“But I was told I need to have a ____ to start a business.” Fill in the blank with a board of advisors, business plan, or some other obstruction between you and the thing you want to build. Have you noticed how all these commonly held notions about things you “have” to do are just excuses in disguise? They’re a reason for not doing something. They put a layer (or a lawyer) between you and getting something out there.

Board of advisors is a good one. Some people think they need one to get started with a business. But really, that’s just another excuse for not beginning. Why do you think everyone else knows how to run your business better than you? You know plenty — and what you don’t know you’ll learn as you go. Of course it can be a good idea to ask for advice and learn from other people’s experiences, but there’s no need to formalize it.

And notice who spreads these scare tactics about things you need and hoops you have to jump through. It’s the people who sell the hoops. That means publishers and authors of business books, business magazines, lawyers, and everyone else that makes a buck from showing you the “right” way. And don’t forget all the venture capitalists and established businesses who would like nothing better than to swoop in and tell you what to do for their own reasons.

Next time you hear that “you need this” or “you need that” to get your business off the ground, question it. Ask yourself: “Is this really necessary or can I get by without it for now?”

We get a steady stream of requests from people who have apps that integrate with one of ours asking to be included on the Extras page (here’s the Basecamp Extras page, for example).

A nice move whenever someone sends one of these: When they include a badge image that’s the right size and text that’s the same length as the other entries on the page. It’s just a little thing but it really makes a difference for the person who has to add that extra. It saves a step and makes the request ready to go “out of the box.”

It’s funny how little things like this can have an impact. When someone sends in a request like this, it comes across as them saying, “I’ve thought about what this request entails for you. And I’m guessing this might be a pain point so I’ve gone to the trouble of making it as easy as possible to take care of.”

We tend to think of usability as applying only to interfaces. But it’s so much more than that. It’s about delivering something that’s fit to be used. That means it’s about writing copy that’s understood the first time. It’s about requests that are as easy to accomplish as possible. It’s about manuals that are one page instead of 40. It’s about code that you can paste in and works right away.

It’s about putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. It’s about looking into the future, foreseeing any potential obstacles, and removing them. And that’s a great way to get people on your side.

Update: Here’s a related example. Someone mocked up a screenshot of a Highrise feature request the other day.

Neat way to “get real” with a feature and show exactly what you have in mind.

Producer Quincy Jones on producing Michael Jackson’s Thriller album:

Well, we had great rhythm sections, which we did first. We did what we called Polaroids. We must’ve looked at 600 or 700 songs. When you get a song you feel you like, you put it down with a rhythm section to get it on its feet, and then you hear Michael sing a couple of takes on it, maybe with a couple of background lines to see how it holds up, so you can see what it might be and you’re not just wasting your time. We called those Polaroids. Then, when something sticks, you develop it further, get into background lines and horns or synthesizers or whatever else you’re going to be using.

I like “Polaroids” as a way to quickly get across the idea of rapid prototyping. Go through a ton of stuff and give it all a quick shot. Then see what sticks and devote more resources to that. That way, failure is cheap. You’re actually expecting failure and embracing the idea that only a small percentage of your ideas are truly good enough to earn a big chunk of your attention.

The LAByrinth Theater Company, a collective in New York that specializes in new American plays, provides another example of the Polaroid approach. Every year, LAB has a two-week “summer intensive” workshop during which 35 to 40 plays are rehearsed and read. Company members then offer their critiques and the artistic directors then select the 10 or 15 plays they would like to see go to the next step. Again, failure is cheap.

Good inspiration. If LAB can put on 40 plays in two weeks, what can we get done in that amount of time? We always say we don’t have enough time, but maybe the problem is we’re just trying to do things too well.

People sometimes ask us how much we look at the competition. The answer: not much. We can’t control what they do. We can control what we do. So we focus on that.

Someone who responds to a constantly shifting landscape with a similar approach: Conan O’Brien. In “Building a Home in Late Night’s Shifting Sand,” he talks about why he doesn’t pay attention to the incessant chatter about time slots, competitors, etc.

“Maybe I’m a bumbling, Gomer Pyle fool who should be more concerned about this stuff, but I can’t control what’s going on around me,” Mr. O’Brien said. “And TV is changing so much, I don’t think anybody in television knows how it’s going to play out.

“A lot of that is up to me. If I do a good, funny, and fresh ‘Tonight Show’ every night at 11:35, it’s going to be successful, and it’s going to be irrelevant what everybody else is doing.”

That’s it. If you make something good and fresh, what everyone else is doing becomes unimportant.

The best part of this approach: It liberates you. You don’t have to obsess over others. You only worry about what you can control which helps keep you sane.

Here’s some Conan fun:

Update: Switched embed from Hulu to NBC clip. [thx Peter]

“Act One: An Autobiography” [Amazon.com] is playwright and director Moss Hart’s look at the long, arduous road that led to his breakthrough hit “Once in a Lifetime.” Designer Michael Bierut calls the book “the best, funniest, and most inspiring description of the creative process ever put down on paper.” It really is a terrific read.

One thing I found interesting in the book is the way the play’s words on the page are often meaningless. The play is slaved over by its authors and rehearsed endlessly, yet it is still almost completely rewritten after it goes in front of early audiences. In this passage, Hart describes why the only genuine test for a play is a real, paying audience.

[Fellow playwright George S.] Kaufman did not hold with the theory or the practice of having run-throughs for his friends or friends of the cast, or even for people whose judgment he respected and trusted. He held firmly to the idea that no one person or collection of persons, no matter how wise in the ways of the theatre, could ever be as sound in their reactions as a regulation audience that had planked down their money at the box-office window, and in the main I think he was correct. There is perhaps something to be learned from a run-through for friends or associates; but more often than not, it can be as fooling in one way as it is in another. I have witnessed too many run-throughs on a bare stage with nothing but kitchen chairs and a stark pilot light and seen them go beautifully, and then watched these plays disappear into the backdrop the moment the scenery and footlights hit them, to place too much reliance on either the enthusiasm or the misgivings of a well-attended runthrough. The reverse can be equally true. however well or ill a play may go at a run-through, there are bound to be both some pleasant and some unpleasant surprises in store for the authore when it hits its first real audience.

It’s the same for plenty of other products too. You can do all the planning you want. You can focus group. You can beta test. You can theorize. You can project. But nothing will ever match the feedback you get from real people, especially ones who are paying to use what you’re selling. Everything up until then is conjecture.

It’s one more reason to kick your project, whatever it is, out of the nest as soon as you can. It’s often the only way to know if it can really fly.

I know it’s tempting to counter, “But it’s not perfect yet!” Does it have to be? Trying to make it perfect often puts a shield up that closes you off from what you need most: feedback. Instead of improving, you wind up delaying the moment of truth that can provide the map to improvement.

Reminds me of a quote in “How Google Decides to Pull the Plug” [NY Times]. Jeff Jarvis, author of the new book “What Would Google Do?”, says:

Perfection closes off the process. It makes you deaf. Google purposefully puts out imperfect and unfinished products and says: ‘Help us finish them. What do you think of them?’

Google releases imperfect, unfinished products intentionally. How much does what you’re making really need to be perfect before it gets out there?

Related: Race to Running Software [Getting Real]