We recently did a beta launch of Incorporations.IO which is an international incorporation comparison matrix. The tool aims to objectively answer this question: "What is the best country to incorporate a company" based on user input and criteria that is customizable. The reason this question is (almost) impossible to answer is that for each individual situation, the best place to incorporate may change, and is highly subjective. If you want to raise money in Silicon valley, then a Delaware C-corp is the preferred entity of choice. But not every business has this as a goal. For instance, what if you are a digital nomad that wants to legally minimize taxes on profits - or you want as little paper work as possible (using our tool, you can see how long it is estimated to complete filings on a yearly basis). What if you are starting a bitcoin company, what is the most favorable environment for that? Another aspect of incorporation that is important is tax treaties. If you are trading internationally, oftentimes this is a very important consideration to benefit from certain exemptions, or avoid other headaches, such as with-holding tax, for starters. We have an entire aspect of the application making it transparent and easy to see if the country you select has a tax treaty (either DTC or TIEA). Try out our tool - it's free to try (you don't even need to put in your email) and we'd love to hear your feedback. i@incorporations.io

There's no set right answer. The more people the better the data. Traditionally most sample sizes are 100 people but think about it like this. Which has more power? 90% of 100 or 90% of 1000 all vote in your favor. Which would you pick? My recommendation would be use a sample of at least 100 people. 👊🏽

Don't use leverage. Just simply say, I would need $150k and gently say, that you have been offered that amount by another company, but would prefer to work for company B. They will get the point and at least give you their best offer and probably will not be offended. After all, you are in the Marketing field. You are allowed to market yourself also. This shows that you value your contribution and they should too. Best of Luck, Mike From the Trenches to the Towers Marketing I will be glad to help as my time permits.

Send me the web link and I will take a quick look. Best of Luck, Mike From the Trenches to the Towers Marketing

Generally speaking - having access to more capital is a good thing - particularly when you aren't hemorrhaging equity to get access. Have you talked to the bank about closing on your "need" amount, and having them convert the remainder into a line of credit? Beyond that - this really comes down to a few loan terms, and some math. How does it impact the payment? Are you comfortable with the payment on the higher amount? How does it change your break even point at the cash flow level? Are there prepayment - early payment penalties? If so, are they worth the additional capital in the event you don't utilize it and want to pay it down? How is the loan interest calculated? Is it simple interest or amortized? In the case that its simple interest, you'll pay that interest regardless, because its rolled into the loan from the start. In any event - best of luck with the upcoming launch and solving the marketing challenge! Happy to help you dig into that further! Ryan Rutan

1. Check angel.co and other sites for investors who align with your values, type of business, sector etc. 2. See if you have mutual friends on LinkedIn and if so ask for introductions 3. If not then send a brief email with a one page pitch (I can help you formulate these) 4. Follow up with a phone call if you can get hold of their number

Hi! Since you are good with an .mp3 and don't need a WAV file, I'd highly recommend using a free conference call service to record and download your audio. I like FreeConferenceCall.com, but my vendor of choice is FreeConferenceUSA.com for four reasons: first, no fees or ads whatsoever. Second, you can choose your own conference IDs, which I love, as you can use a vanity number (mine is AUDIO). Third, after you choose your conference ID and host PIN, you can use your conference calling number anytime--no reservations or bookings needed. Instant conference calls any time you need one on the fly. Fourth, you can record audio with no limit to the length at no charge, and you can instantly download an .mp3 file of the recording when you're done. For your purposes, dial in as host and then dial in as a participant from a different phone, and leave the second phone on mute while you record your audio. Then end the conference call and hang up. That's all it takes. If there's anything I can help with, please don't hesitate to ask. Best of luck, Jennifer Wenzel Owner, You Sound Great! http://www.YouSoundGreat.com

aaah. I know your struggles. I have a dating app :) At first we would get flagged and it was profoundly frustrating. What we did after was strictly a content marketing strategy with banner ads to download the application in each post and started seeing subscribers and downloads. Have you tried mobile banner ads on targeted apps? Works like a charm.

First, congrats on getting to MVP stage! Second, since you have a minimum viable product - what you need at the moment isn't investors or cofounders - it's users! I'll strongly urge you to spend your time getting your product in front of your target users, and gathering feedback diligently. Validating your MVP with users will be a requisite step in attracting investor attention - rare is the startup that can raise funds without some user level traction, even rarer still is the startup that nails its product without user feedback and sails happily to market. Gain some momentum and some learnings by getting your product into the hands of your users, your need for funding may be eliminated, or change drastically as you start to steer based on real market conditions and not intuition.

