1% if it is a cold contact 10% it is Warm contact 20% if it is a thank you note.

Well, if you're in a proven industry and have a track record of sales, it's quite simple... make the commission generous. I once worked as an advertising sales rep and while I wasn't 100% commission (my base salary was only $18,000, while I earned over $130,000/yr.) it was close enough that I think the experience qualifies. I joined a team of a dozen reps and we all earned really good money. Convincing new people wasn't hard and the people who weren't good ended up leaving. It was a win-win. Now if you're a new startup and you have no track record of sales then what you're talking about is developing more of a partnership. Here are the fears that any potential rep will have: 1. What if nobody wants this widget? 2. What if the company can't deliver on the promises? 3. What if I starve while trying to sell this thing? See the problem? You need to take a step back and examine if what you really need is a rep on your team who is an employee, or if you need to build some kind of dealer network or get your widget listed with rep houses that are selling other people's widgets. Those people won't be afraid of starving and they'll give you better input as to what they think of your widget. Arrange a call if you'd like to discuss your particular case, I work with a lot of people who are trying to formulate their business models. Cheers David C Barnett

Essentially what I see you asking here is: should I increase the lead generation to my inside salesperson, or should I hire an outsider to get those new leads and convert them? As a business owner, can you see the problem with the second option? You are completely putting lead generation and a lot of your conversion into the hands of an unproven outsider. I wouldn't do that. My advice is you talk to a competent Traffic person (not me--I'm a Conversion guy) and learn more about lead generation so you can keep that knowledge In House. Then, if your current inside salesperson gets overloaded, you can hire another inside salesperson. You HAVE to keep watch over these people. You cannot "leave it to the wizard" where things happen behind a curtain and you hope they're getting taken care of. If they don't, you are behind months and many dollars in return for nothing. By learning more and keeping the institutional knowledge within your organization, at least you learn something in return for your money. I AM one of those BDM types...and I say it's a huge mistake for you to entertain the idea of hiring one right now. Let's say, best case scenario, they generate their own leads and close a lot of them. Good, right? Wrong. What happens when they get frustrated with you? Start thinking they're doing a lot of work for not enough money? And leave? What then? You've learned nothing, and you're back to square one. Nope. I wouldn't do that nor would I advise anyone to go down that road. Keep it in-house. Keep it under your control.

While you've created a good amount of content on your Kickstarter campaign, your website is lacking severely in it. With that in mind, when it comes to your website I'd propose focusing on these two main goals: 1) Increase lead generation through your website. 2) Engage more with your current (and future) audience. Here's what I think you should regarding those goals: 1) Create a User Persona (Customer Avatar). 2) Create an Audience Research document which would outline your customer's needs, social channels, age range, style of communication, and possible competition. Using the data from the above steps, you should do this: 1) Redesign your current website page and outline the benefits for the future backers. Be sure to include FAQ and "intro" section as well explaining the reasons on why are you creating this product. 2) Offer a free incentive for the future backers BEFORE they've backed up your campaign (you can use a paid campaign via social media as well for this). 3) Increase social media engagement via User Persona social channels (Reddit, 9GAG, Facebook as an example). Hope that helps! Feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions.

An andoid app when published on Google Play automatically get SDK integrated.

No special requirements needed for virtual subcontractor. All submission you give the government will be at your own discretion.

Hi! I work with entrepreneurs who are exploring opportunities and launching and I lecture in Entrepreneurship on the side. The answer to your question is it depends on the purpose of your business plan and who the audience is. If it's for yourself to help you plan the business, then a good place to start is a business model canvas which quickly captures your ideas and shows you areas you need to focus on. If you are planning on going to a bank for funding, you will need the traditional 20 - 40 page business plan. Some investors will want similar, some won't. You would produce different documents to get key partners or suppliers on board. If the planning and opportunity evaluation process is new to you, you will save a lot of time and money by getting someone on board who can guide you through this process. I'm happy to jump on a call with you to help you with this.

I would start with small-ish, local shops, like flower shops, beauty salons, bakeries, used car places, etc. Places that are probably run by an older individual that doesn't currently do Facebook advertising. Don't ask them for an 'internship', because that implies something formal that would involve them having to do something. Just go into the shop and ask for the owner, and tell them something like, "Hi, I run a program in which I do Facebook advertising for free for local companies. I help design Facebook advertisements, and then I help post and manage the ads to get them to benefit your business. Would you like to op in to the program? It's my way of contributing to the local community. I live up on xyz road" If possible, before you visit: 1) Prepare a well made mock up of what you envision the advertisement would look like (use their logo / slogan from their webpage, etc.). You could have this ready to show to the shop owner. 2) Have already self-deployed the ad on Facebook, and have some data on its effectiveness in driving customers to the companies website. In other words, use your own money to have the ad online for ~ 1 week, and see how many click throughs you're able to get, and the $/click. Tell the owner that, in order to help companies in the local area you've already deployed ads for several local business for a couple days. Show them the number of potential customers that have clicked it, and the $ / click. 3) See if you can get any sort of support from a local community board. Doesn't have to be financial, it could be as little as an email response from them saying they like the idea. It will increase your ability to convince shop owners that you're not a scam artists or anything. As you build up your experience and successes you could start reaching out to larger, non-local companies.

