.

Before the start of 3 Phases

Before you jump into the mayhem of getting through the 3 phases and becoming successful you need do a few things so that you can enter Phase #1.

What you need to do:

1. Research
2. Plan
3. Brand
4. Strategize
5. Develop a functional product or service
6. Do some tests

***If you’ve done all of above and now are ready to jump in then who am I to stop you so let’s get to it.

3 PHASES OF SUCCESS

Survival

Basically the survival of the fittest, the more prepared. You don’t necessarily have to have feature full or absolute perfect product to enter, as long as it’s functional and delivers what you have promised. Also you don’t to have a lot money, having money is a bonus but not the differentiator.

125,000 blog/day, what you want to do is separate yourself from majority of these other blogs. %99.99 will fail before they even enter survival phase, if you are on the same ship as them, well guess what, you will fail with them.

This phase requires you put in as much energy and resources as you possibly can. 18 hour work days are just beginning, you have to market your brains out, and sometimes you have to invent new ways of marketing and promoting your site. At the start of this phase nobody gives a crap about you, your product or services no matter how brilliant and unique it is. This is when survival of the fittest gets a whole new meaning.

Survival is also about knowing that while you’re working your butt off there are tens of other projects that are trying the same thing. If you have a new blog and dying to get a mention by other more popular blog owners then consider this, most of the popular blog owners wait out the opportunity simply because they don’t want to write about a blog that could die in a few weeks not to mention that they are constantly being bombarded with your own competitors and they can only mention a very few at a time so they rather bet on the safer projects.
Survival is not something you accomplish like passing a test. It is something you have to do day in and day out. For as long as you have competitors fighting for a piece of your traffic you’re stuck in survival mode.

Some of the site currently in Survival Mode: TechCrunch, Mashable, Twitter, Yelp, Glam, Federated Media, BlogAds, OpenID,

Some of the site downgraded to survival: Microsoft, Yahoo, YellowPages, Skype, Technorati,

Establishment

Still survival, but it’s on a different level. It’s when you have overcome all challenges and now you’re on your way to becoming mainstream. Your challenge is not about getting traffic but about keeping traffic. Innovation has become your biggest hassle, your competition is fierce and ruthless, and your server and maintenance costs are going through the roof.

It’s a great place to be! But if you’re not careful and aggressive somebody else will take your place and send you back into the first phase.

Establishment phase is like a VIP room, you may have a chance to get in but seats are limited only the best get in, but if they don’t keep at it they will be asked to leave.

Some of the site in Establishment: Google, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, FireFox, ING Direct, DIGG,

Leap

The dreamland, or could be hell. In this phase your biggest problem is the users that use your site or product. They are very demanding, they want constant innovation and if something goes wrong everybody will talk about it. I’m not going to get into this too much.
 There are only a few website in this phase that I can think of. Like Ebay, Amazon, and … 

NOTE: This website is mostly about the Survival Phase. In my Opinion if you are in the Establishment or Leap phase then helping you is beyond me what you need is big consulting companies like BCG,  McKinsey and Bain