Most startups fail. That’s just a simple fact. Of those startups that do manage to get out of the startup phase intact, few are around in two years, and fewer are profitable. Those that do make it through do so through a combination of great products, stellar leadership, and a little bit of dumb luck.

I know what I’m talking about. My startup, Speek, was one of the few startups in our market that proved to have what it takes. Speek is still humming along smoothly and daily capturing more market.

I won’t pretend that our success was all due to my amazing technical leadership. In fact, some of our success was quite in spite of some of my leadership decisions. No one gets it all right, ever.

One thing I did right, though, was set the tone for what we did at Speek. I developed a set of 10 golden principles that drove every decision that we ever made about our product. I believe these principles were at the root of our success.

Here, then are the 10 things we strove for in our product at Speek:

1. Speed. Our app must be fast from the user perspective. More than one second for any task is unacceptable.
2. Instant Utility. Our app must be instantly useful, out of the box. If it takes too long or is too complex to configure, it’s useless.
3. Voice. Our app must have attitude. It must have personality. It must be unique and different. Think Twitter’s “fail whale” (without the fail).
4. Less is more. Either we do it right or we pull it. Do what needs to be done to make it work and make it work well.
5. Programmable. We offer more than a product. We offer a platform. Customers can take what we build and improve upon it.
6. Personal. Our app must generate endearment. We want users to be rabid fans and product evangelists. More than just a product or a platform, our product should create a community of connected people.
7. Restful. Each aspect of our app should have a free and comprehensible URL.
8. Discoverable. Our app should be friendly to search engines and social media. It should easily be discovered by the world.
9. Clean. We should have a simple user interface with large fonts and lots of space. No UI screen should ever feel busy or confusing. It should be crystal clear what should be done on each screen.
10. Playful. We have a damn monkey for a logo. Our app should invoke that kind of playful spirit and attitude.

Now, I get that some of these principles might not fit certain startups. Some are more or less specific to the software startup environment. For the most part, however, you can extrapolate these ideas to give your startup a serious advantage in your market, no matter what your product.