The way you describe it, the 301 redirect is looping right back to the original URL which is odd. Start by looking at your .htaccess file. It lives on your server with all the other files that drive your website. Often times it's hidden and you have to take extra steps to find it. Your hosting provider should have instructions on this. *Back up this file first* Make a copy and name it htaccess.bak or something like that. Small errors in this file can break your website so always make a backup before tinkering. Once you have it open look for lines that say RedirectPermanent or Rewrite Rule with 301 in brackets nearby. If you find something that doesn't belong you can comment it out with # or delete it. Based on what you find, I recommend doing some research to see what others in similar situations have done. If you do something that breaks your website, simply copy your .bak file and rename it .htaccess file and start over. Don't be afraid to explore and learn, but do understand you can drastically change how your website operates with just a small error. Backups are your friend! Shoot me a message if you need more help.

Probably not. Most carousels these days are javascript-driven. Therefore the source code for those products exists on the page (and is therefore easily viewed by Google et al). The javascript moves items around the *screen* but it does not modify the *source.* And it's the source code that matters most to search engines. The exception to my answer above is AJAX. If any products are being dynamically loaded to a page via an AJAX call, then they would hidden from search engines. Google's John Mueller confirmed about a year ago that, despite all their progress with javascript and AJAX, Google still struggles with some Ajax-driven websites — http://searchengineland.com/can-now-trust-google-crawl-ajax-sites-235267 So, as with so many answers in SEO: *it depends.* If you have any specific examples, I'd be happy to take a look! Feel free to message me here on Clarity.

The complexity of your situation is similar to multiple acquisitions I have encountered on both sides of the table in private and public transactions. In most situations involving private equity, it is doubtful if the additional cost of a private agent would generate a material gain given your minority position. However, since your situation has the additional complexities of differentiation in EBITDA contribution and negotiation with family members, I would agree with your recommendation to use an external agent. If the cost is a concern, you may want to consider using an advisor/coach/consultant to work on a fixed fee basis instead. I took this approach in selling one of the private companies I ran and was able to complete the transaction at a much lower cost than using an investment banker or agent. I'm happy to share my experience and lessons learned if you would like to follow up with a discussion.

There are a number of best practices -- and, generally, they are universal regardless of your product or service. The one that I would stress above all others is: Understand Your Customer. That is, resist the temptation to "jump in and build something", take some time to interview prospective customers. Understand what they want (be looking for clues, as Steve Jobs famously said, most consumers don't know what they want, but you can find sources of friction and answer those) Talk to people. Understand what frustrates them with the current solution. What would their lives be like with your product? Do they *need* this? What happens if they don't have it? Are their implications if they don't buy? Is their FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)? A lot of entrepreneurs make a solution based on *their* perception of a problem without taking into consideration that their ideal customer may have a different need. Good luck and let me know if I can help further, -Shaun

Clarity charges by the minute. It is not possible to have two different rates.

Hire a local immigration lawyer. Been through the process myself. Sooner started, sooner finished. Probably good to get in before the administration changes and possible new guidelines come down from on high.

Based on what you've shared, I would recommend splitting your two products into different brands; they appeal to different audiences and should be marketed as such. That said, there is ample opportunity for cross-promotion, as there are some similar needs between the two audiences. Good luck. I'd be happy to help more. Just drop me a note or book a call. -Shaun

Absolutely! In fact, this is where many solopreneurs "max out". With the Internet, as long as you have a flow of traffic of interested prospects, you can keep converting and selling, right? There's no limit at the scale an individual can operate on to that flow. As a consultant, if that's what you choose, you need to move beyond "trading time for dollars" as soon as possible. Staying stuck in that mindset is how most consultants hamstring their revenue. Key ideas: > work with high ticket industries so you can charge high fees in line with the value you are creating > get your own products (courses, physical goods) out there for sale ASAP > always be looking to expand your distribution channels to expand your revenue sources.

