Applying for a Tax ID (EIN) is pretty simple and can be done online during the week by visiting: http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employed/Apply-for-an-Employer-Identification-Number-%28EIN%29-Online Doing so will enable you not to have to use your social security number when you have situations that ask specifically for a business ID, like doing business with other parties or for billing certain entities. The bigger issues are what kind of "tour" business are you talking about? Not knowing what state you're in, there might be local or state laws regarding the kind of business you're looking to perform that you'll want to be aware of. I read this as "tour" for musicians, but if you're talking about taking people on tours around a certain area, there will be a variety of liabilities that you'll want to ensure you're protected from in the event something happens. Hope this helps get you started.

Fun perks? Hell no! Most people don't give because there's no assurance that money will be used properly. It may simply be feeding a habit or going down a bottomless pit. If a homeless person were raising money not for himself directly but for a reputable charity, then that might motivate contributions. So if the QR code led to a local charity website – one that gives him a place to stay, rehab resources (if needed), counseling, job placement, etc., then someone like me would be much more likely to give. Where I'm located at the moment, 2 or 3 homeless people per day approach me asking for money. Without assurance that the money would be used to help that person, I don't give. If he held out a QR code that took me to the local charity that's helping him out, that would be entirely different. He'd become a nonprofit fundraiser rather than a beggar. And that's a crucial difference – not only for getting results (i.e. money) but also for his self-respect. Holding out an empty hand = begging. Holding out a QR code as a fundraiser = employment.

You answered the question yourself. Preexistence of similar product is an indication of the demand. Given that your product have some additional feature, you should try to leverage the same and gain first mover advantage. Once you hit the tarmac you'll see other ideas evolving within yourself to maintain that advantage. Secondly, there's nothing called good or bad idea. What fails an idea is absence of optimum planning and poor execution. Make sure you plan your road ahead into small achievable milestones. Hope above should be of some help!!

Hmm .. Interesting that you say your sector isn't being addressed. Wonder why ... But if so, then that's an opportunity. I've spent the past 4 years specializing in probably THE hardest market for making accurate appraisals: the domain name industry. For me as an engineer, that has meant crunching numbers. So I'm intimately familiar with the issues involved in making inferences about value from partial list-price and sale-price data. In fact, I spend much of each day compiling raw data and building database-driven tools to organize and analyze it. So I don't know the auto industry at all, but I know a thing or 2 about figuring out the value of assets in obscure areas. Certainly a model can be constructed for extrapolating value from list prices. It only remains to be determined how wide the margin of error would be and what kind of latent bias might exist. If you'd like my help, just ask.

I'd take a look at the large, established companies in the technology space in which you want to operate. Somewhere at one of those companies is an astute, experienced person who might be ready to get out of the big company environment if you come along with the right idea. E.g. Cisco if you are doing networking, Salesforce if you are doing marketing automation, Intuit if you are doing financial apps. The trick is finding one who not only has the technical expertise and wants to get out, but is well suited financially and psychologically for a startup. I learned the hard way that co-founders who are not in the same boat financially can make for an unhappy parting.

Your business model seems to be a SAAS model (software as a service). The best way to make them forget about your company size is to provide them with a working free trial offer of your software and to get them to input as much of their own data into it so they will think twice before switching to another provider. I wish you success and prosperity. François B.

If you assume all other things are equal, why market? Traditional marketing is becoming more and more ineffective. "Strong marketing" is growth hacking. No question about it. So if what you heard referred to growth hacking, yes I agree. If they meant - spend more in exposure and cross your fingers your copy / content was catchy enough they download and use... Then I wouldn't agree. Humberto Valle Hack Marketer, Curious Learner, Entrepreneur. Unthink

It depends on what are you testing by launching MVP. MVP is use to run an experiment to test (validate / invalidate) business assumptions (Customer, problem, solution , channel ... assumptions). If your are interested, I can share some material about MVP and validating business assumptions