Just a thought from someone currently working on marketing his own firm online: Ideally, your existing customers would be so happy with your product, that they would write about you in those forums. Could you help them do that, or lead their attention to it? Or - if you think that is unethical - could you respectfully recommend your own product in the forums? Alternatively, you could just participate in the discussions and add value like that. You could learn about how your competitors work from their customers perspective, and get new ideas for your own product from the interaction. That way, you would get both visibility and ideas for product development. Good luck with your branding! Feel free to set up a call if you want to discuss the idea more in depth. Best regards Kenneth

It would be helpful to know the sector. I would try and start hyper local. That way you can easily and quickly get deals with small local businesses. You can then grow to small chains and then larger chains for a wider coverage. Small local business are in my experience very up for these kinds of programmes which might drive more sales or footfall. If you're looking at bigger corps or online brands then you should start with reselling an existing affiliate programme e.g affilinet in Europe. Happy to give more specific advice on a call.

Start of by using a site like udemy (https://www.udemy.com), they are a platform for creating online courses and handle payments for you. They may have some users who are in your sector. It sounds like finding 'customers' is your main issue. There is no panacea here, the approach you've taken so far is largely correct, here are some more ideas: 1. How about going direct to large construction companies (an industry you know) and offering them discounts for training their staff? 2. Reaching out to your own contacts to try and find more 3. Start a mailing list giving tips to these people and up-sell 4. The things you are already doing are good, blogging, social media etc. I would add creating meetup groups for engineers (and other target market). 5. Starting local is good idea, at least once you validate a customer acquisition model in the local area, you have something you can role out more widely.

I have used PR agencies and other third party services for my startups in the past. In my experience there is nothing like the founder getting in touch with a journalist directly and 'selling' their product/service with their own passion. PRWeb has done little for me in the past Pitch Pigeon is nothing more than a quick way of emailing a wide variety of blogs, who may be wrong for your product and the email might not get to the right person. It's to scatter gun. This is what I would do: 1. make sure you have a story people can write about, a launch is usually not enough, some types of sites are interested in close fundraising (like tech crunch). 2. ensure you have the story down as easy to digest bullet points, as well as a standard press release (in case they ask for it) and a press pack. 3. make a list of all the publications / websites you want to feature in 4. find out the names and email addresses, twitter handles of each of the relevant journalists (look for people who have written about competitors or similar products) 5. If possible get the phone number of the journalist. 6. In my experience NOTHING beats calling up the journalist yourself, they're far more likely to listen to you if you call them than if you email/tweet them 7. See if you have any mutual contacts on LinkedIn or other networks, if so get introductions. 8. Otherwise, call if you can't call, email and tweet. Happy to give you more specific help, ideas and support on a call. BTW, I recently got coverage in two national newspapers for my own startup.

Tough to answer in full without knowing what your service is, but there are plenty of ways to get in front of college students. A few ideas: - Build a blog with useful/interesting content, share on social, build an audience - Incentivize current users to invite their friends through a referral program or a campus rep program - Find sites where college kids spend a lot of time (think: Reddit), or posts relevant to your service and get involved in the conversation - Are there on-campus clubs or groups that would find your service particularly useful? Try reaching out to see if they'd be willing to give it a try Let me know if you want to hop on a call & discuss more ideas.

Just do it! No, seriously, I'd not recommend to talk to someone, because it basically is more a thing of getting to know the interface and the quirks of doing x and y. I'd neither advise someone to start using a 3rd party if you do have someone who can invest a bit time to learn the platform. However, if serious scaling is a close requirement, then you're forced to either get an in-house team or outsource it. I usually reach <.5$ CPA and I also usually have best experiences with testing myriad of AD sets. Keep in your mind, always testing: copy: tone, audience keywords, actionable keywords etc. image: emotional triggers, quality, visual objects etc. target audience: try to refine your scope to your buying persona, not your marketing persona Here are some resources to begin with and set you up on a good track. This is comprehensive enough to introduce you to most mechanics: https://adespresso.com/academy/guides/facebook-ads-optimization/ This is a short list of what to optimize for beginners: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/optimize-your-facebook-ads/ If you do not yet know what you want to achieve with the ADs (brand-awareness, retargeting, CTR, other actions or conversion types), this post is listing most types and its use: http://www.jonloomer.com/2015/05/05/facebook-ads-bidding/

