But what happens when those ideas are cast in stone and fundable? Experts at the National Venture Capital Association conducted a survey in conjunction with Dow Jones & Co., and found that almost 75% of U.S. startups plan to raise a traditional A round or a mid-size angel debt round in the coming year. Unfortunately, they will be asking for critical growth funds just as VCs experience a severe capital shortage.

The survey reports that 69% of VCs expect their investments to stay the same or decline next year, not grow. That’s a 21% increase from a similar survey last year. Add to that sobering statistic the fact that VC firm numbers are in double digit decline, from 1,312 in 2000 to 844 last year. Their numbers dropped nearly 5% in the past 12 months.

Last month’s SVASE-East Bay Series focused on what categories are expected to be hot for VCs–medical, hardware, and non-traditional (read: not high tech software or eCommerce) startups headed the list.

What does this mean to startups on the verge of an A-Round quest? Hard to say. We also heard that good ideas that proved out were not seeing a cloud of competitors emerge around their premise, as was often the case in earlier years. So a startup with that elusive “traction”—customers, revenue, and (gasp!) profit margin—may well find their way to growth and expansion funding. Those with less to show may be forced to close their doors, and that’s not good for our now-famous innovation economy.

Set aside the Gantt charts, scrums, and to-do lists for an hour each week, close your eyes, and visualize your customer, using your product. How does it enhance their life or workplace…what does it mean to them…how does it change their world? How does the way they use your product look? How do they feel as they use it? Is there a smile at the corners of their eyes, or a furrow in the middle of their forehead? Then open your eyes and look at your product through their eyes, touch it with their hands, and hear it through their ears. I promise you, you’ll have a revelation every single time you put your customer avatar on and let it play in the field of your product.

All of this comes from watching the stumbling answers I receive to seeing someone’s demo and asking the simple question, “How do your customers feel about it?”

It’s truly remarkable how many times they pause, look confused, then start again to describe their product’s wonderful features, how masterfully the code executes, and how everyone in the room loves the way it works. They’ve solved its problems, not a customer’s problems. And, sorrowfully, sometimes they haven’t even made a down payment on the problem they set out to solve in the first place.

Perspective is like gold dust–it easily blows away in the wind to be lost forever. It’s even more like falling down a steep mountain, an endless slide without a sudden stop at the end. Once you’re at the bottom, you have to slog endlessly and toil to get back up to where the air is clear and you can see again. Yet, make your customer your sherpa guide, and you’ll be surprised how easy it is to take your eyes out and see with theirs. Your customer is never wrong, no matter how much they ignore, abuse,  or disdain your software baby.

They’ll choose the wrong menu item every time, punch every incorrect button, be endlessly distracted by something you didn’t expect, and will come up with mistake after mistake to confound your program’s logic and tie your UI in knots. Once in awhile, they’ll even crack a smile as something only you knew about makes a connection with their real world. Because that’s what it’s all about—your customers’ real world, not your lab petri-dish culture of self-amplifying feedback loops.

I once worked in a shop that put a artist’s rendition of our customer on every desk. I looked long and hard at that face over a period of many months. It’s remarkable how often that picture mocked my progress and tore up my carefully contrived assumptions. Today, I don’t need the picture to see that face—or the faces of other customers for other products. They are deep in my head, looking over my shoulder, tapping me on the elbow for recognition and input, straightening out my path.

Where’s your customer? Are you building your users and their world into your products, or are they just afterthoughts?

As Bloomberg reports, from 2006 to 2010, over U.S. $535 Billion flowed into Clean Tech startups from venture capital firms, private equity, and IPO, fueling 4,236 ventures. What they didn’t count on was a combination of blindsiding by technological innovation, market forces, and irreducible physical laws that KO’d many of these startups before they could emerge to liquidity events.

Then the first hammer fell—Solyndra went under and brought a glaring spotlight on the dual questionable practices of trying to beat a foreign government intent on dumping solar panel prices and milking public policy for loans unsupportable through due diligence. Within weeks, several more Clean Tech giants were under intense scrutiny.

Simultaneously, worldwide oil price benchmarks—having stabilized after skyrocketing to over $100/barrel on Middle East uncertainty, supply interruptions, and global debt crisis speculation—suddenly flattened out. Bloomberg’s article implies that one reason for this paradox was the discovery and deployment of new fracking technology that vastly expanded the recoverable natural gas supply worldwide, but especially in the U.S.A. Without fuel prices marching upward, the economics of Clean Tech couldn’t compete.

Where does Clean Tech go from here? Not back to the venture capital well for more infusions, if the sentiment on Sand Hill Road has any say. I’d put a vast majority of those 4,236 ventures on the slate for write-down, sale, consolidation, or old-fashioned fire sales.

There’s a lesson to be learned here for everyone who tried to milk this cow that refused to stand still and obey their predictions. Imbalances in the market tend to be self correcting—and markets are never as reliable as regulators in keeping markets in check. So, there’s no Sarbanes-Oxley repeat in Clean Tech on the horizon—rising energy prices answer to more than a federal mandate to spend compliance dollars. Take those moral certitudes to the bank.

Our conversation settled on how she could regain the momentum of winning a major early-venture contest, and I suggested the value of exploring customer partnerships as an alternative to venture funding.

Proposing strategic investments with one’s top customers or customer prospects isn’t everyone’s cup of tea nor is it very sexy, but it has the advantage of having all of the cards on the table face up for both sides. That’s rarely the case for other early investment options.

As a veteran of business development and joint ventures between numerous Fortune 500 companies, I pointed out that the benefits a strategic partner/customer expects go well beyond amount invested and ROI expectations. Partners are usually seeking long-term solutions and innovative competitive opportunities outside of their areas of expertise, along with long-term preferences and a side bet of potential upside, all while keeping their balance sheets clean. The investment of money is not completely incidental—and they certainly weigh the downside potential as well—but there are often mitigating reasons to partner up with a young, emerging player that has the power to disrupt their industry.

Is strategic partnership an avenue your venture should explore to fund and accelerate your growth?

WordPress even provides detailed instructions on how to disable the default display of blog posts on the home page – set the home page to a static page instead, and disable the blog page for a more typical website look.

The vast number of plugins available for WordPress is part of its power – you can find plugins for everything from SEO and analytics to integrating your website with your social media presences. (But read the fine print carefully – consider making a donation to the plugin author if they request it, to help further development and maintenance.) Even without SEO plugins, WordPress let’s you set permalinks for your pages to help guide the search engines – make sure to enable permalinks, and be thoughtful about page titles you create, as they drive the link names.

A plethora of ready-built themes for WordPress simplifies the design development of your site, and, depending on the theme, allows you a fine degree of control over the look and feel of your site – without doing any programming. Do some testing though to be sure your theme will support the static home page model.

Once your website is up and running, you’ll find the WordPress visual editor vastly simplifies updating and adding content. Ironically enough, you can thank the development hours that have gone into enabling WordPress for blogging for this.