Hello! This is a great question. I have been helping startups and small business owners with their funnels for quite some time now. My name is Humberto Valle, I'm an MBA strategist with Unthink and actually recently completed another Sales Funnel Marketing Guide, you can find it here: http://bit.ly/2j4XPid With that said, I will be as helpful as possible to you in this response. 1) Define Your Brand What makes you remarkable? The first step toward answering this question is conducting a self-audit to identify your purpose, strengths, values and passion. In a fiercely competitive cleaning maid service environment, it’s essential to crystallize your competitive advantage. Some cleaning professionals differentiate themselves through their individual achievements (e.g., well-known clients, endorsements) while others boast added value (e.g., JD, MBA, Successful exits, number of employees, etc.). - Understand Your Audience Define your target audience — and arm yourself with intelligence about what drives them to take action. Determine who you’re talking to: consider age, gender, personality, and profession. Then, identify your clients’ pain points: how can you solve their needs better than your competitors? What is their preferred channel of communication? Answering each of these questions thoroughly is imperative. Just like when networking, building rapport is what makes a brand good. - Know Your Competition With rising confidence in the real estate market, there are many new cleaning companies popping up every day - which means more and more competition. In order to stand out, gather intelligence on who you’re up against and go for an opposite plethora of efforts and experiences that will help you build a different brand from the rest. Then, be better than them. One key question to answer in this process: what niches within my city and industry are not being exploited by the largest cleaning companies? Once you figure it out, you’re ready to put your stake in the ground - copy their efforts for managerial to get started, promote where they are and they are aren't. Subscribe to our newsletter and I will follow up later with ways on doing this. 2) Live Where Your Customers Live (not - literally) In order to get customers’ attention, you have to live where your customers live. And today more than ever before, where customers live is on social media. But, if you want to multiply your success opportunity, you must be where your competitors aren't. That isn't social media, per se. You can choose to avoid Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube on purpose, assume they don't exist and use that are a rule of thumb forcing you to find alternate platforms that would be potentially favored by your prospect clients but not used by competitors to reach them. Create beautiful sales funnel marketing campaigns that consider the acquisition as more than cookie cutter reach. Lead Generation Is About Anticipating A Buyer's Needs: When you create a funnel, as you are sketching it out you should aim to address each phase of their buyer journey from awareness, consideration and decision because chances are your audience will be at various interest levels when they first encounter your ad/service. My first approach would be optimizing the website for SEO, making sure all pieces are coherent across all platforms, then address occasionally a major competitor and its key differences. Using linkedin and google ads I would generate awareness and traffic to the site to kickstart Google Analytics for retargeting purposes, then follow them through other platforms via ads offering stories, case studies, guides, best practices, and data they can use with their own clients in exchange for lead information, then nurture them through email marketing. If all this is set up on a platform like Hubspot, you could essentially invest the time upfront and then let it run on auto-pilot. To learn more you can read more about lead generation on my blog post: http://blog.unthink.me/lead-generation-best-practices-for-top-of-the-sales-funnel-marketing

I've written numerous IMs for UK companies and have put together some detailed advice on what to say and not say in IMs. Have a look here: http://ukbusinessbrokers.com/how-to-impress-investors-to-finance-or-buy-your-business/

Being as collaborative as you can be is a good start. Outside of that, being honest and transparent about why the changes are happening is a good way to build trust with the new team. Keeping a positive attitude and energy around it will also help to soften the blow. Most importantly, continually ask the new team for their feedback along the way. This will help them to understand that while you are implementing new procedures to help things run "your way," you still respect and value their opinion. Best of luck!

