Right here on Clarity! Go search IoT and you'll get a list of 7 awesome people who you can reach out to. I'll personally recommend Utz Baldwin - we worked with Utz and his company Ube / Plum when they were fundraising (on our platform Fundable). He's a great guy, a fantastic entrepreneur, and knows IoT better than anyone else I know. Happy Hunting!

I've met co-founders and team members through participating in Startup Weekend evens. (The last two companies I sold were started at startup weekends!) But, I generally recommend participating in others groups or pitching different ideas than you're trying to find a co-founder for. Another great resource is FounderDating.com Just remember, don't think of it as speed dating... Think of it as Match.com and trying to find a lifelong partner.

I can give you the standard answer, brand, audience, marketing and half a dozen other things. You can spend thousands on any or all of those three things but if you don't grind, get better all the time and learn. You've wasted your money and time. 1. Grinding. The reality is just grinding away every day. 14-15 hours a day 6-7 days a week, not for a month, a year, 2 years... whatever it takes. Never say die attitude. Whilst our competitors are on holidays or just slacking off. We're still working stealing their customers. If you don't keep grinding away you'll never succeed. Of course just grinding away isn't enough. 2. Continuous improvement Never settling, learning from mistakes, recovering from it and just keep grinding away. Just focus on just getting better all the time. What has made us successful, (4x) was just getting better. Better at knowing our customers, better at producing the product. Better at communicating with our audience. Better at customer service, better at everything that matters to our industry, our market. 3. Finally, it's self-education. Being open minded to new knowledge. Learning from others, learning from customers, learning from competitors. Learning from successful entrepreneurs in other industries. Constantly learning new skills and learning to be a better entrepreneur. If you really want to succeed. Grind, work on getting better and keep learning. Everything else may be helpful but if you don't do these three things you are relying on luck.

With the over production of the us dollar and the euro becoming weaker the real question is will the European nations ever settle on a unified monitory system (personally i doubt it will ever happen) and how long are you willing to wait for the market to go back up. Also me personally I would stick to your strengths, if you are a house flipper stick with that, if you are an investor and rent till the market is ready that would be my suggestion as the safest bet for your money. Best investment places are resort and tourist locations or just outside of those locations where people want to be but wont want to pay prime rates, also lower taxes in those locations so more profit for you. If you are looking for more information on prediction of human tendencies feel free to give me a call.

Hi there, A good question to consider is this: are people willing to pay to read what you want to write? Do your interests represent a big enough "market" to create and sustain a livelihood? People who make a living out of publishing online seem to have one thing in common: they figure out where their interests intersect with other people's interests. I'm not talking about generating a ton of link bait. I'm talking about finding a hungry crowd. You can sell a world-class hamburger in a vegetarian neighborhood and still go out of business. You can publish excellent articles and blog posts on the arts and humanities, and still make no money. Here's some practical advice for finding your hungry crowd(s): Go to Medium.com. Do some research. Identify the writers who are already publishing on the subjects that interest you. What kind of following have they built up? How many recommends do their stories get on average? Which stories are their most popular? What's their strategy? Do their stories route readers to an external blog or website? Can you figure out how they are making money? If you do "competitive analysis" on two to three dozen arts & humanities writers, then you'll notice some patterns. You'll notice that some topics sell better than others. Or some stylistic elements or flourishes have enabled certain writers to build an audience quickly. Use your analysis to reverse engineer your audience. You can't make a living publishing online until you have an audience. Lastly, watch this video, and pay attention to the part at the end about left-handed vampire movies: https://kicktastic.com/video/convince-convert-jay-baer/. Hope this helps, Austin

You need to think about the user experience for the first 50 people, as you are doing. If you're not solving a problem for them, then there is no value, so the user base will not grow. It's always easy to envision a product or service which if you have e.g 1m users is valuable; but the hard part is getting there. If your service is ONLY valuable with 1m , or 1k users, then you need to find a different reason to onboard them, so they find some different value until you get critical mass to begin delivering on your vision. e.g Facebook started by solving the problem of who is in my year at college to flirt with (hence the Poke button, amongst other things), later it delivered alternative value. They also just "onboarded" everyone in one go, which helped. So, you need to narrow your focus to a segment of your target audience you can focus on, target, and onboard, by vertical, geography, or some other measure. Get the first 50 people, or even 5(!) people happy, because you deliver them some value, then you can start building on that start.

The answer lies in creating an aspirational culture, or a culture of opportunity. Organizations owe their employees pathways for recognition and upward mobility, with inbuilt mechanisms for mentorship and skill augmentation. In a sense, organizations promote their brand to a customer and employees alike -" this is what we stand for, this is who we are, trust us, we will take care of you!" McJobs being devoid of these qualities are then high turnover, whereas the Starbucks job is a pathway to learning customer service and management skills under middle class values. But yes, creating this ethos takes enormous concerted effort! Complicating matters are trends of talent poaching and paypacket competition between industry rivals (this affects mid level and up more). Great question - happy to help you create a strategy of belonging!

