It's often said that an entrepreneur's first idea isn't necessarily what he ends up building. Mike Lazerow, CEO and founder of Buddy Media, a leading provider of social marketing services, mainly on Facebook, puts it this way: "Whatever you launch, assume it's the biggest crap sandwich you've ever launched." The difference between entrepreneurs who make money and those who go back to being employees, according to Mike, is that the ones making money are "realists" about the data. They fail fast and figure out what works.

This is easier said than done, of cousre. But many great companies do it. At Buddy Media, the original business model was to be an ad network on top of Facebook. They also considered Ace Bucks. Eventually, they came around to becoming a software as a service company, charging companies a licensing fee to use its Web-based platform to manage marketing campaigns on Facebook.