There are lots of great companies that make a profit while helping others. Many times, these companies are formatted as a pair of companies. For example: 'Helpco is a not-for profit corporation that does X and donates proceeds of it's activities to Y.' What is not part of the headline is that Helpco has a management contract in place for administration and operations with ForProfitConsultCo. Helpco pays ForProfitConsultCo a fee for managing its day to day operations and this is where the salaries reside and the profits for your efforts. If you look carefully, there are examples of this kind of arrangement everywhere. I can think of one credit counselling company near me that advertises the fact that they are a not-for-profit and I know the owner is paid a respectable salary via a management contract. I hope this helps.

You do not need to incorporate, and you may use the other company for now. Of course, it is always better to incorporate so that you have a legal entity by which you operate, collect fees, pay taxes, and so on. If you choose not to incorporate at this point, then you should at least have a written agreement with your partner. It should say that you both intend to start a company and are using the other corporation only temporarily and only for the purposes of the merchant account, and that as soon as you have enough money, you will incorporate properly. Your agreement should also spell out the different roles you both will play, and who owns what. I would assume you stipulate that you each own 50% of the new company, and therefore each of you are entitled to 50% of any profits after all expenses and taxes are paid, and you are both equally responsible for any debts that are incurred You should also stipulate that for the terms of the agreement, all decisions must be unanimous, but that either of you may withdraw from this agreement at any time and end the relationship. If you need help drafting the agreement I can help. I'm an attorney as well.

This is a difficult question to answer without a lot more info, but I'll share some high-level strategy. 1) Develop your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) in your new markets. Until you do this, you're just "doing stuff" without clear direction. 2) Identify the likely decision-makers in your market. If you're not sure, start calling some of the companies that match your ICP and ask questions. 3) Build a list of people who match the decision-maker role at your ICP companies and start asking questions. It may take some effort to get people on the phone, but it will be well worth your time to understand your prospects? 4) Using what you've learned, create an outbound marketing and sales strategy with companies in your ICP as your outbound targets. I hope that is helpful. Best, Taft

For two sided marketplaces, I recommend having strategies for the following areas: 1) Strategies for solving the chicken-and-egg problem in the beginning, as many multi-sided marketplaces fail to gain traction due to this problem. Buyers need sellers in order to show interest; sellers need buyer in order to come. Some strategies to solve the chicken-and-egg problem: a) Determine which side "makes or breaks" your business, and find key initial anchor tenants on that side. Usually, it's the buyers, as sellers will go where there's demand. Pay/give incentives to those initial anchor tenants if you have to. b) Keep it to an initial segment or two in order to establish critical mass. Don't be all over the place. Establish a niche first where your buyers and sellers can meet. c) Fake it till you make it. The founders can pretend to be buyer/or seller in the beginning. Also make some convincing "fake" profiles so that the marketplace does not look to empty. 2) Strategies that create and maintain high value-add interactions between all sides in the marketplace. The marketplace needs to help buyers and sellers capture consistent value effectively and efficiently. Once you solve the chicken-and-egg problem, you need your users to stick. Some strategies: a) Create a reputation system to ensure quality buyer and seller interactions. b) Give your sellers adequate tools for creating products and services. c) Optimize how your buyers can best search and filter the products, services, and sellers they need. d) Be very clear how buyers and sellers can transact for goods and services. Make the process simple and easy to follow.

It is based on rankings. So if yesterday I was in position 1 and today I am in position 4, there will be a red minus 3 symbol.

My guess is that the question you are asking is, how to get funds? In which case, I think you could try: 1. Asking friends, family and friends of friends and family of family. See if anyone is interested and see if you can create a group of people who like your idea and can help you move it into a prototype stage. 2. Save whatever money you can and depending what your product is, see if you can outsource the development through freelancer.com. 3. Set your project up on Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Or any equivalent crowdfunding site. 4. See if there are any local government/state schemes that offer funds for projects such as the one you have in mind. 5. Take out a bank loan or credit card. Not recommended. My guess is that you are still looking to validate your idea first. Plus, you can likely achieve what you need to without credit from the bank. 6. Find investors. Or perhaps consider a platform like seedrs.com. Go to local chamber of commerce events, start building your network. 7. Send out a message to all your LinkedIn contacts, tell them about your idea and ask them if they can help or notify you of anyone they think might be interested in your idea. 8. Go on Product Hunt, see if you can find an idea similar to yours and start researching how those companies got their investments. 9. Run your idea past a local university and see if it fits in with any of their current projects. Perhaps there will be some crossover. 10. Put out a call on all your social networks, email etc and note you're looking for support and funds for your prototype. Worth a shot.