#1 Go to LinkedIn. Find a bunch of group owners / managers for LinkedIn groups that are large and relevant. Talk to them. #2 Next identify important bloggers. Websites with high Alexa rankings, perhaps, and which cover entrepreneurship. Ask them about dropping a mention with a link. Also ask about their rates for publishing an advertorial. If you don't have an advertorial article / press release at hand, pay me to write one. Or pay someone less talented. ; ) #3 After the advertorials are published, THEN you've given people on Facebook and Twitter something to share. It's much better to share a link to an article OFF your website than ON it because it creates the impression that people are talking about you, that there's some buzz, that your conference is something to look into. At this point, you can go after social media influencers. Doing so before might be premature, in my opinion. #0 Forgot to mention this because it seems like a no-brainer. But make sure your conference website has a compelling landing page whose verbal and visual content makes the most of your star speakers and the networking opportunities to be found among attendees. Photos, writeups, information, and a streamlined sales funnel for booking tickets. That should be ready in advance of everything else, since links are only as useful as what they link to.

Hi! I'm no expert on this but I'll give you my advice on my general insights... Because you are a small company, assuming just yourself and whether or not your competing with any other team, your website's route display is a huge plus from your potential clients perspective. It gives them an idea of what the tour will consist of. Also, I'm assuming you get a decent amount of calls and thus you want to grow this. Congrats! Pursue it. With that said, there is no reason why you can't do both with the site. A website is not just about information, is about engaging those who visit and invite them for more. The more can be leaving their email for a promo code or next availability. Placing a call to find out more about yourself, the tour guide. A lot of time I find myself wanting tours because the person tick the tours seem like fun - so embrace that! I'll assume you're a friendly guy and can crack some jokes and would be surprised if not here, so embrace that and make that your sellin factor, you're the brand of the tour. Maybe even your car if is a random older car, or something... But look into that. Have your about us page with a prominent phone # to call right before and after the about us content. The about us(you) content should be funny and to the point. So that maybe people want to book YOU not the ROUTE. Have a reservation option with half upfront. I've them options to maybe leave the emails of those they are visiting ( if they are visiting ) so that they get to reserve with maybe only 25% - the point here is to open the doors for you to give tours to residents too if you don't already. Nothing wrong with referrals from client to potential provider. At every instance of your website, allow for them to ah e a way to either share what they are looking at, or share that they booked, or that they have found you, or your about me content... As well as a way for the to leave an email. Every page should have that (non-obstrusively) not just the contact page. Emails/contact forms give you ways to get leads and you call, if you're the selling point (brand) you should be able to close a deal when you call because your call should be as if you're doing the tour. Be a personality. Show maybe only have of the route! Redesign the way you have your route listed or mapped, revise the wording and make it more appealing! - this also helps your tours as you do them with more concise descriptions and histories,etc. - so is a win win. But do revise the wording in a way that is sounds super amazing and entertaining and only show half. For the rest of the tour... They'll just have to see themselves... Good luck! There are ways in which you can entice someone to call or email if you make them like they'll be entertained and they'll miss out if they don't! Be fun and have fun with it. That's what most people would want I believe. Even in a history tour... :) Humberto Valle www.Unthink.me

I'm going to answer you with my own experience. The way you mentioned to divide the expenses makes total sense and it's consider the "rational" thing to do. I have seen it work many times and it's what many would consider "fair". The problem (and this is counterintuitive) is that we are humans with emotions and we can't separate us from them. Once someone starts buying nicer things the "ego" hits in, also the "jealousy" and the competitive nature. This brings bad culture and a worst environment. I know you think "we are different", "it won't happen to us" but it actually does and it's not your fault, it's just our nature. My solution is the following. Treat the company as a separate entity from the three of you. So the company (not you) have revenue and costs. THE company can have expenses and they should be as little as possible to run efficient and lean. THE company has to create the most profits as long as it's in the same direction of creating value for their clients. Now, because the company has shareholders (you guys/gals) the profits it generates will go into your pockets 50/30/20. This is after your salaries, that depends on your place in the company and that is money totally entitled to each of you. The profits can be expended as whatever you want because it's like part of your salaries. You will think this makes no sense due that is just a "technical" step. But it's important to separate you from your company. Keep personal and professional in each side of the table. Hope this helped :) If you want to reach out I would be happy to talk. I have helped many family companies to also deal with this kind of issues. Have a great day