I would say this from my personal experience. First right to popularise your domain name. Here are the top 12 tips they've shared that you have to consider when fundraising for your social enterprise. 1. DON’T ACCEPT EVERY CHECK YOU’RE OFFERED. When you’re running a cash-strapped business, it can be tempting to take every investment deal you’re offered. However, early on, you should develop a clear-eyed, strategic vision for the type of capital your business needs. “Too many companies bob and weave based on the investors they meet,” says Greg Neichin, Director of Ceniarth LLC, “It can be a problem for social enterprises when you try to blend all different kinds of investments, or when companies get financed in bizarre ways to meet the needs of the investor.” Instead, he says, entrepreneurs should think through what type of financing strategy makes the most sense to them, and then be vigilant about sticking to that fundraising plan. “You’ll end up with better financing structures in the long run,” Neichin says. 2. WHEN YOU’RE TRYING TO RAISE FUNDS, PAY ATTENTION TO 2 THINGS: STORY AND DATA. Phin Barnes, a Partner at First Round Capital, says that good fundraising boils down to two things: being able to tell a compelling story about your company, and the ability to back up that story with data. As a VC, he views every round of funding as an opportunity for companies to create a bigger story and gather more data. “You should be thinking about the different hypotheses you want to test in order to generate that data to support the larger story,” Barnes says, “And then you have to be deliberate about driving those tests to conclusion, being purposeful about capturing all that data, and then being intentional about creating a narrative to get you to that next round of funding.” 3. CULTIVATING AN INVESTMENT IS ABOUT BUILDING A RELATIONSHIP, BOTH WITH THE INVESTOR AND THE INVESTOR’S NETWORK. “The investment process really looks different for every deal,” says Morgan Simon, a consultant for Pi Investments, “However, our preference is to have as much time as possible to get to know how an entrepreneur operates before we invest in them.” Barnes from First Round echoes this, saying, “The typical process is that we get to know people over a long period of time.” Although they try to make the actual investment decision quickly once a company has pitched to partners, First Round typically gets acquainted with an entrepreneur long before that pitch happens, often through his or her involvement with another First Round company. 4. TRY TO RAISE MONEY IN CHUNKS, RATHER THAN INCREMENTS. Neichin of Ceniarth says that he frequently sees social entrepreneurs getting stuck in a vicious cycle of constant fundraising, where they raise money very incrementally instead of closing the rounds that are needed to take them to the next level of scale. This means that a CEO’s attention is constantly diverted by raising capital and she or he cannot focus on other strategic priorities. "Raise money in chunks, rather than increments." Barnes of First Round takes this point a step further, encouraging entrepreneurs to plan ahead so that they have enough money in the bank when they achieve true product-market fit. “We see that entrepreneurs might not be optimistic enough,” he says, “People work and work and then something clicks. When that thing “clicks,” the first thing the team has to do is run and talk to investors. However, when something really starts to work, you have to be able to pour the gas on.” 5. THINK ABOUT YOUR NEXT ROUND OF FUNDING AS SOON AS YOU CLOSE THE CURRENT ONE. So you just received a round of funding. Congrats! Now is also the time you should start thinking about the next round and who you want to approach. “Start the conversation with those future investors the day after you close a round,” Justina Lai of Sonen Capital says, “You can say, ‘Here’s what we’re doing. We’d like to keep you apprised of our progress. We know we’re too early for you now, but when we do hit those milestones (which we know we will!), we’d like to talk to you.” 6. WHEN TRYING TO CLOSE A ROUND, THE SEQUENCE OF INVESTMENTS IS CRITICAL. “The whole goal as a founder is to move investors from a fear of failure to a fear of missing out,” says Barnes of First Round. “As you narrow in that funnel, the most important thing is to sequence all of your investments. You want to keep everyone in lockstep as much as you can so that you can get investors on the same page. The sequence is the most important piece to getting rounds closed.” That said, Neichin of Ceniarth notes that, “In emerging markets, there might not be as much of an ecosystem to generate that competition.” To prevent potential investors from feeling like your company is becoming “stale,” you should do as much as possible to create a sense of urgency around the investment, says Lai of Sonen Capital. 7. LEADING A ROUND MIGHT ACTUALLY BE ABOUT PUTTING IN THE MOST LEGWORK RATHER THAN PUTTING IN THE MOST MONEY. “We need to look at what ‘leading a round’ actually means,” says Simon of Pi Investments, “In a lot of cases, it actually means putting together the legal terms and there is no reason that the company can’t take that role on. We’re seeing some entrepreneurs really taking the lead and making a very direct ask of the investor.” In some cases, she says, you should come to the table with a very specific and well-researched case for what your business needs and then be willing to take the lead to draw up the terms for that deal to expedite the entire process. A smaller impact investing firm or the company itself can “lead” the round in that regard, even if they aren’t writing the biggest check. 8. INVESTORS CAN OFFER MORE THAN FINANCING. Although providing access to capital is certainly their main appeal, investors are eager to be recognized for the other skills and resources they can bring to your business. “We can provide you with introductions to other potential investors, and a bird’s eye view of the market as a whole,” says Lai, Director of Sonen Capital. Simon of Pi Investments echoes that, saying, “As investors, our job is to know people.” Aside from that, investors can often sit with entrepreneurs and help them figure out alternative deal structures, or determine the type of capital they should be raising. Neichin from Ceniarth LLC agrees that investors are well-positioned to offer input on deal structuring, “We are beginning to get access to enough deals that we can learn how to put together different finance vehicles for different situations,” he says. If you have further queries then you can consult me.

