Personally, I think you should be focusing heavily on your current users that are loyal to your brand currently and worry less on trying to buy users and get more brand awareness. To be frank you should be letting your strongest customers do all the promotion for you organically. "K-factor" This is how why you see businesses that get super big out of nowhere with practically nil paid marketing budgets. One of the differences of the David v Goliath mentality is companies believe they need to take on Goliath. The truth is, however, your company can operate at a high level by offering your customers the best services, prices, quality, etc that you can and be focused completely on the customer experience. The problem is by trying to compete with your competitors you are wasting all your money/time trying to beat or get market share vs. building a high quality business. Focus on acquiring the customers you can through traditional paid, organic channels however stop focusing on trying to compete for market share. Focus on your product/business and ensuring that you have high retention %/ repeat users/payers, etc. I worked at Lyft and to be honest we had that mentality vs. Uber who are essentially monsters compared to us. "Oh how will Lyft ever make a dent in Uber's market share" They have more money, resources, etc. The difference, however, was the customer experience with Lyft. Lyft, overall, is friendlier, and a better experience IMHO. Thus, you now see Lyft making major strides in market share in the ride-sharing economy. At the end of the day, IMHO eventually the customer experience, product etc. will help you organically eat into enough market share.

I have raised money for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, as a founder, an independent director and as an agent. The main salient difference is not so much deferring valuation (unless you give the convertible buyers a ratchet) as it is the trade off of who gets what in the case of huge success on the one hand or utter catastrophe on the other. In the case of huge success, its better to sell less equity so the convertible is probably the way to go. In the case of utter catastrophe you dont want a fight over who gets the desks and pencils, so in that case its better to have sold equity. Its all pretty much no more complicated than the calculus of greed on the part of the founders. Good corporate finance practice formerly dictated that issuers only sell debt if they have cash flow to service it, as few startups do. If you would like to discuss this further, let me know.

I have been involved in many private companies from startups to large cash flowing enterprises. Lets start with what many companies find useful at the outset-negotiate and execute a shareholders agreement that establishes rights and responsibilities of the founders in case of events like this. So with respect to the founder, and assuming you lack a shareholders agreement, you are limited to the options you can negotiate with him. Repsonding to your question of raising funds by selling his share, that essentially competes with capital for the company. The best solution, assuming capital scarcity, might be to let the founder stay in place with his shares, and make an agreement with him to give the remaining founders the right to vote his shares. If you would like to discuss this further please feel free to get in touch.

You can operate your business as a business unit under the corporation through a DBA. There is nothing stopping you from doing that. You might want to check your insurance policy to make sure you are covered but there are no business form issues that I'm aware of that would stop you from doing this. I run several businesses under one LLC with DBAs.

I have worked on small-to-medium RFPs myself, as well as with clients who answer very large ones. What I've found over time is that you're very often going to re-use existing content and assets between tenders, though most companies don't really act on this fact. One thing I've found very useful is to build a database of RFP responses that is as comprehensive as possible, including information such as the name of the client, their industry, the size of the contract, the services they were looking for, the status (was it a win or a loss?) as well as the contents of the response itself. This way, when answering a new RFP it's easy to sift through existing ones and retrieve relevant content and information that can be used in your answer. This can significantly cut the time needed to respond to a RFP. It's also an invaluable source of information for new sales hires, helping them get up to speed much faster.

UX journey maps come in all shapes and sizes. Each can be very effective. I feel it's most important to capture specific elements within the journey map. In addition, visual customer journey maps can be much easier to use. For each customer journey stage and step the following should be captured: customer drivers/considerations; expectations of a solution or solution provider (touchpoint with solution or solution provider); what the customer is doing (needs & activities); what the customer is doing; and what the customer is thinking. For each touchpoint, you may want to evaluate the relative importance for the customer. You may also define a process to measure the key touchpoint - measure/metric, how to calculate, data to be captured for calculation, target result, etc.