I will give you two stories (both mine). It was 1999 and I was 15 years old. My mom's friend ask me to deliver some christmas cards. The reason was that there was a monopoly of mail delivery in my country and it was so expensive that it was worth it to pay a young kid to do it. I did it for her and then for another, then another, and again. I realized that the monopoly actually created an opportunity. It just shocked me how happy people were to actually pay half the price and don't have to deal with a government office! I reached out to the dad of one of my friends and ask him if I could deliver his flyers (he had an insurance company). Half the price. Short story, I hired 20 of my friends and we build a company around it. Second story. I was a partner in a consulting firm and I was making good money. Like really good. But I was always fighting with my partners because we had a different long term vision. I woke up one day and say "this is it, I'm done". I realized I didn't want to go to work anymore no matter how much money I did. I figured out that I would find something else to do. If you want to know more in detail please give me a call. Some of this moments are very personal. I would like to share them but not that openly with everyone :)

The other answers are good, and here is one practical approach to handling this. First, the accounting capitalization (10m x $0.001 = $10k) is really irrelevant. In fact, we went for 10m x $0.0001 = $1k. Whatever you pick, your company after formation will show $X of assets (the cash in the back) and $X of shareholder equity. So far so good. You then need to start spending money through the company. Rather than issue more shares, you can lend the money to the company; write out a loan agreement (probably something like a balloon payment 10 years out with 0% interest) and deposit the check. If you're doing everything at the same time, and want to have $1k of shareholder equity with a total of $25k to spend, then deposit the $25k check and call it $1k to purchase the founder's shares and $24k loan. In this case, your company now has $25,000 assets/cash, $24k liability (to you) and $1k shareholders equity: assets = liabilities + shareholder equity. Hope that helps clarify things a bit...

One approach would be to (1) Create a website from which your product can be purchased and downloaded; (2) Enable easy social sharing from the website so that happy customers multiply at no cost to you; (3) Market that site through PPC campaigns, targeting relevant search verticals. Basically, you'd be paying a commission to Google and Bing in exchange fore eyeballs on your site. Whether those impressions convert to sales depends on your presentation and (of course) the product itself. Conceivably, you might do all this yourself. But you might prefer to pay (1) A branding consultant / namer / domain broker to select and obtain the ideal domain name to use, (2) A web designer to build the site, (3) An SEM specialist to manage your AdWords and Bing campaigns, (4) A copy writer to craft your landing page sales pitch, improving your sales funnel and boosting conversion rates, (5) A content writer to produce additional articles, (6) An SEO to work on whatever it is they do this month. It isn't strictly necessary to pay for these services, if you're willing to teach yourself. You might accelerate that process and avoid expensive mistakes if you schedule a few short Clarity.fm calls with relevant experts. That's the approach I would use – building a site that functions like a store and advertising online through SEM. This way you can test the viability of your product without having to hire sales staff. Yes, you could try marketing through other channels such as local gatherings of college-bound students or via phone, email, radio, TV, mail, etc. But online you can access a broad range of potential customers with less initial investment in planning, staffing, and infrastructure. So it's a test case. If your product can't sell online in this way, then it may not be worth expanding with those other strategies. Furthermore, this online approach scales very well. If you're profitable while spending X on PPC, then you might grow those profits simply by reinvesting and raising that advertising budget. I offer professional services for #1 (names / domains) and #4 (sales pitch) above, if you're interested. To some extent, I know my way around #3 (SEM); but I don't manage campaigns for clients - only suggest tactics for those who run their own campaigns. Plenty of Clarity.fm experts could run an SEM campaign for you quite well if you'd like to outsource that marketing.