Firstly, you should seek out solving a problem that you are passionate about and have useful expertise in. Building a business with the sole intent on making it appealing to investors will often have the opposite effect. With that out of the way, markets that are getting a lot of attention from VCs tend to be areas that are ripe for disruption by hot technology trends. At the moment, two of those are AI and Blockchain technologies. AI is opening up new opportunities in lots of areas: eCommerce, cybersecurity, marketing automation,, business intelligence / analytics (and the interpretation of that data), healthcare, and finance. If you can find things that can be made cheaper, high quality, more personalized or faster through the application of AI, there's potential for VCs to be interested. Blockchain technology has the potential of disrupting many markets. Just be careful not to use it simply as a buzzword; investors are wising up to shallow uses of Blockchain that are designed merely to attract investment. Some markets that Blockchain will disrupt is finance, cybersecurity, transactions that need to be secure such as real-estate, supply chain management, voting and elections. AI and Blockchain technology can also be paired up in a complimentary way, so there's ample room for innovation that is also interesting to investors here. But in the end, the main thing is finding a problem that needs a solution, rather than building a solution then looking for a problem. If you're looking for advice on evaluating and vetting startup ideas that investors can get excited about, I'd be happy to dig into it with you on a call.

Before you do any surveys, I'd strongly recommend talking to 5-7 prospective customers first - either in person or on a phone/video call. During that, I'd ask questions to learn what you're competing against - what other educational toys would they consider instead of yours? What would yours need to do to be different enough for them to buy? How much are they willing to pay? Once you've talked to a handful of folks, then it's OK to do a broader survey with a tool like SurveyMonkey Audience: https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/audience/. You can think of the qualitative research as a way of informing what options you present to survey takers on the pricing question.

I highly recommend reading the book "Blue Ocean Strategy" that is the best and simplest way to map out the landscape of the marketplace and identify opportunities or methods of differentiation. If you don't have time to read the book I'm sure there videos out there summarizing and explaining the core principles. We walk our clients through the Blue Ocean Strategy mapping and simply follow the process in the book, and it's quite powerful and valuable. I don't know of any other process that VISUALLY REVEALS the opportunity in your market. The other way is to look at your past clients: Is there a majority of clients that you worked with that fall into a niche demographic? Is there a subset of your clients that you enjoyed working with more so than others? Is there an area of your expertise that you're more passionate about that would lead you to dive deeper into a niche? (IE: career transition, executives in healthcare, women in tech startups, Female executives for 7-figure startups, etc.) Hope this info helps!

Successful SEO depends on two things: The amount of time the SEO has to invest (which often correlates to your budget) and the skills of the SEO doing the work. Without those two things, it's difficult to answer question number one. SEO, and digital marketing, in general, require a lot of skillsets that most people don't have. They have some, but not all. They should, however, be letting you know what activities they are doing and explaining why they are important and what the results should be. As for the second question, there is a lot to do and it's a matter of prioritizing. Ten SEOs will tackle the same project ten different ways, but that doesn't necessarily make any of them wrong. A great resource you can use to understand what an SEO can/should be doing is webmarketingchecklist.com (disclosure: I wrote it.) This will at least give you a place to start an intelligent conversation and set priorities. As for milestones, you need to determine what your goals are. Are you going for sales, leads, traffic or conversions? What are you getting now and what do you hope to achieve. Then have a conversation with your SEO to determine if your expectations are realistic with the time they have to invest.

I would consider every product page on your site a landing page worth driving traffic to. Almost everything you would do to optimize a landing page for performance can be done to your internal site pages. This will 1) help you get better results from your existing pages and 2) save you time from having to optimize multiple pages for the same thing.

A side effect of stress is using up micro nutrients. As certain nutrients exhaust, like cobalt + chromium, this increases stress till a snowball effect can occur... with many... oddball endpoints best avoided. Incarceration + institutionalization come to mind. Meditation is a great tool. Ponder this... If you're alive, everything's truly good. If you're dead, well no use reading further. I manage my stress through quieting my mind + also avoiding any food stressors which accelerate burning micronutrients. Simple guideline. Avoid eating anything with a face or any product from a critter with a face. So no mystery cadaver or cadaver squeezings (dairy). I took a very long step myself. Creating a Super Food company which imports ingredients from all over the world + shipping finished products back out all over the world. No requirement for you to do this. Just locate all the best Super Foods you can find + design your own Super Food brews (fluid based products), till you find the sweet spot of nutrients for your body. This tends to be a life long adventure, once you start, as the cleaner you eat, the more your body + nutrient desires will evolve/refine. Just enjoy your wild ride.