1. Get your marketing collateral together. Your case study and testimonials from your beta trial. Make sure you have a demo app ready so you can walk into any medical clinic and show the product on the spot. 2. For this industry, perhaps consider a small digital signage campaign. If you don't know what digital signage is, it's controlled offline advertising in public places. Usually via screens or devices like iPads. They are usually prominent in places like medical centres, Universities, shops, public transport etc. 3. When it comes to online advertising. It's always worth testing both organic and paid campaigns on Twitter and Facebook. However, LinkedIn is perhaps where you will really benefit from investing your time. You should look to target the types of professionals in medical establishments who are involved in purchasing decisions for technology. 4. Yes, go offline. If you have had a good beta trial and have a working product, start lining up offline meetings to pitch your solution. Go in, speak to people, pick up the phone. 5. Consider running mobile app install PPC campaigns via Google search and the Google search network. 6. Consider app partnerships. e.g. is there an app that a lot of medical professionals already use. Can you promote your product via their app? 7. Go down the PR route. This could work really well if you're looking to start locally. Find your hook, pitch to local journalists and get exposure in local publications. What I've written above is quite broad and there is a lot to consider tactically, but running through the points above should give you plenty of food for thought.

Hi! Can you provide link to your site?

Hello, I have run couple of years online business and used indiegogo and kickstarter platforms for presales. I also write on Amazon kindle for e-books on marketing topics. Presently, I am a MBA lecturer who works full time teaching marketing. I would recommend you to do the following: 1) Use Amazon kindle keep a campaign to test,you can also register for free book campaign launch.This way you would have a start.Scale up by using salesforce free license for 30 days to generate and engage your leads,referrals update all of them at one place. If you need more info on how to schedule tasks and increase productivity and to answer all your questions regarding business of e-books please hit me up,we could discuss over the call. I am confident you will have a good productive call with me. Regards, Abhilekh

My firm www.yviral.com is always looking for freelance talent to work with our clients so if you are interested lets discuss. As for a title, Wordpress Expert sounds pretty enticing to me.

Do you have any interest in maintaining the domain? Is it getting regular traffic? To maintain that, you'll want to get some relevant content on the domain as quickly as possible. From there, you can decide what you want to do with it. If you just bought it for nostalgia or because it belonged to your competitor, and have no intention of doing something it with, you can do a redirect as the Google rank really won't benefit you. Let me know, -Shaun

There are countless competitors already to Teespring, what they do is not new nor did they invent a new way of printing for fundraisers. I think what you're suggesting will actually hinder you. The finite time limit creates scarcity and exclusivity. If you are a member of a group or organization that wants to produce wares as a fundraiser, it is in your best interest to have a time limit. Having this open-ended will result in a lot of people putting it off until "they have time" -- which is never. With this approach, you are intentionally undercutting your own growth. Your best bet would be to capitalize on #2 and beat everyone else in the speed of service or find other services (like Teespring) to license your process to.

First of all, it is VERY important that you are uploading your videos natively to Facebook, as opposed to simply sharing a YouTube link. Facebook will penalize you for sharing the link, but greatly reward you for uploading the video natively. Whether or not you are already doing that, the easiest way to get more views on a Facebook video is to run a video ad, thus boosting its reach. You can boost it just to your followers, to your followers and their friends, or to any targeted group that you think might enjoy it (people who like BBC perhaps, or people who follow politics). When it comes to video ads, a little bit of money can go a long way.

There are so many different moving pieces in this type of situation, you're best bet is to reach out to an expert accountant. Personally, I use and recommend Eric from Charitax (http://charitax.com)

There's no "best" answer here, but you can approach it a number of ways. For trendy/future-facing, an isomorphic JS stack (Redux, React, etc.) could be a good move. The architecture is scalable and — if no one on your team hacks around the implementation details — it's easy to maintain (and onboard new team members). You can also use WordPress as your CMS, but that can get weird when scaling, and isn't the most developer-friendly solution due to WP's wonky architecture. You can unfuck it somewhat using something like roots.io (Trellis/Bedrock), but at the end of the day it's still WP, and those quirks are part of the price you pay for the ease of starting up. Another option is to use WP as a CMS, but read the content from the REST API and generate sites with other front-end tech. I recently built some tools to generate static sites (for deployment in Amazon's S3/CloudFront) that pull the WP data as JSON and then generate static pages with my preferred front-end tools, leaving the weird PHP templating out of it entirely. To take a crack at a tl;dr: talk to your development team about how you want this to scale, and where you see it going in the future. If you don't have a development team that can make those calls, talk to a specialist to help lay out a roadmap. If you need help with this, I'd be happy to take a look at what you're planning and offer some insight into how it could be built to scale and grow painlessly (or at least as painlessly as possible). Send me a message and we can talk details. Good luck!

Bear in mind that the approach Amazon took was during a time in which e-commerce was still just taking hold and was far from commonplace. Of course, starting with your own products and building an audience of shoppers gives you some leverage in attracting sellers when you change to a marketplace environment. The downside is that in the short term your product mix won't be as robust, and you'll rely solely on your own efforts to promote your site. In the early stages a few enticements come to mind: 1. Early mover - for those early sellers, all important reviews and ratings will stack up and give them a lead over later adoptees of the platform. 2. Additional exposure - if you don't impose exclusivity on your sellers, they stand to benefit from having additional promotion to customers they may not otherwise reach - ie while the upside may be questionable - there is no real downside to listing products on the site, assuming that the time burden of doing so is low for the sellers.