Business names cannot be legally copyrighted. Any name is fair game. As long as it does not confuse people. Even if it is the exact name but marketed for a different product in a different way and different market. Just don't use a little yellow ghost as your business logo and you'll be fine.

I would look to see what stage you're at as a start. I've ben through this many times. 1. First study the VC and the partner 2. See what else he has invested in 3. They may be looking to round up their vertical with something similar or to acquire smaller players. If you're not a competitor, then anything is game. 4. Study when they invest and how Lastly: 1. Set up the call. 2. Start the call by letting them talk a lot first. Ask: What is your mandate, sector? What do you invest in? What stage? What do you look for? What is the typical investment size? Where (geographically) do you invest? This will tell you a lot about why they are reaching out and what you should say after. Hit me up privately if you would like to discuss more, and good luck!!!

Be responsive! Answer requests and messages promptly and thoroughly. Respect the caller's time! I always send a pre-call questionnaire in the message field. I won't take the call until I receive answers to the questionnaire. That way I have my basics answered before the meter starts running. No phone time is wasted on getting-to-know-you questions: just dive right in to the heavy stuff. This saves you time and it saves them money. Be honest! It's great to be labeled an "expert," but if you try to oversell yourself, it can only come back and bite you. Admit your areas of inexperience. Put yourself in their shoes. Ultimately, the caller wants to feel comfortable and secure in their area. They're looking to you for help. If you can go the extra mile for them, that only helps them all the more. Refer them to other experts or industry professionals. Provide links to reading material and resources. Offer to follow-up a week or month after the call (and then make sure you do it!) to check in on them. Etc. Be more than a phone call. Be their help.

Firstly investigate if there is anything trademarked or patentable (I doubt the latter due to court cases like Alice killing off a huge amount of business process patents). Just don't do anything completely stupid like steal any copy from the site and repost it. The fact is that there is no end to situations similar to yours. Just because someone is there first, doesn't mean you can't do the same thing - even in most cases exactly the same thing. In fact, you're in a better position bearing no legacy and not having to pay the heavy price of educating the market on the value of the offering. You just have to innovate within it, or market better, or expand the market.

Yes, you can use personal money to pay for business expenses (just not the other way around.) In fact, most businesses start up this way with the owners putting their personal money into the business to get things started. In the end, the accounts track it all when they balance the books. If the money put into the business is more than the money you get out, it comes out as a loss for the year. But I do suggest you talk with an accountant.

It really depends on your overall business objectives. Some helpful thinking: Why do you need funds or is funding secondary and you have other objectives here? Why Kickstarter? Are you wanting to sell an 'investment' in your business in exchange for equity? A product for pre-order? A room at a discount? Answering those types of questions is a great starting point. Shane

There is no "Best", Do a google search and compare POS Focus on things like Cost, Learning Curve, and functionality.

Several ways come to mind. Formulate your idea into one (or better all) of the following + you'll know by interest level if you have a winner. 1) My favorite. Start a Meetup Group (set the zipcode of group) to match the zipcode of a US city where most people originate travel to your target destination. For example, If your targeting running tours in Chang Mai Thailand, research what city people in US most travel from to visit Chang Mai. Then run Meetup events related to Thai Travel topics. 2) Package information about Thai Travel into a PDF + sell it via Facebook Ads. 3) Start a Kickstarter project. 4) Speak at existing Travel Meetups + other groups + related conferences about your idea.

Your best bet is to go on the Java discussion board for this type of question.

You should try searching yelp, they will give you customer reviews with feedback.

Hello, great question here. First of all you should understand that there is no 1 way and depending on who your audience is and what you sell the answer will definitely vary. A short answer however would be - engagement. Forget about likes and follows and shares are engagement, if you want to be a successful marketer you need to see engagement as conversations. The more conversations you can build around products the more you can rely on them to follow links or follow up on a request when you do make one. With that said, social media updates should be about what your followers want to see - depending on the social media - try to avoid being too pitchy on each post. My name is Humberto Valle, I have been a strategist for about 10 years now and have helped countless of entrepreneurs and businesses thrive through creative competitive strategy and marketing and I'm the co-founder of Unthink.Me. I hope my answer helps you a bit.