The quickest path to cash is almost always consulting. Be very specific about what it is you can offer. Don't just offer "business consulting". Find a niche and serve it. Reach out to your network, including friends and family and ask if they need or know of anyone who might want to hear about what your consulting has to offer. That will be way faster than trying to go at it from scratch or cold calling. If you call 100 people in your network this week, you will have a consulting gig within 3 weeks. Good luck, and let me know if you'd like advice on entering a digital marketing/lead generation consulting niche. I've grown from zero to $8,000 of monthly recurring payments in the last 40 days! Dave

What kind of contacts? I find out that the way to stay in contact is to create groups or communities around them. So: Whatsapp: Family + Friends Slack: Business Wechat + Line: international friends LinkedIn: others I used contactually and it's good but its still a one-on-one that fades and doesn't feel natural. So I try to bring some people together (that I know have common interests) and that way I can jump in a have a conversation any time. If you want to know about how this have work so far, give me a call and I will be happy to share my experiences.

Basically you're extrapolating future sales that you expect will come from these 50,000 customers. So it's really a question of assumptions + existing data. Knowing the average sale amount of $120 is nice, but it's really inadequate. How saturated are those customers in terms of ongoing purchases from you? Will they return? Will they respond to upsells or bring their social networks with them? Will the future behave like the past? "Some customers return to buy widgets". How many customers and which? Which widgets at what cost? You mention a 6-24 month cycle and a $10 to $5000 price range. But there's a huge difference between someone buying a $5000 product every 6 months and someone buying a $10 product every 2 years. I'd advise against any quantitative measure that simply gives you a handy single number. The topic ought to framed in terms of a range of possible outcomes with margins of error ... as a probabilistic confidence interval. X% chance that values will fall within range Y to Z, in other words. Undoubtedly, business gurus have their thumb rules, which I'm not familiar with. My background is in mathematical modeling and database architecture; so I can only say how I'd tackle a financial forecast. Those assumptions really depend not only on your data but on an interpretation of your business model and speculation about customer psychology. Long story short, avoid the "ballpark number" you think you want – at least, if having a reliable number matters.

As a fellow workaholic, I can't possibly advise you. But there's an excellent podcast series by an acquaintance / former client of mine called Dadverb that's all about balancing work life with fatherhood. He interviews successful entrepreneurs about how they find the right work-life balance. You may not be a father. Neither am I. But I remember the very first interview in the podcast (with the creator of Ruby on Rails) as being right up your alley. Dadverb.com redirects to the series. Check it out!

I would offer them a proposal to reveal their source to you in exchange for a small percentage or fixed amount of each unit ordered. You would also need to structure the offer in such a way as to guaranty that you would not compete with them or circumvent them, if they agree then you would need a legal contract drawn up between you and them

