May I ask how niche the directory website is? With selling anything at all, it's about uncovering the need for the exact target market. So are you clear about what the value is to the client? What expensive problem are you solving for them that isn't already covered by local directory listings? And do they see it as an expensive problem that they're willing to pay to solve? If it's local retail business that you're targeting, it would be important to test the market with some face-to-face conversations. (In retail, from my experience, 20 minutes is about the maximum time to speak to the business owner, and it's important to get them at the right time of day. For example, a pizza shop owner is likely to have more free time in the morning, but a dry cleaner, in the early afternoon.) It really comes down to the business problem that you're solving for them, and whether they are ready and willing to pay for that. Testing the waters first can save you from creating a great product with no one wanting to buy it, and I'd hate to see you go through that.

Best way? Figure out a process to get consistent referrals from other professionals. I made a video about this situation, in the video blog here: http://www.jasonkanigan.org/your-confusing-title/ Second-best way? Narrow your ideal customer definition, and go get them. Who values uncovering their unconscious behavior and changing them to conscious decisions? Who values that? Not many people, IMO. But I do know one niche that does: some high level executives. They know mindset is #1 in determining their results. The good news here? They know the value of doing so, and will pay for it. Unlike the regular public, who love 'free' and struggle to pay for anything because they don't have any money nor a belief that investing in themselves is important, your executives will 'get it'. In fact, I'd niche down even more, to executives in a certain industry who are making so much a year. Talk less about you and more about the situation your ideal customer is in. That's your marketing. Most sellers do it completely backwards.

Trying to save money and time by going with a pre-made solution is going to pay you back with frustration later. Best bet is to always build from scratch or build from available components that you can configure the way your particular software needs to work. I would look to open-source javascript frameworks like Meteor JS which is made for rapid development and has access to a huge ecosystem of pre-coded libraries and components for just about anything you need.

Yea, not really a great option. Most of them want real money for "sharing" your project with "this list or that group, etc." and really aren't promising cash on the barrelhead. Crowdfunding is hard work. Period. The bigger the email list you have of people that "KNOW, LIKE & TRUST YOU" the better you will do, if you can muster the gumption to reach out to them. Did I mention it is hard work? {grin} Having said that, I built a planner from my efforts based on a number of successes (going back 5+ years starting with raising $2K for a startup idea) and of course a few failures. I am willing to share of my insights. Schedule a call and let us chat. P.S. My latest effort (last month) raised 250% of goal: $25K.

First of all, you are not alone! Almost anyone with a successful business has left a trail of half-finished ideas and projects. Sometimes we realize we don't have the skills to execute our ideas, or we don't have the capital, the resources, whatever. Your question makes me think it's not that you don't have the skills to execute your ideas, rather it's that you run out of steam or get nervous. If this is the case, you might need an accountability buddy - someone who will meet you for coffee, listen to your ideas, and help you figure out how to make them happen. My friend and I meet up once a month and update each other on projects on which we are working. I feel guilty when I don't have updates for her, and this motivates me to get stuff done. This is more of a mental hack for yourself, but it totally works! You might also look for a Mastermind group in your area (or virtually) which can help you feel like you're part of a community and not going it alone. I've learned a lot from peers who are going through the same thing I am. Happy to chat more if you want help thinking this through!

Don't delete them: segment them. Move them to another list for their own retention campaign. Send them a series of 3 messages saying that you've noticed that they haven't read anything from you lately, and you want to make sure that they're still interested in receiving information from you. If after that, you still haven't heard from them, delete them. In addition to keeping your costs under control, it will also improve your open/click rate with your sender, which, depending on which service you use, may be important, as it's often taken into consideration if you get a lot of unsubscribe requests or spam reports.

