Start experimenting by putting the 2 things in place you say you are missing: 1. create a validated learning model 2. Stop focusing on vanity metrics; replace with user growth, cohort analysis or growth metrics. Do not just read Lean principles; APPLY them. Also, What are you doing to brand your company? What are you doing to engaging people who have the problem your service solves? Does it actually solve their problem? Do you know what their problems are? What do THEY think their problems are?

It sounds like you have their email address, so I recommend using it to target them on Facebook and Twitter through their custom audiences program. You can upload the lists there and specifically reach these users ( and lookalikes). Twitter even has an ad format that send a targeted email subscription ad with an embedded form. Your only email option is to send a transactional or relationship message such as a website maintenance, password reset request or terms of service update. As long as the primary purpose is non-commercial, you can include some promotion of the newsletter below the other copy.

Seems to me that versatility is actually your greater selling point. Yes, you could concentrate on 1 niche problem that you solve over and over again for various clients. Advantage: That streamlined approach would be efficient in terms of presentation and actual work load. Disadvantage: By promoting a very specific offering, you may be introducing yourself as the wrong tool for the job ... for most potential clients. If I stumble across you and find a landing page that stresses your ability to solve Problem X while I am dealing with Problem Y, then I assume you're less relevant than you might be. That does a disservice to your diverse skill set. You can marry the best of both worlds. Here's what I'd suggest. Clients will discover you both passively and as a result of active outreach. So 1. For your active marketing efforts, identify prospects where the client really needs you for Problem X, in which you're specializing. Introduce yourself as a specialist in Problem X (which is true). 2. For your more passive, less keyword-targeted online footprint, showcase your versatility rather than your specialization. That's also true. This way, you'll seem like a better fit for a wider group of potential clients. Instead of writing you off as a specialist, they'll consider engaging you as an IT "renaissance man". Narrow the focus of your presentation when you have narrowed your demographic. Widen that focus when the demographic is wider.

The actual process of this is based on the company policy. I deal with some companies that will not mix the two types of income at all, while other companies treat all of it as earnings. As far as the legality of it when you receive the funds, it is totally up to the applicable tax laws for your particular case. The best way to clear this up would be to talk to an accountant specializing in affiliates.

The short answer here is that this is very situational stuff and not necessarily something you can have completely planned out in advance. If you've already incorporated (c-corp) then you'll have authorized shares and issued shares (see http://startuplawyer.com/incorporation/how-many-shares-should-be-issued-to-founders-at-incorporation) Any additional grants would then be dilutive. In most cases, you'll want to create a 10% option pool for future employees. Co-founders that you would bring on will typically want common stock. Advisors or consultants that are helping out for equity would typically receive option grants that come out of the 10% pool you set up. Long story short, depending on your situation and needs there are A LOT of ways this could go down. I would recommend reading up more about these issues at http://startuplawyer.com/ (author is a personal friend and his site is packed with great info) Hope this helps!

Compared to other business ideas, yes it is easy but it's not 'push-button' as many experts would have you believe (as they pitch you their $5,000+ training/services to help you). Selling products on Amazon is a business and the more you treat it like 'your baby', the much higher chance you will have with success. Also buying products in bulk and rebranding them (this is called 'private label' or 'white label') is just one of 25+ ways to get products to resell on Amazon. For more free information than you'll ever need to get started, check out my resources page at: http://jordanmalik.com/blog/resources (especially near the top under 'Amazon - Free Beginner Help'. Also (if you're interested in a high-quality, low price course to help you along), check out my free review guides/comparison charts of the world's best Amazon seller training at: http://jordanmalik.com/blog/asm and http://CourseComparo.com .... Good luck!

