What's your end goal? Do you want to be a great employee? Or a business owner? What kind of a business owner--hands on, or Olympian? Big differences. Specialized skills are what's necessary for being a great employee or hands-on business owner. If you want to be a leading, delegating, deal-making business owner, then you need a different skill set. In either case, simply knowing what you want and being able to articulate it will put you ahead of 99% of the pack. Most people have no idea what they want and drift from thing to thing...their next job is similar to their last, or the first one that was offered to them... You can literally shave years off your career path by being ultra-clear on your target and going straight for it. I've had employers create custom roles for me four times. Each one knocked several years off my career path. It's why I was a production manager with six supervisors and over 150 floor employees reporting to me at 26. I created that job, by sending the employer a package detailing my plan and requirements. Want to partner with the best to learn specialized skills? Sell them on the idea of why they need to hire YOU and only you. Want to learn the art of deal making, delegating and other soft skills? Sell the right kind of business owner on why they need to hire YOU and only you as their assistant. Get IN. Once you're IN, you will get a completely different view of the world. For example, I worked for a national electrical wholesaler for four years. A guy was an accounting clerk when I started, and after awhile he got promoted to assistant to the GM for an area with 11 branches. That guy instantly got access to all the high level data and IN on the decision making at that level. He got to see the issues, information, solutions, and people who played at that level. Near the end of my time there I did a stock tracking project and worked with him. On my first day, I was shocked to see all this data. I was suddenly IN. Nobody else in my department got to see this data. And it was "no big thang" for these head office guys; they worked at this level every day. Set your target and get IN. I bet you cut 10 years off your learning curve by doing so.

If you have your CAD design done, you can get it printed in plastic first using inexpensive printers at 3DHubs for example. Do tweaks to the design and reprint. This can't cost more than $5 or so per print. Once you're happy you can then send your design to shapeways or i.materialise to be printed in metal. These services will likely charge a fee $100 for a metal print.

Could be! You do raise a good, unexplored space of connecting and monetizing referrals. I've been working with a few HR startup types and I do know that this would be valuable resource. The trick is the angle you take - is this 'buddies helping buddies' in a quiet, hidden informal way, or is this sponsored by and for the organization and routed through the recruiter? Another dimension is intra-company as well as inter-company referrals - wall street and finance businesses have a lot of inter-connections and this could be an interesting connective. I'd love to offer more suggestions over a phone call! Your purpose and qualifications will make our strategy more concrete. Best, Arjun.

Yes, you should read Do More Faster by Brad Feld and David Cohen from Techstars. It gives you great advice on what to consider when starting your tech company.

Erghh...tough to answer because at 18 I know I didn't listen to many people...and I thought I was a "nice kid." A lot of this stuff is learned through trial and error, and this saying (which has been attributed to many people from Mark Twain on down) is accurate: “Good judgement is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgement.” So at least in this model, you have to go through the bad to understand the good. I'll say this, from my own experience: The time will pass. In three blinks of an eye you will be 40. I know it seems like a far away point now, but trust me, time accelerates as you get older. Each summer you plan to learn how to sail a small boat. Each summer passes and you have to work, you can't take the time off to do the course, the sunny days pass by. Suddenly you are 30. Blink. The time will pass. If you want to get good at something--business, music, art, whatever--start now. Persist. The time passes, quicker and quicker, whether you like it or not, and if you stick with whatever it is, you will develop that skill... ...and suddenly, in two blinks of an eye, you will realize you are a professional. I have perhaps 25 functional years left in the workforce. The full force of this is in my face every waking minute. Be the person you want to be--or be a flake. That is fate's demand. Don't be too concerned about money at your age. You can build it. Live beneath your means. I didn't, through my mid-20s, and it bothers me to this day. Put a percentage of your income aside every paycheck. Then you can take vacations when the opportunity arises, buy stuff on sale that you really want when it comes up, take that sailing course and get started on the road to enjoyment and perhaps mastery. Don't let circumstances rule you. Need to get out of work early to take that course? Talk to your boss about it. Start a side business now, if you're so inclined. You can make all the mistakes early and it won't cost you much...and you can be a pro at 28. Because, trust me, the time will fly by. Make the things you want to happen...happen. Don't be too interested in pleasing other people. It doesn't pay off. They will simply take advantage and then take more. Take care of yourself first. If a choice comes down to doing something you know is important to your life, or pleasing someone else and suppressing your desire or interest, choose yourself. You can always get another job. Speaking of jobs...don't let anyone tell you that "you have to pay your dues" or "you have to have more experience." That is the Chicken Little way of the world and those people do not know what they are talking about. Someone told me I couldn't be a factory manager when I was 24. I quit, and within 4 months was a plant manager. People do not know what they are talking about. Even me. Trust yourself. Find your own truth. There are MANY ways to success--not just one. Not just the single one advertised on television. You can figure it out your way, and you'll probably be a lot happier. Oh, and invest in some solid real estate as soon as you can to get a passive income going.