As a general rule, you want to be offering the loans brokering just at the point where business buyers are looking for them. At what stage would that be? Just after they have written a business plan? When they're ready to expand their business? Supposing it was the business plan stage. You could offer a short piece on a business plan question regarding funding. In other words, a landing page, which points to your free PDF that explains "how to find funding for your business." Then the prospect has shared their email (because that's where you send the PDF). You could then do a follow-up email a day or two later asking: "did you find that little guide helpful? " and then offer to jump on a call in which you ask a little more about their business idea, and then you could ask: "are you confident you'll have the funding you need?" If the SBA loan is happening when they are looking to grow their business, then the lead magnet (the free PDF) would perhaps be about how to work out how much this business expansion would cost. I hope this helps. I'm in Australia and my field is more helping IT people who hate selling, but my advice is somewhat similar: offer something valuable for free (in exchange for an email address), then ask them if it was helpful. If you have any follow-up questions, I'd be glad if you wanted to book a call. Hope your SBA loan brokering business grows.

Congratulations on the entrepreneurial spirit it takes to start a business. The better you can demonstrate the outcome from their investment, the less of a risk you'll be perceived to be. The best way to find any money for investment is to anchor the costs of the investment against the financial upside. Without directly answering your question of where to find the funding, I would say this: the clearer the path to that estimated 120K of revenue, the less expensive it it to find someone with the 40K to help you kickstart. Sounds like you're well on the way to validating your idea.

As someone who has worked in administrative positions for the better part of a decade, I will say: being seen and recognized as part of the team goes a long way. This can be simple - sending an email to congratulate your team on achieving a goal? Send it to the folks the back office positions, too, and call them out in the email as being part of the success. A coffee shop gift card with a note that says "thanks for your work on this project" tells us that you see us, and you see how hard we work. The more information your administrative and clerical employees have about the company goals and objectives, the more they can be involved in meeting them. Take them as true partners rather than peripheral positions - this helps them stay engaged in the work, which helps both you and them. I'm happy to chat further about my experience - I've worked in huge corporations and small businesses and can help you brainstorm more solutions for rewarding your team.

What your trying is one approach to finding investors. Here's another that in my experience is far more effective. I'd tap your network, and it's probably actually a lot bigger than you think! Linkedin is the perfect tool for this. Look for people you're connected to, that you trust, and that are suited to helping your business (ideally in your industry, or experienced in fundraising, etc) and that have a good network themselves (ideally they're connected to some investors you're interested in, but not required). Reach out to them, and let them know you're starting a venture, and are looking for their advice, and would love to treat them to a 30 min coffee meeting. People love to hear that others think they're awesome and they love to give advice which makes them feel awesome, and this is someone you know, so chances are they'll accept. Send this request to everyone relevant in your network. At the meeting, tell them about your venture, give them your pitch, hear their comments and heed their feedback, and ask them for 3 people in their network that would be great people to talk to. Get intros to those people, and repeat. If you do this diligently and listen well, your network will expand extremely quickly, and you'll be able to get introduced to literally anyone you want. This is how our founding team at Tachyus acquired our first customer within 1 month of starting, and having no experience or direct connections in our industry. I'm always down to chat in more detail if you're interested. Best of luck!

Hello! I work with a bunch of freelancers on Upwork.com so you can pay them directly through the platform on a flat rate or hourly rate. If this freelancer gets sponsors for you, you can give them a percentage of the sale as a commission. Sales reps usually receive somewhere between 10-20% of the sale so you can use that as a gage for your freelancer and how much money they will be bringing in. For flat rate you can do hourly or project based on how many hours you assume this freelancer will work. If you want to further discuss feel free to set up a call!

Total Addressable (at least in the US) can be built based on market data sets, both free and for fee. For early child care centers, Market Data Retrieval and NCES (publicly available data set) are two recommended sources. For Serviceable, that depends on a) your own business / operating model and b) the current and projected penetration of comparable competitors in market. For the former, consider things like technology usage and implementation capabilities. For the latter, if you have identified clear competitors, it is unlikely that you will have access to accurate info. So, if you can estimate these numbers and reverse-engineer, that's a good starting point. This would also be a great time to consider how your SAAS product is differentiated and will give you a chance to think through different scenario models for customer "switching" (from an existing competitor product to your own).

It is possible. You generally have two ways to export water to the USA: 1. You export directly to the USA, It means you will import product into the USA and resell inside the USA by yourself. This is the most complicated strategy, and if you are just starting, then I don't suggest that for you. In this case, you indeed need to have Company registered in the USA: 2. You sell to USA importer. You need to find the importer who is interested in about importing drinking water. Then you no need to register USA company, but you need to provide all needed certificates and licenses for USA importer.