Let me start off by saying that my expertise is in domains proper – not websites and certainly not SEO. So I can't say with absolute certainty that a whois change won't affect Google rankings. Nobody CAN give you that kind of reassurance, since Google's algorithm is so inscrutable. What I can say is this: Whois changes are normal. Established companies often reassign the contact info when an employee changes roles. Likewise after rebrands or mergers or buyouts. More often, they simply reformat the whois, going from "Smith, James" to "James Smith" or "Jim Smith", updating phone numbers, standardizing old idiosyncratic email addresses, and so forth. Google would be insane to penalize whois updates per se. Insofar as Google's algorithm picks up on whois changes, this may alert the system to a possible ownership change. So maybe, just maybe, the algorithm re-evaluates the site's trustworthiness at that juncture. But a change of ownership is no reason to penalize a website either. It's much more important to look at the website itself to see if anything a visitor sees is concurrently changing. THOSE changes might upset earlier rankings. A rebrand, for example, can damage SERP rankings if URLs aren't handled carefully, if old links are broken and Google mistakes the site for something entirely new. In all the thousands of articles I pour over in the domain industry, I've never come across a story of a website losing its rankings after a mere whois change. Never. After a domain name change, yes. After a website overhaul, yes. But not after an update to the whois database. Google has been around the block a few times. Their algorithm has dealt with websites being bought and sold before. When domains change hands, that invariably entails a whois change. So it would be idiotic for Google to downgrade rankings purely on that basis. It's unlikely, therefore, that they do. Searching for instances of such catastrophes just now, I couldn't find any. The consensus among professional SEOs, based on a few articles I've sampled, seems to be that whois changes ought not to coincide with other large-scale website and branding modifications. Of course, you should do your own reading. And consult with an SEO professional. But I suspect you're more nervous in this case than you need be. One option might be to ask for whois privacy to be applied during and after the escrow holding period. That would mask the ownership change once the website is paid off and the domain comes out of escrow. But note this: Some whois privacy services invent a long random string of characters for use in the email address proxy. Those random strings are automatically updated every so often. If Google really were fanatical about punishing whois changes, then such whois privacy services would be driven out of existence. Yet they're still here. Conclusion?

I am not an attorney and this is not legal or "professional" advice. Copyright protection will be the easiest, as an artist's work. However, trademark is what you will really want. And that is not at all as cheap. Overall, my advice is for you to get moving, quit worrying about what theoretical other people will do, and work on yourself. Otherwise, you'll remain stuck in "analysis paralysis".