Google Search is already smart enough to capture those misspellings and shows recommendations for the correct words. Assuming that your website has been around for a while, Google will show users the branded site first in the results pages so the clicks will go there. Google figures out possible misspellings and their likely correct spellings by using words it finds while searching the web and processing searchers queries. So, unlike many spelling correctors, Google can suggest common spellings for proper nouns (names and places), and words that may not appear in a dictionary. I usually use misspellings in my clients Paid Search campaigns to capture all the possible traffic when I see that there's a high number of searches for those variations. I advise against buying domain names for the purpose of capturing that traffic. It will help, though, for people entering the exact domain name directly into the browser. And if you do so, make sure that they all redirect via a permanent 301 redirect to the original one, but do not use them for tricky SEO purposes.

I worked with a guy, who was with SKY news for 18 years, and we did a great transition for him into coaching. We discussed his strengths and weaknesses. We looked into what his passion was and created a purpose for it. I would want to work with you on who you want to serve and why. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me. Shawn Huber

I live in Brooklyn, NY, which is a really fertile ground for small business retailers. My experience speaking with a lot of the shop owners is that they simply don't have the resources to maintain an online presence. Just keeping the brick and mortar operation running consumes most, if not all of their time, especially if the are also creating and producing their own products. For many that I do see take a shot at e-commerce retailing, they may get Shopify/Squarespace site set-up, then just run out of steam to keep it going. One innovative, in-between approach that I've seen one of my favorite shops take, is to actually focus on using a single social media channel, Instagram, and maintain an e-commerce function through it. (See @peopleof2morrow on Instagram)

Hi there, I'm going to assume based on numbers and that you can't pay a salary to yourself at $165k in revenue that you're working with an ecommerce business or some type of business that has a hard cost to what you're selling. You have a good growth rate so far. But let's shift focus towards getting your business into a place where you can make it a full-time gig. A key here will be turning your existing customers into repeat customers and increasing their lifetime value. If you're an ecommerce business, this means upselling them into products that compliment their past purchase. If you are in some other product space, it's offering them a higher value upsell to increase their value. A great example of doing this in ecommerce is with super food companies. These stores sell dehydrated or freeze dried super foods in packages, and their upsell is to go from a one-time purchase into a subscription. When they have someone on a 3-month, 6-month or 12-month subscription, they've effectively increased that customer's value by 3x, 6x or 12x. That means if you have $165k coming in this year from all new customers, moving into something subscription based could push that revenue from $165k into $495k, 990k or $1.188m. Assuming subscription is possible with your product. If it is not possible, then you will want to increase the number of repeat purchasers. Selling them into products that compliment their past purchases can get you into doubling or tripling a customers value if you are selling products of equal or greater value. I hope this helps, but I'd love to learn more about your business and what you are actually selling. If you're interested in talking to me further, send me a message on Clarity!

I would be curious to know why you feel it is important to use personality testing. I have hired over 20 sales reps and I have never used any testing. I have conversations with my hires because that is going to tell me more about their personality any day than a test. Plus you might eliminate someone because of a test score that could be a great fit for your organization. I have a pretty strong process for hiring sales people and could share with you my steps and even the questions if you would like.

What you are asking for has one simple answer: Marketing. I assume however that you would want a more specific how to guide for such marketing efforts. I won't venture in giving you a ton of possible irrelevant examples but I would like start our conversation by saying that if there is no market demand and you do have a clever useful product you need to market the emotional need and consider why it hasn't been served. When you find that this is what you leverage.

It sounds like you are headed in the direction of WordPress. Do you want to create an e-commerce portion, too? Check out http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/. Cheers! Let me know if you have any questions.

Hi! Partner disagreements happen all the time. The good news is, most of the time, they are disagreements that get resolved for the better. I'm a business performance expert, a CPA, a CGMA and highly experienced at leadership and managing companies. Allow me to suggest some options for you. This looks like you and your partner need to reach an agreement on how to operate the company. You can do this verbally or you can do it in writing with an operating agreement. I suggest you get this agreement in writing. The results you seek are to clearly define, and understand between both of you, the way both of you may smoothly run the company. Operating agreements may have many different segments in it including (but not limited to) defining everything from who has an operating role vs who doesn't, your responsibilities, how the company ownership and profits are split, entry and exits of partners and even the method of accounting chosen. Once you decide with your partner who has authority regarding your product direction, the person responsible should provide good leadership to see the products are well developed, and the other should follow their respective role as agreed and defer product development decisions to the other. If one partner breaks out of the agreed role, you should have a private, positive conversation with your partner to set your boundaries and remain in your agreed roles. When this happens, you need to have this conversation within a reasonable amount of time after the disagreement. Don't be afraid of what they think, because your product and your company are at risk. Just be respectful and let them know they crossed the line and ask that they step back behind it. I hope this helps! Please feel free to call me if you need help with this operating agreement, including a sample for your reference. To prepare it, you can expect you'll need a legal expert and a business expert to contribute to your desired operating agreement. Best of Luck! Rodger Stephens, CPA, CGMA Business Performance Expert