I am not an accountant, but I do have a good understanding of this concept. It works like this. If you are self employed there is a slef employment tax on all your income of 15%. This essentially goes toward social security and Medicare. So let's say you make $100k in profit that means it's $15k in self employment tax. If you instead become and LLC and file as an S-Corp then self employment tax goes away and is replaced with social security and Medicare on "wages" only. The company then pays you a "reasonable wage" of let's say $30k in this case, and then pays the other $70k out to you as "dividends". The $30k is subject to social security and Medicare which comes to a little under 15% with all things considered (~$4500) and the dividends are not. This creates a rough tax savings of $10,500. (Talk to your accountant for exact numbers and advice for your situation, this is just the basic concept.) Here are some more resources on the subject: https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax-tips/Small-Business-Taxes/How-an-S-Corp-Can-Reduce-Your-Self-Employment-Taxes/INF22938.html http://www.incorporatecalifornia.com/scorptaxes.html

Understanding your market is key. Without a market, products flounder, or worse, fail. I've conducted research on markets where a product didn't exist yet. The research doesn't have to be expensive or lengthy. The purpose of research is to understand the true needs of the market. Based on the gift box idea, have you identified a user type or persona that this product would be suitable for? That is where I would start. Draw out the different types of users and scenarios there are for the product and start talking to them. Get an understanding of their current gift giving habits: - Who are they buying gifts for? Is it someone they buy for regularly? How often? How much do they typically spend? - What are they buying? - Where are they buying (online/physical retail store)? - When are they buying? Is it last minute? Hone in on where they're having problems. If you start noticing patterns in their answers, this becomes the pain point(s) your solution/product can address. Towards the end of the conversation, you could run the gift box idea by them and see how they react to it, but gathering their current habits before biasing them towards a solution would help you in the long run. After conducting the research and you feel that you've nailed it, then you can set up a website that gathers email addresses before you create the product. This begins the iterative process, and as you work through each step, you're gathering interest and insights from potential customers and working it into your new product. If you have any questions about getting this started, please contact me.

Excel Excel Excel Then SAP or something else . SAP or other oracle ERP applications are good for company wide book keeping, data gathering ...etc. But when it comes to analytics, if you want something very easy, and simple, go for excel.

The one word answer is: ask! Make it a process to systematically ask every client for referrals. Referrals from happy customers are indeed one of the best ways to generate new business. When and how to ask is a matter of taste and practice. Let me give you two examples which apply to B2B. 1. Ask as soon as your prospect has made his buying decision. From Steli Efti, Startup Sales Guide - www.startupsalesguide.com "When a prospect has already made a buying decision, say: Great, but I can’t let you buy just yet. Right now, we are a startup. This means we focus all our energy, time and resources on delivering as much value as we can to our customers. We don’t have a big marketing budget. If you are happy with our product, please recommend us to others who you think might benefit from our solution as well.” 2. Ask when you are about 2/3 of a project, or when you have significantly progressed in the relationship with your buyer. Here is some great material by Alan Weiss: - Asking For Referrals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXJXukZB94s - How to maximize a referral: http://www.contrarianconsulting.com/how-to-maximize-a-referral/ Hope that helps. Put it into practice this week and let us know how it goes!

Have you looked in to Crystal Reports at all? It has numerous advantages. It will connect to all of the data sources you have including spreadsheets, and can integrate data from more than one source at a time. i.e. you may have most of your data in a spreadsheet, with some additional info in Access and a little more in ... The Crystal Engine itself is available via API within certain SDK's. I know it's available in MS Visual Studio. It is also available in Java. If you build your own solution using the API you can custom connect to each of your data sources and distribute the results however you need them - via email, ftp or file save - as pdf, excel, HTML, and so forth. You can even use the reporting tool as a Data Transformation Service by writing the results back to an ODBC database. This platform is more than capable of reporting on data you've collected via your user interface such as clicks, time between clicks, undo, etc. Anything you want to track - as long as it's stored somehow. I hope that helps. If you need further examples or details feel free to arrange a call, I'd be happy to help.

