So you want to be an e-millionaire?

Here are has 50 vital pieces of advice for would-be Netrepreneurs, the author of which has spent the past year attempting to get rich on the internet

1 Use your friends (assuming you have some). Think - who can help you? Who can work for you? Who knows someone who could help or work for you?

1 Use your friends (assuming you have some). Think - who can help you? Who can work for you? Who knows someone who could help or work for you?

2 Network. The secret start-up community is like a commercial underground. It's amazing how much information you can gather and how many opportunities you can grasp just by getting in among it.

3 Buy your round. A great way of ensuring successful networking.

4 Be open. The more you get the word out about what you're doing, the more chance there is that someone who might help gets to hear about it.

5 Don't fear copy-cats. You have a great idea. You're frightened someone might nick it. But most people are too lazy to bother. And even if they aren't, they've got their own business to think about.

6 Forget about NDAs. Non-Disclosure Agreements are documents intended to protect your ideas and prevent you being ripped off. But the people you can trust don't need to sign a document. And the ones you can't will shaft you anyway.

7 Don't give away too much too soon. You start out with 100 per cent. If you give away too much, you'll end up doing all the hard work and for naff-all of the reward. On the other hand -

8 Don't be grasping, either. You'll need other people to help you. They're more likely to do so if they're treated as valued partners, rather than slaves. So give key people a decent slice of the action.

9 Lack all pride. You need money. You need help. You need clients. Your theme tune, therefore, is "Ain't Too Proud to Beg".

10 Write a good business-plan. Investors see hundreds of plans a week. If you want yours to be noticed, make it good.

11 Crunch numbers. It's impossible to forecast what your business will be like in five years' time. But investors like to see detailed month-by-month projections. So humour them.

12 You need an elevator pitch. This is the whole concept, plus bottom-line financial figures, on one sheet of paper, short enough to be read in a single elevator ride. It's all the top guys will ever bother to read. Make it good.

13 Get an introduction. Your plan arrives on a desk unannounced, it's in the bin a minute later. So let recipients know it's coming. And make sure they get this news from someone they trust. Better yet, someone to whom they're obliged. That way, they'll have to read it.

14 Be enthusiastic. You'll meet lots of grey suits whom you need to impress. They'll be dull as ditchwater. You, however, must be as fizzy as Fanta. They like that.

15 Get a good patter. These guys see a zillion presentations a day. Yours has to be better.

16 Jargonise. Pepper your conversation with concepts like "disintermediation" and "first-mover advantage". It's all complete cobblers, but it makes suits feel you're speaking their language.

17 Keep it snappy. Businesses are like movies. The best ones can be described in a sentence. If yours is too complicated to explain, it's way too complicated to sell.

18 Show them the exit. Before people put money in, they need to know how they'll get it out. Will you float? Will you be bought by? Come up with a credible strategy.

19 Figure out your exit, too. How are you going to make money from all this? Not the notional value of your shares, but real, hard cash. Don't even start until you've answered that question.

20 Be sexy. Grey suits lead drab lives. If your business can get them close to fame, glamour, or beautiful women, they love it. But -

21 Don't invest in blondes. Grey men lose all judgement when confronted with beautiful blondes. These blondes may well be brilliant. But the over-excitement they engender in bankers will cause the value of their businesses to be wildly over-inflated. Three words as proof: Boo dot com. Three more: Martha Lane-Fox.

22 Have more than one backer. Internet funds have been folding as fast as internet companies. If your backers go down, they'll take you with them. So don't put all your commercial eggs in one financial basket.

23 Ask for lots of dosh. Nothing makes an investor more nervous than someone who asks for a small amount of money. Double the number you first thought of and they might just take you seriously.

24 Obsess about revenue. If investors can't see a massive profit for themselves, they won't give you Penny One. You must have a revenue-stream. But -

25 Forget retail. The Net is lousy for selling objects. Shops and catalogues do it better.

26 Forget advertising. There isn't enough advertising to pay for the number of websites looking for it. There never will be.

27 Forget merchandising. No, punters won't come to your site, check out your editorial, then buy videos, CDs and T-shirts. UK companies last year spent 10 times as much on content as they made from ancillary sales. So -

28 Keep your product digital. The Net is a digital medium. It sends digits down wires. Figure out a way to make money from digits, and you could be in business.

29 Copy porn-merchants. The only people who make money by selling internet content direct to consumers. Whoever can copy their model, without the need for genitalia, will be a billionaire.

30 Don't get obsessed by technology. Punters don't care about gizmos. They just want a site that works, downloads quickly and does what it says it does.

31 Put practicality before glamour. Making a site work is far, far more important than making it beautiful. If your designer does not understand this -

32 Get another designer. Actually, get another designer anyway. They're all impossible egomaniacs. It does them good to be sacked on a regular basis.

33 Don't be tied to a launch date. It may be a blow to be seen to delay, but not half as much of a blow as launching and being seen to be crap.

34 Customer service is everything. If punters have bad experiences on your site, they will never come back. Spend your money on them, and they will spend their money on you.

35 State the bleedin' obvious. One of the biggest drains on Web revenues is that punters log off thinking they've bought something before they actually have. Even when you think the process is obvious, it probably isn't.

36 Sell shovels. You're better off providing a service than starting a site. A cliché, but it's true: the people who make money in gold rushes aren't the diggers. They're the people who sell the shovels.

37 Do what you know. A friend was approached by a woman who had an idea for a site selling large-size ladies' shoes. When asked, she admitted she knew nothing about the Net, retailing or footware design. "But I've got very large feet." Sadly, that's not enough.

38 Forget that instant fortune. Starting a business is like renovating a house. It takes twice as long and costs three times as much as you expected. So -

39 Cut back. You are going to be very poor before you become very rich.

40 Get used to the line: "Are you a millionaire yet?" Everyone will expect you to be rich. Tell them that you are, in fact, skint. But try not to hit them as you do so.

41 Go to bed. Attachments opened with a naked web-designer working all night. No-one works well when they work too long. Just ask junior doctors.

42 Learn the language of beards. Techies have hairy "too brilliant to care about appearance" beards. Designers have small, trim, "creative statement" beards. Unless they're women, of course.

43 Be prepared to meet a lot of blokes. The Web is supposed to be female-friendly. But 90 per cent of all hardware salesmen, programmers, database engineers, software gurus, graphic designers and venture capitalists still urinate while standing up.

44 Work in London. It's where the money and the talent is. It's where people expect you to be.

45 Don't spend too much on office space. Rent can kill you. But rents in London are sky-high. And you can't be out of London, unless you -

46 Only give out your mobile number. If you can only be got on the mobile, you seem modern and on-the-move. And no-one knows you're actually in Chipping Norton.

47 Start offline. Find a business that works anyway, and only then take it online. It's called "bricks-to-clicks" and is the in thing.

48 Keep it cheap. Start small and grow organically. If your brilliant idea needs a £10m ad budget, think of another idea.

49 Stay cool. Things will go wrong. Plans will have to be rewritten. You may end up with a completely different business. Deal with it. Or, alternatively, you could just -

50 Rob banks: I have been given three foolproof methods of robbing banks online. But that's a whole other story.

David Thomas's book about his own attempts to start an internet company, 'Show Me the Money: the diary of a wannabe internet millionaire' will be published on 5 October by Ebury Press, at £12.99