Thanks for writing this up, and I know exactly what you mean about making all the mistakes you've read about. I've been there too. If you're smart, you only need to make them once. I'm still making a few of them over and over.

I'm also happy to see that most of the comments here are positive. I'm sure you'll get some "Oh, well you should have just done ..." crap here too, but you probably know to ignore that by now.

Good luck in your future ventures and just keep at it. There's no guarantee you'll ever be successful, but doing nothing guarantees that you won't.