Before you attempt to sell to the senior executive you need to find out from his team why they wouldn't buy it. The senior executive will defer to his team prior to making the decision to purchase so you're only assuring your failure by contacting him at this point.

You need to fully understand marketing to hospitals, the FDA, and how clinical trial management works. I would highly recommend finding a local friend/advisor/investor/etc. who is a doctor involved in clinical trials or better yet a clinical trial manager. There are a lot of hoops to get a clinical trial underway and you want to make this as easy as possible and put on paper and give to prospects up front how you have already cleared all the paths and made this a low risk trial. Of particular concern will be your strategies around HIPAA compliance and how your store patient identified and de-identified data. How does what you are doing compare to software systems that are already FDA approved? Do you interface with all the main electronic heard record and other systems? I have some friends in the clinical informatics space. These are the types of people you need on your advisory board. Feel free to call or contact me.

Go to your Tech Transfer office and talk to them about what other technologies in a similar space have been spun out, who is involved in each company from the university and outside. Find out those faculty, entrepreneurs and investors and talk to them. They will know who is most interested in working with tech from your university and who already understands the issues involved with licensing university inventions to a startup vs. trying to license that tech to a big company. I used to be the director and startup advisor at of one of the Purdue Research Parks, which is the largest university incubator in the U.S. Feel free to call if you have more questions

If you're structured as a C-corp (which, if you're going to raise venture capital, you should be), then it shouldn't matter. Most VCs have foreign LPs. If you're an S-corp, it can be a problem due to limitations around who can own shares. Also if you're doing government work, it could be a problem. Otherwise, I wouldn't worry about it.

I'm glad you described your market a bit. I have not seen a retainer model work in this space, but that's not saying you can't succeed with it. YOU are the expert, so I would not leave it to clients to choose what they want. If you do, you'll get clients who say, "Yeah, I hired them to make me a page; it looked nice but didn't work"--and who is responsible for that? I have seen both arguments when it comes to the question of displaying pricing. I think you should show it. That's a qualifier for visitors, and you do not want to waste your time and energy on people who cannot afford your help. So my recommendation is to list your services with pricing, but make sure you have a lead capture system to pre-qualify. Then talk live to fully qualify and give your expert recommendations. I kind of like #4, but there is so little opportunity cost in you being able to offer all the other kinds of content...I would only take this approach if you are committed, really want to specialize, and get known for these kinds of pages.

From a SEO perspective the domain shouldn't really make any difference - or at least not a major one. As Google often emphasizes they try to rank by relevance for the user. There's one main exception, which would be ccTLDs (country level domains). And while .CO is a ccTLD, it's considered a generic domain by Google. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1347922?hl=en There were some TLDs that would negatively affect ranking, but .CO wasn't one of them. I do think you should always try to own the .COM though - as domains get passed on by many means, i.e. word of mouth etc. Users are used to seeing/hearing .COM more so than .CO, so they might just try to visit the .COM instead of going to your site.

Hi! So I'm a snarky business coach helping startups and enterprises internationally. First my snarky thought: Many novice entrepreneurs and or aspiring crowd funders wait until the campaign is live to commit any effort to the project - the reality is that you should always prepare ahead of time and do your due diligence so that the community is built before you truly need them {live campaign} I hope this answer helps future campaigners and get going in their marketing before it goes live. Now the advice: I don't know if you want to spend money to get money, specially from a crowdsourced fund. I would avoid any paid ads. Go to instapage.com and create and account, quickly draft 1 or 2 landing pages that show a funny story about the guy (no insult intended) make it funny or make it sad (one of the two) but make it engaging. Test both sites (they are free and go live for free) Promote the bounce pages through twitter, instagram, facebook and quora 1. twitter is where the general urban sarcastic and information driven community is - target them with simple did you know, still have time to, learn about the funniest com. ever 2. instagram - post pictures. change your profile page information to display the campaign link. {never use links on the posts themselves} after a while you can "revive a post" by going back and you yourself posting comments - comment should be hashtags. 3. Facebook - people are the to hangout and could care less about your campaign (generalizing) so instead drive awareness about the guy and links to the landing pages. Don't mention funding. Get the readers out of the lazy environment...then ask/convert. 4. Quora.com is agreat to address the community directly. Those of us who are there are there to purposely engage. Feel to share your stories/the guy's story and the links to either landing page A or B. *let the landing pages A/B do the asking or suggesting to donate, dont do that on your posts. *before posting do your homework and write down the hashtgs that are being used by the people who would most likely end up donating or being touched. For this, sometimes it helps creating a persona... what they wear, what they eat, where they hangout (including social media) what jokes they might like.. (post a joke)... do this right away and hustle it over until weekends end... By the end of the weekend you should have enough data to know if this was worth and keep pushing it... If you want implement this simulatenously with another approach. Best of luck. Humberto Valle Twitter @OfficialUnthink http://Facebook.com/iwillunthink