Yes there is a huge market for learning online. Just like clarity you just have to find the ones that fit your style of teaching. Your biggest competition will be all those free teachers on youtube. Your biggest expense will be marketing.

It's hard to tell from your question what you have / don't have. Do you have an MVP? Do you have people using the 'discovery tool' yet? It will be hard to get any restaurant to pay you anything unless you have a deployed MVP already. You'll need to show them actual data of the value of your tool. To do that you need people to be using it to find restaurants. So put restaurants into your tool without the restaurants necessarily paying anything for the listing. Once you have traffic you can start charging the restaurants for certain features. That doesn't mean you should wait until your MVP is done before talking to restaurants though. To develop your MVP you should be visiting restaurants and talking to them about whether the features you're currently working on would be something they're actually interested in, and ask them open ended questions that may bring up ideas that you hadn't even thought of. If you'd like more specific advice on the types of questions to ask, or what the restaurants might want to see in terms of MVP data, or general MVP development help, let me know, best, Lee

You can find this information for each data site on their privacy notice.

No there is not such Guide, because it will be a 300 page manual. Your best bet is to pay a consultant who specialize in that area of business or at the very least find someone doing what you're doing and pay them to build you one.

From the IRS point of view sub companies without an FEIN are the same as the mother company. Just add their names and profit and loss on your taxes. Sub companies with a FEIN but not incorporated are the same as the mother company, nothing extra to do here either. Sub companies with a Fein and Incorporated as a LLC is just multiple companies, just add them to your taxes the same you would if you worked at 2 jobs. Sub companies with a FEIN and incorporated as a Corporation is no longer a child and must do its own taxes separately. There's nothing to "Structure" really because IRS don't care where your money is coming from, as long as you report that it is coming from somewhere so it can be taxed and tracked. I'm not an accountant just a fellow business owner, and i've been successfully doing my own taxes now for over 20 years.

There's no reason GE Aviation, or anyone, would be excited about your "idea for a hoverboard", or give you credit in any way, because you yourself say that you can't contribute anything to the project intellectually, financially, or otherwise, and the idea itself is not a new one. The idea was popularized in the 1989 movie Back to the Future Part II, and there are currently several people using their own skills to try to make commercially viable hoverboards (e.g. https://youtu.be/588du55BcAY?t=463 and https://youtu.be/588du55BcAY?t=31 and https://youtu.be/588du55BcAY?t=110) So your only real option is either to learn the skills to create a prototype yourself, or to have some insightful, patented idea on a unique approach, or to have enough money to pay someone else to do all that for you.

The contract is governed by the state in which the "Subject" of the contract will operate If the Subject should change operating location then the governing body changes. This applies to state laws of course, but not federal laws for obvious reasons.

Yes, when you file your taxes you write off your investments as a loss. You wont be be taxed unless your business turns a profit.

Who writes the review? Staff or passers by? The most obvious way to create a community would be to seek input from the audience – especially for a review site. Ordinary consumers write the content for you for free, and they naturally feel attached to the site where they've contributed. For now, your site seems rather thin on content. And I didn't see anything describing who you are, what you offer, or why your site exists. To build a community, you ought to build an identity first. I'm not smitten with your brand name / domain. That's my professional focus, in case you have any questions in that area. A more authoritative and memorable name would serve you better with your twofold audience of readers and businesses.

You need some sort of functional prototype (i.e. something that actually, in some way, does what you want it to do). Nobody will invest without one. You said you're too low on funds to have one built, so my best advice would be to spend some time learning the skills needed to build it yourself. You could for instance take free online electronics courses that MIT provides: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-002-circuits-and-electronics-spring-2007/ or buy books, watch youtube videos, etc. I've built my own hardware prototypes for two of my own startups, and also helped build prototypes for others through Clarity. Let me know if you'd like advice more tailored to your specific idea (e.g. the kinds of microcontrollers and motor controllers that might work, etc.) best, Lee

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