Hello! This is a great question, alimena many new self-employed or entrepreneurs face. When I started consulting 10 years ago i started mentoring people in this exact situation - you know you're good, but you feel like your skillsets are diverse and you obviously want to do something productive that generates steady income thus you're unsure as to what path to follow. If this goes un-addressed for too long you'll see years pass by w/no fruitful effort. My background is in strategic marketing - here are my thoughts for you: First, try coupling your skillsets to a certain industry such as marketing, pr, sales, technology, etc. Are you capable of creating the logos or imagery you propose to someone? Second, based on whether you can deliver and the industry that best suits you - understand your would be role in the current eco-system. For example I would place your interest into marketing but you see, a logo does not make a brand, a slogan requires clever pitching to be accepted at once, and clever repetition to the audience for it to stick and become a slogan or part of the brand. Why would a company go to a consultant who cannot deliver campaigns but only create words on microsoft or sketch a logo but not create it? Even a graphic artist must go through dozens of variations of the same 'finished' logo before one gets accepted and thats because a miniscule detail makes a huge difference to a client. So a sketch is close to delivering nothing. Consulting can be a good gig, but you must understand what consulting is - is not just speaking, unless you're amazing public speaker and jargonist. No, sustainable consulting delivers a product in the form of research, theories, thesis, manages others implementing the effort, works side by side the teams they are hired by. So this means that even for logo and branding consulting you must be perceived as an expert in your field, have experts who like you as a human and respect you as a professional. Specially if you want to simply create verbal content and not tangible brand assets. With that said, on the other hand, let's say that you are able to deliver tangible assets to a company client. Good for you, now lets understand your role in the current eco-system as follows: You are either a disruptor, traditionalist, softserver, specialist, connector or a soloist. Now, is important that you don't get played by your ego - none of these is above another and even through the distruptor classisification might be of your liking it doesn't mean that you are - you, to me, sound like would fit under the soloist. A distruptor is someone with ton of experiences and abilities to bring all others together under one roof service and deliver a hybrid company - I have done that with Unthink, a hybrid marketing agency that caters to small and new business owners who need high budget services on monthly payments and have gathered expert professionals to work under my model and not traditional lump sum plans for traditional and digital marketing and advertising. A traditionalist are becoming irrelevant and depend heavily on relations and past authorities in a field. For newcomers this is obviously out of the question and a dying competitive strategy. Specialists, you could be here, focus heavily and depend on NICHE markets only. These individuals can charge a premium because they offer a single solution to any client and deliver it well because they understand it backwards and inside out. These people are constantly improving, reading, learning and networking and have a pitch crafted down to the T. They depend heavily on connections obviously and patience for their connections to need their services. Connectors, are networkers, not doers. - you could be here too. They make the connections and hire or subcontract others who can serve. Soloists are common - these are web devs, programmers, graphic artists, solo-business owners - who have modest growth goals, low cost of living and thus can comfortably build connections and offer a small variety of services which once sold they create and deliver themselves. (if you know graphic design you would be here) These people are not looking to build an agency right off the bat or at all, instead just make a good living doing something they love either as main provider or as a contractor or sub-contractor to clients directly or other companies. I hope my answer helps you figure out what type of business to start, I cannot give you a direct response because that is a loaded question which answer depends heavily on things only you know. If you would like to chat a bit more give me a call, message me, or google me. Right now, we currently added a yelp account, if you feel like my answer helped me I would invite you to leave a yelp review for me in return :) https://www.yelp.com/biz/unthink-marketing-avondale

LinkedIn, Glassdoor, or search the experts here on Clarity. Good luck!

Does your target market want your solution? Do they acknowledge it creates value for them? Are they willing to pay for it? What words and phrases do they use to describe the problem you fix in their niche?

A mentor should be someone who has successfully accomplished a goal that you wish to accomplish or have great insight. I personally would like a mentor that is helpful, patient, provides good direction, and doesn't mind communicating with me.

[This is a duplicate of the question at https://clarity.fm/questions/4300] Since some new business owners get excited about revenue, instead of gross profit, it is always wise to show the difference. Let us consider as an example, that your business makes $10,000 (revenue) in revenue in one month, and has a cost of goods (or services rendered) of $7,000. This means that you have to pay someone (e.g. a vendor) $7,000 to make $10,000. Then, you are faced with general expenses for the month that amount to $2,000 (utilities, etc.). The excerpts that you quoted from the article mean that you should NOT think that you are spending $2,000 from the $10,000 (revenue), but that you are spending $2,000 from the $3,000 (gross profit: $10,000 - $7,000). As you can imagine, you will be much more cautious when you realize that you are spending 66% of your gross profit on expenses, and not simply 20% of your revenue. While this is certainly common sense, the reason for his pointing it out is that sometimes people do not keep it in mind.

Since some new business owners get excited about revenue, instead of gross profit, it is always wise to show the difference. Let us consider as an example, that your business makes $10,000 (revenue) in revenue in one month, and has a cost of goods (or services rendered) of $7,000. This means that you have to pay someone (e.g. a vendor) $7,000 to make $10,000. Then, you are faced with general expenses for the month that amount to $2,000 (utilities, etc.). The excerpts that you quoted from the article mean that you should NOT think that you are spending $2,000 from the $10,000 (revenue), but that you are spending $2,000 from the $3,000 (gross profit: $10,000 - $7,000). As you can imagine, you will be much more cautious when you realize that you are spending 66% of your gross profit on expenses, and not simply 20% of your revenue. While this is certainly common sense, the reason for his pointing it out is that sometimes people do not keep it in mind.