As I have seen similar cases a lot of time, in most cases it means that he is not interested anymore, or at least, no so enthusiastic about it as you want him to be. So instead of trying to find new ways to him. just move on. You can keep in touch with his reps once every two weeks, but check other options. If the idea is that good, you will find someone else that will be interested. Good luck

I've been raised angel money as CEO several times, and also advised angels on multiple transactions... Of course the investors understand that you don't want to "give away too much" equity, but of course if they believe in your business then they'll want to acquire a meaningful position. If you're still pre-revenue (or even if you have revenue but still negative cash-flow), then the thought-process in the angel mind often goes like this: 1. How much money does this company need, to significantly transform itself to the next stage (and either become cash-flow-positive or at least become a serious candidate for a much larger round of funding)? 2. For my risk, I'm going to take around a third. (Maybe 20-40%). 3. Therefore, if I think this company needs $400k to hit its next milestone, and I want to take 40%, then I'm going to give this company a pre-money valuation of $1M. And then, of course, the question is, "do I think it's ok to risk $400k on this enterprise." If you were to counter-offer to an investor, "gee, thanks, but we don't want to give away that big a %age — so we're only going to take $200k," the investor would have a huge problem: The angel would say, "but you just got done telling me that the company absolutely needs $400k to grow! so, if you 'settle' for $200k, won't you be in trouble? or were you lying when you said you needed a full $400k?" It can become a bit of a catch-22 if you start down this road. RECOMMENDATION: Figure out what you truly think the company needs, to really transform itself into something much bigger. Try to raise that much in the round. LISTEN to the feedback you hear from angels. They will drop hints (or tell you explicitly) if they think you're asking too much or too little. If your round is over-subscribed, that is, if you're able to get more investors than you needed, then you can run up the $ valuation. Otherwise, keep it modest and expect the early risk-takers to eat a big chunk of equity. But don't counter-offer a lower amount of money for the round, because it would discredit your earlier claims about what you need. Of course I'd be happy to jump onto a call and discuss this further if you like. And above I was pretty much assuming you're pre-revenue; I would change some of what I said if you have positive cash flow or at least some revenue.