How would you describe this app to a friend? Who would you recommend this app to? If the app wasn't working, what would you use instead? And observation! Just watching people use the app, you can see from their faces/hands which bit is working for them or not. Great to hone in those areas of delight and frustration and ask "you seem frustrated right now, is something not working for you" or the opposite? Do these rather than asking about a magic wand. I worked at the forefront of streaming video and consumers asked for everything and then once they got it, didn't use the features etc. You will find similar stories elsewhere. Share the resource if you find it. Thanks

If I were you, I would launch a Facebook Group. It's the easiest way right now to create a community around your business of people interested in your offering and which contribute to each other. Why a Facebook Group? Think about where is the primary place where people spend their time without getting paid. Yep, you guessed it right. It's Facebook. B2B Marketers/Founders/CEOs… Your audience is on Facebook. Trust me, or better, trust people that are seriously smashing it on this niche thanks to Facebook Groups. I’ve started my Facebook Group recently after Vin Clancy and Charlie Price from the famous “Traffic and Copy” group suggested me various time to do it. In the word of Vin Clancy: “It’s the perfect place to build your 1000 true fans.” Other reasons why to start one are: - You have a community! To test our your ideas, and to gain a sustainable momentum (people from your group will invite more in the future, and so on.) - There are way too many blogs out there, and people are sick and tired of optin popups, they tend to give their emails much less (only when the content it’s remarkable, but with so many competition it’s hard to stand out.) - It’s the only public area of Facebook. For the rest, FB is pushing down all the organic reach to push you to buy FB Ads (in groups it’s still not possible.) A Quick Note on Personal Branding Ultimately creating remarkable contents on your Facebook Group (Linkedin and other platforms and blogs as well of course) with consistency will contribute to building your brand and differentiate from the competitors. You’ll create a little space progressively in the brain of your customers with a kind of “positive karma” which they will want to reciprocate in the future (we’re human beings, read Robert Cialdini’s book for more about that.) If you need support in creating and growing your Facebook Group from 0 to thousands of members, and monetize it, call me here on Clarity!

Many ideas come to mind. You might book some calls with people you follow on Clarity, to flesh some of these out better. Start a Kickstarter project with high dollar perks of some number of weeks. Setup a travel site about how to enjoy your particular part of Mexico (sites, activities, seasonal fruit, festivals) + buy traffic from Outbrain + Taboola to your travel site. Then sell your services as a broker to book lodgings. You will first book out your properties, then charge a fee to other property owners to book out their properties. There are many spins on the above idea. For example, cut deals with some City's Chamber of Commerce to do an export seminar, where you charge $5K-$10+ for a 30 day excursion for people to come + learn about products they can import from your area. Now that I think about it, I did created a set of recordings... geez... must of been nearly 10 years of first one, about generating cashflows in other countries. If this might interest you, PM me + I'll try to find these recordings + resources.

I would say, what you are hearing is correct - I would take all 4 of those as MAIN factors. Maybe add another two - Verticals that you are an expert in. - Verticals where you will have enough $$ to break into / develop / support for some time, until you start making profits. Most startups operate at a loss for a long time, until they build critical mass of users. If you run out of money before you are profitable - what's the point? For example, space flights are "hot" right now (space-x, blue origin, etc), but you would probably have no expertise in it, and not enough money to get into space craft biz.

I think that all news site have app. For example my favorite is Flipboard. It have IOS/Android app

Selling to HR departments is hard work + low income (compared to other approaches) + they can cut off your income any time. This is basically working a job. Lowest income + highest exposure to income loss. If you have a B2C product, sell to consumers, not businesses. Just setup a content site writing about your niche with an ways to purchase you product on your site. Then buy traffic - Outbrain/Taboola/Facebook/Google - to your site. In your case, you might even be able to create a Facebook look alike audience for your product. If you PM me, I can pass along a couple of folks who can likely help you with Facebook campaigns. Depending on the exact nature of your product, you might also experiment with buying Yahoo Gemini traffic. This way you go direct to consumers + never have to deal with pitching HR folks... who by the way, get pitched stuff like this all the time + usually they have no budget to buy anything like this... so rarely pans out for people pitching. If you really think going the HR director route is useful, just call up a few + ask for interviews about their work + then ask them questions about how they make their purchasing choices + budgets they have to work with. Based on my experience trying to pitch HR folks in the past, likely you'll only interview a handful, before you ditch this in favor of going direct to consumers, via paid traffic. Traffic is cheap + you never have to talk with curmudgeonly HR folks.

