I recently gave at talk at StartPad.org chronicling some of our successes and lessons learned — dare I call them mistakes:) — from my time as co-founder and CTO at Faves.com.

The lessons I shared were:

• Find and/or develop a product lifecycle checklist to keep you grounded and to know where you need help.
• Understand your business drivers.
• Understand (and choose wisely) your target market.
• Refine your positioning until it is a) crisp and b) reinforces what you are best at.
• Segment your user base, and potentially address each segment uniquely.
• With respect to technology, design things in a way that minimizes your “maintenance tax”.

John Cook of TechFlash (as well as some of the commenters) summarized the talk very nicely.

Note: Faves.com is up and running, and it is the company’s plan to keep it that way for the forseeable future.