Interesting, I spoke to a client at length the other day about this. 1. Firstly, there is 'perceived' value. 2. Secondly, there is actual value. It sounds like you are trying to build the latter. I also need to make a second inference here, you say we are 'trying' to close deals - so i'm going to assume you are still pre or in the early stages of revenue. So it sounds like you are hitting the procurement buffer. The biggest danger here is - to get a high valuation you will most likely have to sell your investors on 'potential clients', but then they will stall discussions until those deals are sealed. So you would have to be incredibly careful if doing that. Firstly if you want to understand what creates strong valuations look at companies in your sector that you respect, or relevant start-ups in other industry verticals and ask yourself what made them sky rocket. As any potential investor will be measuring you by the same stick. It's a bit hard to know how to advise you without knowing what industry vertical you are in. However, Slack who refer to themselves as B2B has been a runaway success it's probably worth looking at why, because everyone was astounded when it hit a $1bn valuation in approximately 1 year. "Slack is a team communication tool. It brings together all of your team communications in one place, instantly searchable and available wherever you go. Launched in February 2014, it is now the fastest growing B2B application ever and is used by over 500,000 daily active users." What made Slack strong: 1. 8,000 companies create accounts in the 1st 24 hours. 18 months later: 1. 500,000 people now use Slack daily, including users in 60,000 teams 2. 135,000 of those people are paying for Slack, adding up to $12 million in annual revenue 3. Slack users send 300 million messages to each other a month 4. The average Slack user is connected for more than nine hours a day and spends more than two of those hours in active usage, such as reading and writing messages Basically the valuation was pumped because Kleiner Perkins, Accel, Index, Marc Andreesen realised if you put money in one side the user growth boomed on the other side. So to make this actionable if I was interrogating your business for value: - I would want to know what your pipeline was like? - Which clients you were talking to and where those discussions currently were? - What your anticipated procurement cycle was like? - The anticipated contract lengths? - The infrastructure required to onboard new users/make new sales? (in the instance of Slack they relied on viral spread) - Testimonials about your product? - Genuine IP sat behind your software? - Churn + expected churn? - Exposed to one or two large enterprise clients? The list goes on really, but high valuations are because companies can see the 10x, 100x potential and that is because it's basically an arbitrage exercise or money in one side and user growth, customer acquisition and retention out the other. I hope that helps a little?

Generally speaking, Yes. I say this for a couple primary reasons. 1) If you do not place value in your product, why should the customer? And if you are not charging for it you are not placing value on it. 2) the customer will be more "invested" in the success of something that has cost them something. If it was free and it fails, "who cares"? if it cost them resources they may be more interested in making it work. There could be overriding factors, but this is where I start with a question of this nature.

Without more information on your intention and the target market's use for the application, itself, the simple answer is "yes." Many digital products available for US consumers are developed/launched outside of the States.

It all depends on your marketing communications strategy and the actual tactics that you execute. Some businesses find either social platform to perform better than the other one, sometimes both, sometimes neither. For example, based on my own experience, food blogs do great on Pinterest when the visuals are professionally produced (See my friend Allyson's website https://www.pinterest.com/allysonreed/, she makes everything on her own, including coking the recipes, taking the pictures, etc.) That, in combination with a great promotion plan (influencer outreach, large loyal follower base, among others.) Some businesses do great with Facebook when they use the right balance of paid media and organic content posting. Facebook offers great targeting options for paid media. Unfortunately, you do have to pay for paid media on Facebook, they have forced businesses to do so as a way to reach to followers, organic reach is harder on these days since the algorithm hides a lot of your content in the newsfeed. Get your analytics set up and define what your best channels are, reinforce the low performers as well as the top ones. Use aligned strategies across channels but prepare unique executions on each, do not just copy/paste from one channel to the following one. In your business category, see what others are doing, for example: https://www.facebook.com/Craftytude

I'm a young guy and startup entrepreneur. Recently I got myself into Inc., Fast Company, HuffPost, Entrepreneur.com, and Forbes. I essentially found writers/contributors who write about topics similar to my website/product. Then, I find them on linkedin, twitter, or find their email and reach out to them with a personal message and a call to action. There are a ton of options for you, including hiring a PR firm to help you, but I wouldn't recommend doing that. There are plenty of ways that you can get yourself into large publications or find others ways to get yourself social proof. I'll also make a few introductions for you, if I can. If you want, request a call with me and walk me through your website and I'll give you actionable steps you can take to get in publications. I cal also tell you how to begin creating shareable content that will help you grow. I created BIZFIT2015 (google it and you can see what I've created). I'll refund your $$ if you don't think I helped much. No questions asked. I'll also give you email support/coaching for free to help you out along the way.