Congratulations - you're in a very enviable position compared to many startups - you already have an audience. I would recommend that you open a dialog with your readers - it doesn't have to be obvious (it can be), but you should include them in the decision, and find out what they want. You could take a direct approach and poll them. That might seem a bit uncomfortable, but if you believe in the value of what you'll offer them - and give them a say in that offering, it shouldn't. You could also take an "offers" approach - where you test a few limited quantity, limited time offers (via email, banner, inline, etc) - this allows you to test the waters with multiple products before committing to a consistent offering. You can test products (physical, digital), services, affiliate offerings, and the list goes on. What to offer is a hard question to answer without more details - but suffice it to say you should look at what has performed historically among the ads on your site - as that will give you insight on what has captured their interest in the past. Something very important to remember - you've built this based on the value you add via the blog - don't stop doing that. I've seen more than one blog make a commercial attempt - and in doing so stop or greatly reduce their content after getting excited about initial conversions. Once they'd hit their entire initial population of users with product marketing, things slowed down, and then they had to play catchup on the content front to regain traffic.

I'd venture that if you have to ask such a generic question about how to start a startup, you're probably not well equipped to do so. My suggestions are as follows: 1. do 3-6 months interning with a small very early stage startup 2. find someone else to execute your idea whilst retaining a % equity 3. look to find co-founders who can execute the idea, stay involved but focus on your skill set (if it's relevant)

Hi there, Congratulations on your scholarship! I am both a startup adviser and college professor. My advice is based on my experience in the US, so please bear that in mind. Typically a personal statement is a combination of resume, aspirations and suitability. In that the school wishes to see your achievements, life experiences, goals, abilities and how all those make you a great candidate for their school. Most schools like to see your connectedness to their history and culture, and want to be satisfied that you will both gain from their learning and add to the institution. I am happy to get on a call with you to discuss how your startup experience and mindset can be leveraged for this as well as learn more about why you want a law degree in the first place. Look toward to speaking with you! Best, Arjun

Try linkedin.

Being both a Consultant to Startups and an Educator to young people like yourself, I commend you first on getting international experiences of any kind. And it's great you have a good business idea! Here's the beauty of applying to those companies - you can always say no or not pursue the job. And if you're not hired, that's the end of that anyway! Better to have an offer first before you think of this as a 'choice'. As for someone working on your idea - odds are someone already is even if not publicly known. Let's go with that assumption. Remember that being first to market isn't important anymore (remember Ask Jeeves? Google it.) Short answer: apply for the job(s) and simultaneously try to put a team and execution plan. See which opportunity takes root. Talk with me more, as I love working with students and young grads! Best of luck, Arjun

Working in consulting I can certainly see your dilemma. We have often thought about billing like that, but ehrn we have compared our fee to the size of the clients business, the clients do not receive it very well. (Close to "Mind your own business!" to put it mildly). By billing by the hour you stay on your own side of the fence and can motivate your costs, but you do not get a part of the value you create. I have seen it presented by one consultant, and he ties his fee to the performance of the business (increase in revenue, bottom line) after he has been involved. But he is a big shot strategic consultant working strictly with coaching top management directly. On that level it could make sense, as your impact can be more directly measured. I would consider one of the following options: - If your impact can be very directly measured - f.ex. If you are involved in the launch of a new product, business area or similar - it could make sense for both you and the client as you can measure f.ex. revenue generated - Try to package your deliveries into products or components, as they are more scalable and easier to charge by user, revenue or cash flow through your delivery. It can be hard in a lot of traditional consulting deliverables, but try to be creative about it. Software licenses have been priced like that for years. That way you do not have to justify the time you spend, so it is easier to charge the margin you are looking for. - If you have no doubt about your value creation, go all in! No cure, no pay - if the value is not created, you do not get any money. Significant downside, but also upside. Again, you need to be able to measure your success correctly. The good thing is, that you can experiment with this approach without harming your other business, as I assume you work with your clients individually. Good luck!