Having just completed a top notch Accelerator program I can tell you that even in the great programs not every company survives. Accelerators and their coordinators are a good resource for entrepreneurs who may be in search of additional opportunities. That group of people varies greatly in terms of their liquid resources. Some have funds to reinvest while others have no cash at all, so it also depends on what you are looking for. Straight cash, versus a transition to silent partnership, for example.

What do you see when you look at the stock market over the last two weeks? The Dow was down over 900 points this morning. Why are you even thinking of selling your business in this sort of market when there are no buyers? If the above makes sense to you then its wrong. The Dow recovered because buyers saw an opportunity and the Dow recovered to be down about 250 points. As I write this is its about 480 points down. The bottom line. You have your reasons for selling. A buyer will buy for their reasons. You have to find the right buyer which normally takes time and presenting your business as professionally as you can and having experienced advisors around you to help you be successful. If you are highly motivated to sell, try to solve what's causing you to be highly motivated so you can just be a motivated seller and let the market do what it does; bring together a willing buyer and a willing seller.

Well, you'll certainly have a lot of options for where to focus your marketing efforts, since entrepreneurs are a huge market and pretty much everywhere on the web. I'd recommend testing some different social media channels - grow a brand presence on the major networks, and if you have the budget, test some ads (I'd recommend Facebook and/or Twitter to start). It's worth doing some keyword research to see where your opportunities lie. I'm guessing many of the ones directly relevant to your business will be very popular and therefore very expensive, so try looking for some more specific longtail keywords and phrases if you decide to focus on SEO. I'd also recommend publishing case studies and testimonials early and often, to make it extremely clear how valuable your service is (ex: "This business owner saves himself 200 hours each year. Learn how he does it." ... or something to that effect.) Your success stories will be key in attracting the attention of your busy audience. Happy to talk through some more strategies if you'd like to schedule a call!

There are a lot of places where you can try to get validation for your idea. But before you start going to look for these places, get your Buyer Personas (the representation of your ideal customers) in order. If you know who your ideal customers are, then the next step (of finding where they hang out) is easy. You can easily start tapping into your (existing) social network, for example to try to find people to have a conversation with and try to find out if they're really having the problem you're solving. Another place is local meetups, check out sites like meetup.com and see if they're meetup's in your area around the problem you're trying to solve. Go there and start talking to people! Online, online there's million of possibilities to try to find your ideal customers and trying to get a conversation with them, use Twitter search, certain Facebook groups around your demographic, newsletters, things like Quora etc. to find people hanging around and trying to get solutions to the problem you want to fix. (there's a ton of online locations in this SlideShare deck if you need more inspiration: http://www.slideshare.net/jcvangent/doing-customer-development-and-stop-wasting-your-time-startupbus-edition) Don't feel limited by the amount of budget you have, for having conversations with people you don't need a budget, you just need to know where to look to find the correct people to talk to. I recently wrote a blogpost around the subject as well, to give you some tips on how to reach the right people and what to ask them if you want to dig a bit further in the subject: http://inboundrocket.co/blog/stop-wasting-time-how-to-prove-youre-building-the-right-product/. Best of luck!

I very rarely recommend display ads for user acquisition (and I'd be hesitant to call this a growth hack!), but because your product is very visual in nature and you're targeting users of one specific site, it might be worth testing an ad campaign through the Google Display Network, using managed placements to only display the ads on ebay.com. (More on managed placements here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2470108?hl=en) I'm guessing there are also plenty of forums and sites that ebay sellers use to discuss best practices and such - I'd do some research to see where your audience hangs out and start participating in the conversations there, ideally in a way that is more focused on being helpful than being salesy. Let me know if you'd like to discuss further & I'd be happy to talk through some more ideas!

Solidify your idea by making sure that there is a market there. That means putting everything into a presentation, similarly to create a Product specific business plan. Speak with your tech team to decide upon technologies and commercial of the shelf software licenses, including hosting. Design a SIMPLE and good looking UI/UX and apply standard software methodologies such as SCRUM from development, Monitor progress and milestones. Most importantly target on "small" and doable product feature. One by one start adding. Place your product in the market and test-bed it fr FREE. Evolve and change features and functionalities. Remember Marketing is NOT everything ... but it is!