You'll need a little more detail than that to get a useful answer, unfortunately. Are you a developer and/or someone with access to custom development? If so, there are great options like Stripe available. You can use PayPal's API. If not, you may want to look into SaaS offerings that handle the UX for you. Also, is this a native mobile app, or a web-based mobile app? Do you need subscription payments or one-off payments? Taking people's money online is a complicated, risky process that needs to be extremely well-considered. Otherwise you risk big problems: unhappy clients, security vulnerabilities, poor usability, and so on. I would recommend doing a good deal more research on your own, then coming back to this question with far more detail. Good luck!

Backendless is a mobile app development platform and also provides server functionalities. You need to develop your app using the platform. See resource below to determine if it is right for your app "Using Backendless developers can focus solely on the user experience and client-side business logic of their applications without worrying about or spending any time on the infrastructure and server-side tasks. Backendless accomplishes this by exposing the core server-side functions as programmable services accessible via specialized and REST APIs. Without any effort, developers can implement app functions for user registration and login, data persistence, push notification, geolocation, publish subscribe messaging and media streaming. Absolutely all default server-side behavior can be modified or extended with custom business logic. - See more at: https://www.crunchba"

The two obvious answers are to 1) network your ass off, and 2) make sure the product blows users away in both quality and support. If you have any inroads with your sellers, go to where they are and convince them that your tool is going to make everyone's projects better. If you can't convincingly make that argument, work on improving your product and/or confidence before continuing. If you have competition, monitor for complaints about their products. See what frustrates their users and make sure you're not making the same mistakes in your product. If your product offers a clear solution to that problem and the user is complaining publicly (e.g. on Twitter) then offer the solution and incentivize the switch. If you can't sell direct to customers, then you'll probably want to target industry events where your sellers attend. You could sponsor MS-focused conferences and find a way to display convincing case studies and/or let people see the tool in action as a selling point. Most importantly, remember that clients don't hire fancy tech; they hire solutions to problems. In the first ten seconds, no one cares what tech stack it was built in, how clever the algorithms are, or anything else about what makes it work — they only care about whether their problems can be solved. Show them how your tool will solve their problems faster and easier than anything they've ever tried before, and with fewer painful side effects. Good luck!

I wonder what differentiates your site so that people want to pay to read the blogs. Who is your target market? Are all bloggers having established social networks? In another words, how is their social influence? Is $25 a one-time deal? Can they pay through mobile?

I'm a feelance CFO and I work actively with early stage companies. I've been at this for almost 30 years. Some of my current and recent clients wrestle actively with this very questions. My advice is to have the tough conversations right up front, early in the team building process. This usually consists of answering questions like, "who's in charge and what does that really mean," "who gets how much of the company and when and in exchange for what," "what are you, you and you really bringing to the table in terms of skills and cash," and "who is really in a life situation that will allow them to sustain their commitment to the business?" Any team that can get through these questions can get through the trials of surviving startup. I'm happy to talk with you directly about these issues and, in particular, to help look at them through a strategic financial planning lens.

Get into a showroom that has these connections. I'm with one in Los Angeles so I don't have to worry about sales. I have connections with a few that work with the majors. It will cost a min of 500 a month but that's the way to do it right. Just be aware of Be cautious, as there are showrooms that don't produce results, and simply collect on monthly fees. I'd love to hear more about your product!

Sarah is correct here. Becoming an influencer or authority in any area takes time and dedication, is not something you can typically leverage over night. My suggestions to you is stick to a hyper targeted niche, narrow down your vision and scale back all efforts to the most minimal most targeted effort possible that will yield you to the next effort all with one goal in mind. In growth hacking, we take this approach as having minimal goals but approaching them aggressively to reach highest results at each goal level. No matter how minimal the goal might be feel, if you're moving closer to the bottom line the goal is worth the effort. With that said once you have a niche and only focus on that the social platforms and users will begin to recognize this and turn to you. A quick hack for boost, although it typically doesn't list is writing a piece for publication to local journalists or online blogger. Write about something in your niche, look for relatable blogs or journalists and send it to them. Follow the bloggers, message them, ask for guest articles, or make suggestions on their posts vi their comments with links to your own blog. Dedicate a Facebook page with images (not info) and always include a link to that guest post, or your blog, or article. For example, the first time I came out on television, I managed to get more views of the back stage images than I did on the actual show. I leverage that into more appearances and visitors to my websites and businesses. The authority level can after a lot of work tho. Expertise came to me in my field due to experience and education all I had to do is expose my insight but even that took time and consistency in one area.