You need a source of capital to carry you through the receivables period. Basically you've got three options: -Borrow money to finance the receivables -Find investors to contribute equity to finance receivables -Sell the receivables (factoring) or some combination of these. In my experience you're talking about making the same leap that a bathroom renovator might make to become a home-building contractor. The difference in that business is also capital. Arrange a call if you'd like to discuss your particular case. I can run through a few questions with you and help point you in the right direction. Best, David Barnett

Strong and bold branding. Make it a prduct to flaunt.

This is a tuff one! As an entrepreneur, you will never be truly happy working for someone else. Not to say there is anything wrong with working for another company, it is just that entrepreneurs have a drive to innovate the process and shake up the market that just does not jive well with working for another person. Reading through your question, I would first suggest that you really think over the question at hand and make sure that your recent set back in business is not the driving factor to work for someone else. I have now started 9 businesses from scratch and of those nine, one of them was a failure. The failure gave me pause before I started another business, 6 months to be exact, I began to second guess myself. Once I moved though that by recognizing the driving factor, I was able to jump back out to my natural abilities again. With this said, I will say that I learned many of the skills of consulting and business through my 2.5 years working for a consulting firm owned by someone else before I started my life as an entrepreneur. There is safety in learning while being paid! The other benefit to working under another developer is to gain access to His network of individuals and vendors while gaining the creditability that he holds. While working for him, you will be building your own credibility in the field so that when you step out, you will have instant credibility for your own business. Please let me know if I can be of more help, I would welcome the opportunity to talk by phone with you to let you know how I was able to keep an open communication about my intentions of going out on my own while working for my soon-to-be competitors.

Hi! First of all I recommend to make a pitch deck for yourself that completely describes your product, user needs, market and theirs validation and lay down money after you will be confident with that document on proof of concept (it will cost you much less then creating MVP). I'd be happy to talk further with you about the difference between MVP and proof of concept stages and help you to set correct KPI to each of them regarding your product

I host 100s of high traffic, high speed, WordPress sites. If a client asked me this question... I'd say... This type of spaghetti setup is okay for a hobby site. Not for a real + money generating + pay your bills type of project. For real (money generating) projects. Keep tech simple. I run straight up Apache + FPM PHP + sites I host load test at roughly 1.1M request/minute throughput. You read that right. There's all sorts of myths about what's required for fast sites. My guess, 99.999% of everything written about fast sites is written by people who've never run a high traffic site or don't understand how to setup sites to isolation + fix slow points. Do yourself a favor + hire someone smart to host your site. In the long run, you'll save a truckload of money.

Hi! First of all i recommend to pitch your product to a community that represents your market , then give them free access to basic features that will complete most common scenarios and create premium features that will convert happy customers to paid users. I'd be happy to talk further with you about setting up market adoption of your product if you'd like to give me a call sometime

Wow, sounds like you have an amazing profit margin. The key is GROWTH. Continuous and stable, with the ability to predict future growth. Therefore, your market niche is very important, to feed the growth curve within an order of magnitude and can't be too vague. As others have mentioned, investors look for a $100-200 million valuation potential, as well as the ability to morph or expand as needed. Contact me if you want to discuss more.

I believe in MVP (Maximum Validated Product). The more you get customer/user validation, the more robust and complete the product becomes. It's smart to begin testing immediately to collect data that can help road mapping for the next product build improvements. Launch early with a few lighthouse customers to get the following (but not exhaustive) information: • Validate improvement over previous product iterations • Validate visual fit as a lightweight QA process • Supplement quantitative A/B testing to investigate user preference from a qualitative perspective • Identify missed usability issues or awkward product flows • Show use cases of a product in multiple environments (Desktop vs. Mobile) • Collect user feedback and hear their opinions, suggestions, and desired features lists

In general no effect... and... Be aware all content in subfolders + subhosts is now considered part of domain, so make sure you stick with some sort of common theme across all your content... to maximize your SEO. Also, there's no real way to do what you describe... short of using sshfs or something similar to mount your WordPress site into your EC2 instance, so technically you'll have challenges. Likely best you talk with a Server Savant about what you're targeting to accomplish, before you get to far down your implementation track. Also, you'll have far more flexibility if you dump your .net tech + go with strait up LAMP... Linux + Apache + MariaDB + PHP + WordPress. With .net you'll end up spending considerable time trying to fix technical issues that are unfixable or take many times the hours + dollars required to fix with a Lamp Stack.