If you want to build a business around this, I'd recommend looking into some platforms that offer white-labeling and an easy interface for creating courses. Check out www.thoughtindustries.com. Or you could always go with something like Udemy, which may be a bit easier, but would be hosted through their site.

A tool we love to use is Adespresso (Adespresso.com). There you can easily create Facebook ads in a much more intuitive way than you would in Facebook's own power editor. Adespresso also automatically creates A/B tests for you, letting you ad a ton of images, headlines and text and creating multiple versions of your ads for you. I know this isn't an individual like you're looking for, but the tool is great even for someone with no knowledge of how to do Facebook campaigns so you can definitely do it on your own (and there's a free trial). If you'd rather have someone help you, our team at I'm With Otto (imwithotto.com) can help, or you can schedule a call with me here on Clarity. Hope that helps!

I can guide how sell all , and share with you my the sites i use and even connect you with some investor who buy from me app and maybe intersting in yours.

You can get real people to interact on a site like usertesting.com — it's a paid service to get you real feedback from real humans. If you want access to your demographic, you'll need to find out where they hang out and come up with an offer to encourage them to try your service (a closed beta, free access in exchange for submitting evaluations and feedback, etc.). Ads and/or sponsored posts could be useful here. Or you can set up your own user testing arrangement and offer to pay people a small amount in exchange for using the app. This should probably be your last-ditch effort, though. Good luck!

Take a look at the Expert360 platform at https://expert360.com/ They are based in Australia and seem to have quite a few consultants based in Sydney.

There are lots of things that will make or break this... Do you have an intellectual property on your product? Are you sure costumes need/want it? On the to do list - need to develop marketing material and contact the company you want to license to. Having contacts with the right people/decision makers is very important. Happy to discuss details of you like.

So the firs thing I wonder about this is not what the price will be, but how will you get mental health providers to integrate the app into their workflow? What is the ROI specifically that would make a company want to buy this? How can you justify the cost with the value provided? Is this something that can be billled for? What is the entire interaction between the patient and the doctor? Is the doctor going to get paid for using this? What is the benefit to the provider for implementing this? Once you understand the perspectives and experiences of every individual who is touching the product then you can start thinking about price.

I have been working with HubSpot for almost 5 years. I've consulted with *hundreds* of companies in a very similar position to you. In my experience, the man-hours it takes to manage multiple systems cobbled together far outweigh the dollars a system like HubSpot cost. Further, there are countless inefficiencies that become factors when trying to synchronize databases, lead tracking, scoring, and effective lead nurturing. I'd like to talk with you more about this before a poor decision is made. Shoot me a message and I'll waive my consultation rate for a quick call. I think we can find ways to make this work for your best interest long term. -Shaun

You'll find that to be the case on any outsourcing site. Focus on the reviews and comments left on a designer's profile. This will give you an idea of the quality of their work before contacting them. Further, check out LinkedIn and search for "freelance designer" or "freelance graphic design" and sift through the results. Good luck! They're out there!

Depends. If the order is a few thousand dollars, you should have it setup to let them wire you the money or even checks (if the company is in the US). Normally, for products up to $2K, companies take care of it with credit card. For higher products, you should encourage them to contact you. If you check a few SaaS companies, they have an enterprise plan with no details, encouraging you to contact them directly to find out more.

Finding the right co-founder is like a marriage. It's not a good idea to jump to bed with whoever comes along. Most investors and accelerators bet for the team that have a previous relationship before. The best option is definitely to spend time in the geographical area you'd like your co-founder to be and start going to startup meetups and events. It takes time, but it's worth it when you find the right partner. Although I don't recommend it, here are some websites that can match you with co-founders: https://www.founder2be.com https://www.cofounderslab.com http://www.founders-nation.com http://founderdating.com

If you have an enforceable contract, the client is obligated to pay for the services received. As a business owner, I would be very concerned if a SAAS was demanding upfront payment for 2 years.

Hi, check out my previous response here https://clarity.fm/a/10228

There is inherent risk to running a business and building a team of folks to help you grow it. That said, hiring the right people is paramount to your success and reducing the risk of theft or abuse. Hire people for their integrity rather than their skill set. Almost anyone can be taught skills of the trade, but no one "learns" ethics on the job. Lastly, many franchises have systems in place to reduce the risk of employee theft with verified cash drops, deposit tracking, and such. The cash in the register drawer is *ALWAYS* at risk of walking away. That's why many retailers require cash drops when the register reaches a certain amount. -Shaun