4. Don’t Market a Bad Product – Perhaps the most important lesson for first-time entrepreneurs is that you can’t have great marketing for a bad product. The corollary is that it is very hard to recover from a crappy marketing campaign that over-hyped. I think I first heard this from Guy Kawasaki but it’s kind of obvious. In a world in which you’re encouraged to launch early and get feedback from customers you can often confuse “product launch” with “marketing.”