You can start by having a text to download sign up on your website. I use Link Texting. You can also create a landing page that can build a email listing so that you can send emails to people who are interested in your app features. Read a article by Kevin Kelly called 1,000 True Fans.

Checkout is a high-quality WordPress theme by Array built for marketplaces of any kind. https://arraythemes.com/themes/checkout-wordpress-theme/ Let me know if you have any questions about implementation, and I'd be happy to setup a call.

Hi Heavily depends on you payback time for customer (how long in months it takes you to get money back invested in acquiring them). If it is more than 12 months than you have to work on reducing the cost of acquisition. Without lowering the cost (and lowering the payback time) the growth wthout funding will kill you - you will have exhausted all the money before getting to the payback time. The other thing to do when you have long payback time is to work on increasing the value of customer. This is usually done by introducing annual payment (for SaaS solutions), up-selling, cross-selling and other (full list how to do it you will find here:https://medium.com/@asengyczew/19-best-ways-to-boost-your-ltv-the-ultimate-guide-61b9417fd779) Now, if the payback time is short (6-12 months) than just try to exhaust the market - get 100% penetration, approach new potential customers, The bigger share you want to get the bigger range of acquiring customers you will have to use. Some people do not react to offers by mail or phone so you have to go old-school and have direct sales. Sometimes, the niche is too small for your appetite (or too small to sustain the business in the long run). In those cases you have to find other customers – either go global or look for other similar segments / markets where you can use the same solutions. Hope it helps Best Asen

This seems to be very interesting but I think you should stay away from most VCs who are mostly focus in IT etc. My expertise resides in VC funding in IT so I can't really help with Lobster but if you have decent financials of last year, you can probably go to the Angel route for a small round. Did you look at AngelList?

If your talking about the pixel quality it depends on your brand. The content of the video is far more important. You should take into account on a broader level whether an explain-er video will increase conversions verse a text based explanation due to trade offs. Video: Visual elements help with user experience and also increase transparency with brand. The con is that search engines can't read video's and only the video description will be recognizable. (A work around is having a transcript of the video which may take away from the user experience). Also video's decrease your websites page speed. Text: This will allow people and search engines to read your content. May decrease visitors engagement and increase bounce rate. Solution: I have been in a position where we did an A/B text on having a video verse image to explain the concept. Turns out both performed nearly identical. We choose the image because videos hurt page speed. Page speed is a part of Google's algorithm for search engine results. Consider creating a landing page with bullet points around customers pain points (not your product/service benefits) with a CTA that takes them to your video or offer. With an explain-er video I'm guessing your offering an unique product or service.

Better than choose an architecture and try to build the server side of your app, I suggest you to try to find a mate that helps you and was your cofounder. Just you will probably fail in building the app and keeping it working fine in the near future. One-founder teams are very risky for accelerators and VCs. So, you definitely should trust in a co-founder. Read this: http://venturehacks.com/articles/pick-cofounder

This falls outside my field; but in the absence of responses from others, I'll throw in my 2 cents. Yes, photographs will communicate emotion more viscerally and more immediately to a wider audience than would mere graphic design. It would take a rare painter to equal an average photographer for a job like this one. We've all watched weddings all our lives – weddings of actual people; and we empathize or fantasize by imagining ourselves in their place. Especially among brides, it seems there's a strong desire to emulate. But we're all trained to respond to images of weddings and brides. The less stylized and abstract they are, the more evocative we'll find them. That's my hunch. Browse some Pinterest boards about brides and weddings, and you'll quickly see for yourself what kinds of images people have selected and respond to emotionally.

Assuming you are looking for software, not in-car telematics, and you are willing to integrate rather than build it yourself, you could try using ZenDrive. That would give you a lot more than mileage too (eg, driving behavior).

You should start first by not asking for free legal advice in a place where anyone can answer. That's a great way to get caught in a major headache down the road.

If they are offering equity as your payment then I'm surprised that they didn't come with a number. Or maybe they will. It's hard to give a firm answer because it all depends on how much money the two founders are investing on their own. If you say you'll invest equal portions then you can ask for 1/3 of the company. If you're just investing time, how much time, compared to how much of their time plus equity. Depending on those answers, the amount of equity you're worth can drop pretty low.