Regardless of your launch date - keep calm. Having a competitor or twenty is all but a certainty in our new business environment. It has never been easier to discover a problem, validate a solution, build a product and reach customers. But that goes for everyone. I'd urge you to consider a few questions: 1. Competitive Intelligence: If this competitor's offering is very similar to yours - what can you take away from a year (nearly) of their operations? Can you use this intel to modify your own product or approach? What have they learned in a year that you can use as a shortcut? Have they shown success in a particular vertical? If so, can you also focus there? This isn't an exhaustive list of questions on this topic - just pointing out that there is likely a silver lining to this cloud of competition. 2. Product The question of "is this ready to release?" "should I do it now, or later", "if later, how much later, when is the right time to launch" is one I field more than once a week. My opinion always skews to the "as close to now as practical." Watching founders struggle over knowing exactly when to launch as if it's a ribbon cutting ceremony for a bridge is painful for me. There is always a minimum level of development, engineering or design required to get your product into the market - but it is usually well below the perceptions of the founder. Take a minute to step back and ask yourself what will happen between now and whatever arbitrary time period you've determined is "ready". What features will you be adding? Do they matter to your users? If you said yes, how do you know - did you ask users? A lot of them? If not - you may be adding bloat before you even launch, or worse, doing what I call "building a better Yeti trap". Make sure your efforts are driven by the actual, and not perceived, assumed, or gut intuitions about what they need. Conclusion A competitive entrant is always a bit unnerving - but remember that being first to market isn't the race you need to win - that's just the start. Turn this into an advantage by drafting off their momentum. Chances are, your product is ready for some level of use right now, and that users will derive some benefit from it, and that you'll learn a lot from their usage. So, for my 2 cents, I'll borrow from my stiff upper lipped ancestors from across the pond - and suggest that you "Keep Calm, AND Launch Now" Cheers, Ryan Rutan

I have had a lot of experience of being mentored and mentoring. I think you should separate the search for a mentor from the search for an investor. A mentor should be a disinterested guide to life and business. An investor is going to look at you and your business as a way of buying a retirement condo! They want different things. A mentor wants to feel valued, to feel that they are helping to build something of value, to feel appreciated. You find such a person by looking for people whose expertise you think is useful (in Meetups, or conferences, or via LinkedIn) and politely approaching them to ask their advice. You will need to talk to a lot of people this way. Once you find someone with whom you "click" then you can see if the relationship develops from there. Investors are a whole different ball game. They want to see evidence of competence, capital, talent, cashflow forecasts. They don't want to hear that you are struggling, that you have dilemmas, that you need advice. Don't mix the two! Feel free to ask me more :-)

Do those prospects come from an opt-in process? Are they aware that your brand obtained their data? If not, than you are cold-calling them and no matter who it is, we humans do not like to receive cold-calls, right. Though, you are in a premium market, thus you are in the market to put in a lot of effort to warm them up or to get in front of your leads. In your case, you already have their names and mail addresses. I'd get those mail addresses into gmail and use discoverly to receive their social media accounts. Discoverly is a chrome plugin that will automatically retrieve the mail addresses linked social media accounts, if there are some. http://discover.ly/ Armed with those you can do further research and look if they have shared interest or even know eachother with followerwonk.com or buzzsumo.com. You can use this data to prioritize your list as you already have a positive WOM signal if they know each other and only one becomes your customer. I'd advise to create a spreadsheet to keep track of your research. I'd consider to think about an outreach method with your facebook channel as your prospects can immediately associate your account with your business giving you higher trust-value than a faceless cold-call and especially if they can see your work without any friction and low mental effort - just a click away. You may even gain insights to their actual consumption patterns, e.g. you might see someone publishing an event that is related to your business and they are going to - thus you could approach them on spot. You could also gain additional insights about lead quality with realizing at what stage of their "marriage preparation" they are. With this you can at least weed out the non-qualified leads, those that are just "interested" but far from making an elaborate purchasing decision. There is so much you could do with that data,but even if all of these seem out of your willingness,take this advice cold-mailing > cold-calls. Hope that helped a bit ;) -Andi

Hard to say with no information, but... I would always suggest starting with the community your customers belong to. 1. Try and get relevant music blogs writing about your app. 2. Look for tweeters who are big influencers of your potential customers and see if you can get them interested in tweeting 3. Try creating some incentive for people to share the app with their friends / peers 4. Write your own content for your website or a blog, good quality content is what google looks for these days 5. Decide based on your markets demographics what other networks are good to establish a following on and create useful content there, e.g. instagram