Hello! First, you're going to have to spend some time researching your targets. You can go for the typical outlets that feature startups, but I think you'll find great traction if you start researching bloggers that are in the healthy food space. I would also spend some time researching who has covered your competitors, who might be healthy snack subscription services such as Urth Box, Healthy Box, Graze, etc. You can use a tool like Buzz Sumo (buzzsumo.com) to see what publications and AUTHORS (this is the most important part) have covered their launch or anything related to them. The authors are extremely important because often times they have their own personal blogs, or they write for multiple places. Once you find the authors you want to target, get to know them and engage with them. I have a lot of tips (and also a research spreadsheet as a resource) that you can find in these two places: Post: http://www.copyblogger.com/stronger-outreach/ Resource For Research/Tracking: http://t.co/89AER7pUBW As far as an example email, something like this might work for a food blogger, customized for each person and in your own voice. Never, ever send the same exact pitch to food bloggers, and make sure you research their temperament before reaching out. You'll want to get to the point, but make sure they know that you appreciate their blog, them, and what they've written about. Also, make sure you're following them on their various networks and that you've engaged in some way with them. This may take some preparation but it's worth having that warm touch before reaching out. Also make sure they're open to accepting pitches. Some explicitly state that they're not, and you should honor that. ---Hi [name] <-- always address by name. I'm [your name] and I'm the founder of [company name], which is a healthy snack food subscription service. We [name competitive differentiator here] and I'm hoping to help spread the news of its launch to the food community. I was looking through your blog/site/publication and I noticed that you've posted about [something related to your area - healthy snacks, healthy recipes, quick bites, etc - share link] and [share why it was important to you - maybe their post talks about one of the reasons you decided to launch the company, etc]. Do you feel as if [company name] would be a good fit to share with your audience? We'd love to share a promotional code with your readers so that they're able to get the first month free and test out the snacks. Thank you so much for your time! ---- As far as reaching out to bloggers that have covered competitors, that's another beast, because you have to be respectful in how you approach it. If you have the resources, you can always write a post that discusses something in the health space related to food, including (proven) scientific facts, with visual "fact cards" that can then be pitched to a bigger news outlet. That's just a very loose, general example as more research is required to figure out what will resonate with that crowd. It's also something that I could brainstorm and cover in depth on a call. I'm always available to chat via Clarity. I've executed outreach for a lot of product launches in the past and I'm happy to chat about this. Have a great day!

I've seen or been involved with a few projects in the past few years that aimed to entice developers to work on premium domains in exchange for equity. That rarely if ever works. Developers have too many gigs that pay them quite comfortably. If they wanted to make sacrifices, they'd probably expect to own and control the project. You're better off hiring a developer for cash if you wish to run these sites as businesses. Otherwise, it makes more sense to sell them.

Angel List (www.angel.co) is a good resource - people and entities are gauged on their 'signal' rating so you can see who's most active, and that's a pretty good hint as to who is most likely to have leadership/influence in a particular area. You can search by one/many of filters such as Market, Location, Size etc. to help narrow in your search. It's also worth looking at complementary/competitive companies and have a look at their path and investors - an example would be Pact Coffee in London, or perhaps a chain of coffee shops who have been recently funded such as Philz Coffee in San Francisco?

I think push vs in-app are two different things, like email and telephone call. Push reaches people who are not using your app, but require OS-level permission. In-app gives you much more flexibility but they only reach people who are using your app (obviously!). As to whether in-house or external SDK is best, it depends what you are trying to do and whether an external system handles it. For a typical retail environment the SDKs might be easiest--it's a well-established use-case. For something needing a more customized algorithm, an in-house system might work as well as an external SDK (for less money). There are simple options to save you from starting completely from scratch, from PHP toolkits to Amazon SNS. It depends on what (if any) server environment you have... Hope that helps!

This really depends on the idea that you want to test. Remember, a test is just a test, and not a complete depiction of how your actual business will do once it launches as that greatly depends not only on your product, but also on how your business is managed and what value you provide to the customers. Having said that, a good test can give you good validation on your product/service. If it's a product, you can use crowdfunding or Quirky to test the interest. If it's a service, you can create a signup page, and raise awareness it via well thought out plan that includes blogs, partners, paid advertising and other marketing channels. In addition, there is no substitute to talk to people in person (offline). It will help you describe your idea in detail to a potential customer, and gauge their true reaction w/ verbal feedback as well as facial expressions, body language etc.

Super easy! You already know the answer to this. A simple growth hack that should get you more than 100users is by either creating or joining a meetup or group with these interests. Give them some swag (tees/stickers) If possible add gamification to your efforts and watch your user base grow ;) If you want to chat a bit more give me or any one of us here a call thr can help you with growth tactics! For insight and cool pix follow me here Instagram @unthinkme Follow me on Facebook.com/iwillunthink Or Twitter.com/OfficialUnthink Thank you for trusting Clarity and best of luck!