You should first figure out your audience more specifically. Females 15-40 is very broad. Will all of that audience like the 1 product you have..? Get specific before you advertise. For example - you are selling iphone cases so you would ideally like the ability to target only people with iphones. Facebook seems a logical place to start as you can plug in your current profile of iphone users females ages 15-40. Location - local national or international..? (Im going to guess local & national) Also you might want to consider the style of your cases will appeal to certain types of people more than others. If you have a minions case (hot at the time of writing as the first minion movie is out) This might currently have a broad appeal because of the movie. So you can also add in this as an interest when you promote your cases on facebook. Or if you are selling leather folding iphone cases there might be a different type of person who would be more interested. It might be more of a male/female mix as well who are slightly older 30+ at a guess (of course I would need to research - this is purely for illustration) My point hopefully is that before you start advertising you need to figure out who your advertising to and what specifically they will want. Facebook is a great place to start as you have so many choices to only promote your products to exactly the people who are interested in what you are offering. Hope this helps Good Luck Phil ps. If you need help with this I can offer a strategy session to help with this part of your business plan - this will help you build a solid base for you businesses long term success. Call me

If you're an entrepreneur starting out, you CANNOT outsource sales and marketing. If you are not able to sell your own product, the business that YOU created, no one else will. Furthermore, if you haven't even tried selling yourself, how do you even begin to understand what the characteristics of the right sales people for the job are to make sure you hire the right people? You mentioned you had a full-time job and can't jump in yet because of financial reasons. That doesn't mean that you can't start selling your product, understanding why your customers are interested or not interested between the hours of 5PM to 9PM. Or 9PM to 2AM. Having a full-time job is not an excuse to outsource sales and marketing.

Be honest with her. Tell her your concerns now, and ask that she give you the same courtesy. The unique skills that you each bring to the table and the passion you both have is what can make the business successful - but only if you can communicate. If you aren't willing to commit 100% right now, then tell her what you are willing to give - I'm sure she'll appreciate whatever you can give her, including your support.

You're definitely not alone with this feeling and it's very common amoung millennials because we were taught to figure everything out ourselves with the Internet- what we didn't know we were expected to look up. Admitting we truly didn't have the skill associated with the job would conjure up feelings of humiliation which would lead to the compulsive behavior to then just say-- yeah I can do that. It's my opinion that you're not trying to impress initially as so much as you're trying to not be caught in a vulnerable situation. I would recommend writing down all of your skills separate from your traits-- traits are the characteristics of yourself such as dependable, honest, persistent, loyal-- skills are how you can help them accomplish their goals - transferable skills are those you have accumulated throughout your career. - when someone asks you a skills based question like -- describe your normal methods of assigning work to your subordinates and you answer with "well I'm a very fair person and I wouldn't want their to animosity between the employees so I would make sure it's spread equally" - it's a honest answer but it's a skill question answered by subjective traits. - does that make sense? I think understanding skills/traits will calm your anxiety down and get you pumped for your next interview! :)

There is no single best way - that said I prefer to keep in mind that businesses owners get inundated with offers. 100's of emails every day and week - so what are you going to do different..? Instead of cold emailing - just like everyone else - why not set up a webinar and speak to people en mass. This will leverage your time and your potential reach from 1-to-1 to 1-to-many. Instead of humping for business - like everyone else - what will you do different to get their attention..? could you walk in to local brokers? Perhaps send something through the post Build a relationship first..? At this point - why would anyone open their client books to you? You may well be surprised that money is not the only motivation - Doing business with people I like is a big motivation for me. action steps - change the way you do business get people on a webinar promote your message to a mass audience let them apply to work with you Most of all - build relationships Hope that helps Regards Phil ps - call me if you need help with setting a webinar strategy like this up

