Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and the ever popular Twitter (which, if I’m honest, don’t get), has a “classic” post on the ten rules for a web startup.

My top 3 from his top 10:

1. Be Narrow. Focus. Period. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Merge probably is still too broad in our scope of services. But where we are narrow is that “we do all things web.” We could do I.T., print, photography and video if we wanted to (our clients would pay us to do such.) But we can only do so much and do it well. As such, we’re sticking to just web.

2. Be Different. If you’re not different, then you haven’t differentiated. From our roots, Merge has focused on business strategy and results. Today, that’s cliché and it’s not so different, but it’s truly what we focus on. We’ve seen most firms focus on design or technology, but we focus on results. If we can’t get results, then we need to get out of the business. Like #1 above, we could probably differentiate even more along these lines, and will plan to do so as we hone our services.

3. Be Picky. I like this one. We don’t take any client that comes along and we don’t hire just anybody. My philosophy is that life is too short, and when you’re at work about 2/3 of your waking life, then don’t you want to work with people you like? At Merge, we’re picky. We really like our clients and we really like our employees. If an employee or a client becomes unbearably unfriendly, well, we get picky.

Read the other 7 reasons and even if you don’t have a web startup, I think you’ll see that it still applies to what you’re doing.