That's awesome. You are at a first stage of building a MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course portal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course I worked in the growth team of a UK startup that reached an explosive growth in 2015. I like your approach you applied the "don't scale" approach in the Paul Graham (Ycombinator founder) way. http://paulgraham.com/ds.html I invested in this kind of business hundreds of thousands of dollars every month on several acquisition channels. The good news for your business is that bidding costs for Indonesian users are the lowest in the market today so you could leverage this opportunity to invest in CPC/PCM channels. There is a really important thing you will need to do before doing this. Building an email list at the top of the funnel. To learn how to grow your business today call me and I will help you. Ciao Danilo

I am building a NewCo with one of the developers that worked in an itailan Expert Platform called http://www.bemyguru.it. Send me more detailed questions about what you need and I will try to help.

I have just recently partnered with a network of 800 Family Offices around the world that are interested in acquisitions and investments for US based companies. If you send me a pm with the details of your company I could evaluate to build a first connection.

One of the most toxic ways early stage companies fail is picking bad co-founders. Building a business is hard, and if you expect to ever make it anywhere worth mentioning, you're going to need help. Anything past a cute business that makes you a couple hundred bucks a month is going to have more work than you think. There is simply too much to do alone. My suggestion: Do your best to find someone you can work with. The best business leaders find ways to bring in diversity of thought. Assemble your team to fill in your gaps. If you think you have none, you're being dishonest with yourself. Take your time with the search. Picking a bad co-founder will take you nowhere fast, like you've seen. Start with Angellist, ask a lot of questions. Good luck!

Yes, the IRS does recognize their role as non-profit volunteers and I'll list some of what they can deduct from their taxable income. They can choose between deducting gas/oil used or mileage. If they don't have their own transportation they can deduct subway, bus, or taxi fare. They can also deduct food and uniform cost, and other expenses they incur and out-of-pocket costs while volunteering.

Demos and free trials seem to be the only ways SaaS vendors can think about selling. Funny thing: the same issues that plagued the IT field ten years ago (!) continue today. The answer is in education. I don't mean teaching the prospect for free; I mean as the seller educating yourself on the true state of the target market so you can begin the sales conversation on ground they already believe in...and using education as a tool to bring the prospect around to your point of view. I've made a couple videos and written a couple blog posts on the topic. Here they are: Why Demos Fail to Sell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKK5Anu9keM Blog post: http://www.salestactics.org/why-demos-fail-to-sell/ SaaS Sales Problems: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDZQ_8Srt7g Blog post: http://www.salestactics.org/how-saas-vendors-get-it-wrong/ If you want to develop an effective sales funnel for your SaaS, book a call and let's get started. Given the jump in expertise required, it's probably not something you're going to figure out correctly on your own in a short time, and I can save you that time--and those lost sales.

HelIo, I personally recently raised $1.2M seed investment for my own startup after one year of networking events, startup competitions and pitch sessions. Today I work for a network of 800 US Family Offices as external advisor. We are looking to invest in US based companies for series A,B,C rounds. If you send me more information about your project/pitch with a PM I can evaluate if I can help.

Without question you can! I've put out over 150 apps into the app store without knowing how to code and have gotten over 1 million downloads in the consumer space. You just need to find the best people to help you see your vision through. Start by putting together a clickable prototype so that people can see your vision. Tools like POP are great for doing this. https://popapp.in/ It's hard for people to get a grasp on an idea until they can see it in action. If you want a more high fidelity prototype, get a professional designer and use Invision . https://www.invisionapp.com/. This is especially important when talking to developers or investors. Is it a SaaS (Software as a Service) type product? If so, you can try to get some pre-sales by showing your target customer your clickable prototype to help validate your idea before spending money to get it developed. This alone can save you a lot of time and money. It sounds like you're a good salesman if you've got 1 M in revenue. If you have any questions about how to find people to build it, how to oversee the process, how to quickly validate the idea, or talk through anything else related, I'm happy to jump on a call. Thanks, Greyson