I have been working as a Business Entrepreneur and have been working with many of the customers from Europe, North America. While creating a White Label solution, the most important part for the owner is to manage the security for the product as well manage the Quality to be delivered within the expected timeline and budget. While choosing a company, the NDA's would work but with them you can also sign a Proposal, SLA(Service Level Agreement) which helps to bind the contract and source code as your own property. As when it comes to offshore development, my suggestions is to choose a company which has been doing this services since more than 5 years now and have been a part of good success stories whose stories are kept confidential. So with the documents, a formal trust would help you create the platform as your own property with the expected quality. You can consult your Legal adviser in the matter and hope they would align the strategy.

Just be transparent and if you can, get a formal letter from that former partner about the situation. Things like that happen!

When I built my first company, I targeted a niche and was able to corner it. Is attribute the success of the company to a few key factors: helpfulness, consistently excellent service, and high relevance. The best way to get the support of a niche is to be truly useful to that niche. Where do they hang out online? Be there, and help everyone you can with no expectations. When it makes sense, link back to relevant resources to give them the option to research more deeply. Keep a blog full of helpful information — this helps the resources you link to when helping more useful to you, because they're yours. And — most importantly — make damn sure the product or service is filling a gap in the niche. All your efforts are for nothing if what your selling isn't wanted or needed. Then you simply have to make sure you're treating every customer like a celebrity endorser. Their word will make or break you, so make sure every client is your most important client and that they finish the project ready to tell everyone how great you are. "Pretty good" won't corner a niche; "fucking awesome" will. If you'd like to talk strategy and/or marketing, hit me up. I'd really enjoy working with you on a project like this. :) Good luck!

That's a common fear, but you are better off putting that aside and just going for it. Instead of worrying about someone taking your idea, have any manufacturer, pattern maker, etc sign an NDA, and move forward with your idea. And most importantly, work with people you can trust. Even if your idea is revolutionary (and I'm sure it's excellent), the people you talk to are most likely busy enough with their own endeavors to copy someone else's project. Not to mention they aren't going to be as passionate about it as you are. I'm happy to help if you need advice or a contract. Good luck and take action!

1. Would be great if you can tell us more about your audience. 2. Do you have data sets available about your users. Age, gender, income, etc because if you don't have that then don't expect to get paid top dollars. 3. I don't think you need to build anything at all. Instead of using an Ad network you can use an Ad server. You can also set floor rates at what you want to sell your traffic at. However your fill rate will be low. Best thing to do is not set any floor rate. By using ad sever I would suggest that you go hunt your own advertisers to your niche so build a sales time to get top dollars. If no direct inventory is available then sell off to exchanges. If that fails then have a backup mediation to ad networks.

I do a lot of business with people on Elance (which is now being merged into Upwork and is going away, so stick with Upwork). The real challenge for US-based workers (which you may or may not be) is the price competitive nature of jobs when competing against an international workforce. There are always going to be great workers in every country and sometimes in certain areas you just can't compete on price. For example, I do a lot of business with great people in the Philippines and their work is excellent, they speak perfect English, and they are very affordable. What I usually tell people who are first getting into the space is to be honest about that in your profile and do some jobs for near-free with private pricing so you can build up your profile with good ratings. There are some disadvantages to this approach, but I find it helps to get some jobs under your belt with employers. One of the keys is going to be differentiation. You have your industry listed but skills, language, specific experience, and other niche items are really going to help here. I'm a consumer of a lot of Upwork contractors so I'm happy to do a call and discuss my experience with you. I work with people all over the world on a regular basis and I've built my business around these assets.