About.com invited entrepreneurs to reveal what made their small businesses unique and the lessons they'd learned (the hard way) as a result of being in business. Eight-five business owners responded with profiles of their companies, heart-felt stories of years of struggle before important breakthroughs, and solid pointers for everyone looking to make it in their own business. We recently published 17 lessons learned.

Here are 17 more great lessons from people who have been there and done that.

People

1. Don't count on anyone other than your core people to make sure you succeed. I have hired some people that were not who they said they were and cost me a small fortune to repair their mistakes.
2. Don't use craigslist for new hires/contractors. I can't say we've ever met anyone we've retained through CL, and generally have not had great experiences. Partnerup is a better resource.

Marketing

1. The strength of guerrilla marketing and social media -- with small budgets, SEO and social media were crucial in our early stages of growth.
2. Your best market research is to go "live" in the marketplace and see if someone will buy.
3. A gorgeous site is great, but a site that converts is more important. Don't get too hung up in the edgy aesthetic that the general public doesn't understand. This was an expensive first lesson.
4. Your brand and mission statement is everything. Evaluate all business decisions against them and ask if what you're considering is a good fit for your brand.

1. It's not what I like that matters, it's what the customer likes.
2. Don't skimp on advertising. Having a professional logo and website is what makes us stand out to the crowd. Know when you should hire a professional to take something to the next level.

Planning

1. The main lesson from failure for me is to give everything more time for testing, development, and any other unforeseeable problems to be properly addressed.
2. Focus on your core market -- we had opportunities to franchise throughout the US and in China -- which ultimately drew down resources.

Money

1. Cost-controls really can make the difference between a successful business and one that fails. Ditch the land line and get an unlimited cell phone provider, use Skype or other VoIP solutions when traveling overseas, use inexpensive talent to create websites and logos, get an intern to help out, and try to do everything in-house if you can. The first two years were rough for us -- we didn't know we'd succeed. But once you turn the corner and finally start to feel stable, you realize it was worth the wait. Oh, and turn off the phone at least one day a week.
2. Our greatest failure was to not be able to adapt to a crashing economy quickly enough. I should have let some people go sooner.
3. Get a good bookkeeper first.
4. Plan, plan, plan. Before we started we made sure we had adequate funding for at least 12-18 months and made many mathematical sales models of best, worst and typical case scenarios.
5. Keep a low debt load -- early investment and interest was crushing to the company. We've learned to operate nearly debt free.

Customer Service

1. Go overboard with customer service. We are happy to spend hours on the phone with people to help them order the right system.

The Intangibles

1. Ask for help. Engage everyone who is interested in your business. You will be surprised how people can help you solve your problems if you let them.