There's no set-in-stone formula. The answer depends on the degree to which implementing a revenue model would potentially cause a mass user exodus. A) If implementing a revenue model would obviously cause no problems, then investors might be ok with Camp 2. B) If a reasomable person might think that implementing a revenue model could cause a mass exodus of users from your service, then investors would not be ok with Camp 2. Having said that, each investor is different, and there has been a steady decrease in the popularity of investing in Camp 2 startups. The popularity of Camp 2 startups fluctuates with the current strength of the economy (weaker economy = less investors willing to go with Camp 2). I usually recommend a hybrid approach, which involves initially implementing a revenue model on at least a small scale to start testing the waters. You want to deploy this as quickly and cheaply as possible, and then scale it up, just like an MVP. You start off by exposing a potentially unrefined revenue model to just a small % (e.g. 1%) of your users to test the waters, and then slowly scale up its deployment as you improve it (based on data feedback from that first pool of users). Even if you only have time to test the 1% implementation before approaching investors, it will be better than nothing. You can use the data from that experiment to show investors that (hopefully) it didn't cause a mass exodus of that 1% of users, and you can use it to have a ballpark estimate of the revenue you could get if it was fully deployed and better implemented. For certain unique situations, it may be important to remember that for this initial testing, the deployment of your revenue model doesn't actually have to generate revenue for yourself, it just has to have the appearance to those 1% (or whatever %) of users as your revenue model would. The most important part of this initial testing is just testing whether your revenue model will interfere with your user base. For instance, you can start by creating fake ads that don't actually generate any revenue. That may sound weird, but it was relevant to a unique situation I helped someone else with. It allowed them to save time and money to deploy their initial test. Once you have data showing that it doesn't scare users away, then you can make convincing estimates of future revenue based on your growing user base. If you'd like more tailored advice to your specific situation let me know, best, Lee

The answer to this varies wildly. It is dependent upon what you're asking the customer to do, what your relationship with them is, and what barriers they need to navigate to signup again (your stated win-back goal). I've seen success rates as high as 80% and as low as single digit. I don't think you will find a "typical" because each brand, product, and consumer is different. All of which effect this type of conversion rate. I would be happy to help you calculate what is typical for *you* and your product. If you're interested, drop me a note or schedule a call. All the best, -Shaun

Some more information about your situation would help. What is your product? What problem does it solve for buyers? Do they acknowledge that problem exists, and value fixing it? Are they willing to trade money for your solution? Do you have a "ladder" for people to buy increasingly valuable things from you, or are you trying to rely entirely on revenue from this one thing? Do you have Traffic and Conversion tools in place? You are asking us to diagnose a situation, but just like your doctor not being able to diagnose what's wrong if they can't see you or hear fully what's going on, it's pretty tough to blind. Only two components or issues exist when it comes to Sales: Traffic, and Conversion. I don't care how great your Conversion tool is, or how great you believe it is--if you don't have a high quality Traffic source hooked up to it, the Conversion tool is basically useless. So where are you getting leads (potential buyers) from? Are they pre-qualified for your offer (do they have a want or need, at least, for what you can give them)? And in what quantity are you receiving them into your funnel? Each business needs four systems: 1. Lead Generation 2. Qualification 3. Closing 4. Fulfillment. How well are you doing on all four of these? It's very common for a tech guy to rush out and drop money on the development of some brainwave they had. Unfortunately, you cannot ignore "business" in the hectic race to bring a product to life. If you've created something nobody wants, or nobody understands, you've wasted your resources. I recommend these Sales Tactics videos I've made about SaaS; there are links to written blog posts in the video descriptions if you would rather read than watch and listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MGF-C0GPQY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDZQ_8Srt7g

List your item against the wrong UPC code. This provided Amazon with all the correct information, including the correct photo. Then go back and mark your inventory at zero.. keep an eye on this as you don't want to sell the item as you might not have the wrong item to ship. Then email Amazon with the ASIN number and explain that you have piggybacked on the listing based on the UPC code but the detail page reflects the wrong item. Let them know that you have removed your inventory till this can be worked out. I included photos to show the UPC for the correct item. Ask Amazon to cleave the listing so you can list your item. Amazon cleaved the ASIN. I had never heard that term. What Amazon did was split the listings and assigned a new ASIN to the listing I started. This allowed both listings for one UPC code while Amazon looking into the questionable listing. You have to have a UPC code to list an item... or you need an exception from Amazon. You can't take an item that has a UPC code and add a non-UPC code item as a variation. The photos are slower than the text. When starting a new listing, the photos don't even start to be loaded until you have completed the listing. Just the way Amazon's system works.

If there’s one tool that I recommend above all other solutions it’s ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is the backbone of all of our ventures here at Venture Harbour. It’s easy to use, and easily the most feature-packed email marketing / marketing automation tool for small to medium-sized businesses. On top of that, it’s also one of the most affordable tools. What sets ActiveCampaign apart is the fact that it has its own CRM system for managing leads, and marketing automation for nurturing your leads into customers. In short, it’s an all-in-one platform for handling small business sales and marketing. Unlike some of the other tools that do this, ActiveCampaign is affordable starting at $9/month – a twentieth of the starting cost of tools like Infusionsoft, Hubspot and Ontraport.

Do you have an idea of what kind of invalid emails you are receiving? That will help you determine which vendor is the best fit for you. For example do you consider support@, info@, or postmaster@ invalid, some vendors will weed those out for you? Or are you just concerned with making sure the email has an accurate Domain/MX Record? Will blocking SPAM IP addresses be enough to address your needs, if so you need a vendor who checks agains URI DNSBLs. With that in mind, here's a good blog article about the top vendors. Best wishes! https://www.formget.com/best-email-verification-services/