Our team uses Basecamp and Slack. Both are very easy to use and have a lot of features out of the box. Basecamp's benefit compared to other project management software is that it is easy to use. We have used other systems with our clients like Jira and iMeet but we found both had a learning curve that was much steeper than Basecamp. Slack isn't really a project management system but it really helps us with our communication. It allows for "channels" so you could talk about different projects with the same people without confusion. It also has a lot of integrations and will definitely help out a lot. It has an unlimited free trial so there is really no reason not to try it.

Try a non-traditional approach and go for the best of both worlds. (Note: Whether this makes sense and would work depends on the details of the situation, which I don't know) 1) At your current job, bring up your idea for the new internal program and say you'd like to take charge of it. Don't ask for a raise, just say it's something you want to do. You'll be helping _yourself_ out by A) learning new skills in your new position, and B) getting a promotion which looks good on paper. You'll also be helping your _company_ out by A) setting up a new internal program which in theory will benefit them (if it's a good idea), and B) not asking for anything in return. 2) Now that you and your company are both better off, A) start keeping an eye out for people in your team (or from outside the company) that would do well in your current position as director. You can even start 'grooming' them for the position. B) Start keeping an eye out for startups that interest you (Angellist, etc.), go to entrepreneur meetups, come up with startup ideas of your own, etc. If you find a cool opportunity go for it. You'll already have built a more diverse set of skills, and look better on paper, both of which will help you get it. Meanwhile, if you don't end up leaving your current company, you've put yourself in a position for an easy raise if the project goes well. Note: this strategy is only cool to try _if_ the project you initiate with your current company wouldn't totally fall apart without you if/when you decide to leave (i.e. if it's likely that someone else could take your place and keep the project successful and benefiting the company, instead of a liability). That way it's still a win-win, even if you end up leaving. If you want to discuss your options more according to the specifics of your situation feel free to set up a call, all the best, Lee

B2B is much easier and more profitable. The pitch to help a business grow at an affordable price is much easier than having to spend on gaining customers trust/loyalty.

Check out these WordPress plugins: https://wordpress.org/plugins/shardb/ and https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/multi-db/ Good luck!

Sure, try these guys http://creatingdemand.com/ They work on a performance basis which is why I like working with them!

The easiest thing to ask identify an expert is what campaigns have they ran and what are some specific successes they've found....if they can answer this with exact keyword mentions...then they know their stuff.

Knowledge source:- I'm an app developer myself (heading app development company www.agicent.com. I believe you understand that an App like OpenTable basically has 3 major parts; 1. one is the end user App that you see on the front end on iOS or Android, (native) 2. Another is an App or a web portal for restaurant owners to receive and confirm bookings, see orders etc. 3. and a Backend that you don't see (which has the DB, APIs, business logic, Admin panel, reports etc). So broadly breaking up these modules, I can do this project as follows:- 1. Minimum 60 to 80 hours for all UI design. 2. 350 hours for iPhone App for end user 3. 250 hours for An app (iPhone or android or web) for the restro owners. 4. Minimum 400 hours for the backend (DB design, API, admin panel with basic features). 5. An overall 150 hours of QA for each module. 6. Take a buffer of 10 % minimum. These hours also include the research and planning on technology, third party libraries to use, and interim releases (at least 10 for both apps and admin etc) for your testing. To get this done you need to have a great tech. architect cum supervisor who shall oversee and decide on everything, very good developers for iOS and Android (at least 1 senior + 1 assistant each), and a DB programmer and one Web developer (for admin panel), and a critical QA. The actual release time of this whole thing could be:- 1. 3 months from scratch to one App (end user) and backend (without Admin panel). 2. Another 1 month for restro owners' app (or site) 3. Another 1 month for admin panel release and to finish everything. While an offshore app development agency like mine would charge somewhere around $ 20-25 K for this project, the same in the USA would charge you 5-6 times, while the same in freelancers world could be done in like even less than 5 K (but that won't be what opentable is). Feel free to ask more, I'm happy to assist. PS:- some relevant apps from my portfolio • Food ordering Apps - https://goo.gl/lb8Tfg , https://goo.gl/WTzXy2 • Limosine (Cab) Booking App (For a startup in Boston area, USA)- https://goo.gl/iIi2qs And couple of more I'm getting done right now and wouldn't mind demo that.

Well, the most basic answer is that you could look for certifications. However, that only takes you so far. Any PPC professional worth his/her salt also has experience with PPC management software (Kenshoo, Marin, Acquisio), etc. Ask what experience they have and what they like dislike. I have my favourites :) More over any good PPC expert has their own strategies for managing and structuring campaign. Ask what strategies they use. GIve sample cases and how they think. However, you really have to know what you are doing to hire well. I would suggest you get a PPC expert to do the interviewing and screening for you. Identify 2/3 good people and you hire one that you like for the personality fit. Good Luck :)

Value based pricing is neither about being cheap, nor about the kind of product/service. The value potential of $3.99 will depend upon the quality of output that the product/service provides, irrespective of the categories mentioned by you. Ideal way should be to benchmark your product/service content to decide the price point.