I have 2 youtube channels and combined I have more than 100M views, my 2nd Channel is growing by 70% month to month and I estimate that this channel by itself will produce 30-50M views per month end of 2016. With that said the single most important stat you should be on the lookout is engagement rate. Try to have videos that have a high engagement rate, preferably anything that is above 50%, if you want further details and other techniques happy to have a call

You should always give someone what they deserve. Never more and never less. Most people don't know how to do this so they guess. They try to predict the future or they look for rules of thumb or they try other ways of guessing. Kind of like you are doing now. The best way to determine this is to consider one person's risk relative to others. When someone contributes to a startup company and doesn't get paid they are accepting risk. The value of that risk is equal to the fair market value of the contribution they made. For instance, if you could earn $100,000 a year doing whatever it is that you do and you do it for a startup without getting paid you are, in effect, risking $100,000 a year. Taking risk in a startup company is essentially betting on the future outcome of the startup. If you and I bet $10 on the same hand of Blackjack we are each betting the same amount and, therefore, each deserve exactly half the winnings (if any). So, the right way to split equity in a startup company is to keep track of what's been contributed, then perform this simple formula: Individual Ownership (%) = Individual Risk/Cumulative Risk The model changes over time as more contributions are made. Each day a person contribute their stake would change. This means that at any given time, no matter what changes, who joins or who leaves. Everyone always has exactly the ownership they deserve to have. Unlike traditional models that require us to predict the future, the relative risk model is based on easily observable values in the market. Everything has a fair market value. So, the answer to your question is simple. Add up the risk he has taken and divided it by all the risk taken by everyone (including you). Each person's share can be calculated this way and the total will always equal 100%. On day one, before he's done anything, his ownership will be 0%. As it should be. Over time, as he risks, his % will change based on relative risk. This is a perfect, unambiguous formula. Every other equity model lays the foundation for disputes later on. Only a relative risk model will give you the fair answer. I've written a book on this topic, called Slicing Pie, you may have a copy if you contact me through Clarity.fm or SlicingPie.com.

I would recommend that you start attending industry trade shows in your area and/or country. These are excellent platforms to connect and network. I have organized and attended over 300 trade shows and events over the last 20 years, and suppliers and manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors are at these events. Additional sources are with export offices, government entities, and other multipliers. There are also specific focus groups in the furniture business, as well as groups that you can connect with. Let me know if you want to discuss this further in a call. Good luck.

I'm not familiar with the specifics of iOS's interruption of other apps when calls come in, so there may be a simpler solution somewhere in the iOS device API. An end-around solution might be to keep the call alive on a central server that acts as an intermediate switchboard (a third caller, sort of), so that even if one user disconnects, the call itself is still live. Then the app could attempt to rejoin the call once the interruption has passed. (Or, if rejoining is impossible, reinitiate the call.) This makes several assumptions, so you'll need to dig around in the API documentation for both iOS and Twilio. However, assuming there's not an existing solution inside iOS, creating a call controller on an external server should be able to solve (or at least work around) the problem. If you'd like to get a second opinion or a more in-depth review of options, I'd be happy to schedule a short call to review options, and — if necessary — some hands-on work with your code to help you solidify a fix to the problem. Good luck!

Interesting, but very loaded, question. It depends on the industry segments, location of your business and the reach you want to have, as well as your budget. I have organized trade shows all over the world and in over 65 industries. So look at industry, location, country/city, attendee profile, demographics, and some other factors. There are over 10,000 trade shows every year in the USA alone. You need to do some "shrinking" of the reach and take it from there. Let me know if you have specific questions and we can schedule a call. Good luck!

Assuming Twilio allows multiple calls to the same number to happen simultaneously (I've never tested this), you could build a lookup table in your app that stored active calls, then give the user a control to swap between active calls. You could send a push notification to notify the user of additional incoming calls (a vibration) if there's not a way to play a sound or otherwise notify the user through the active Twilio call. (There should be a way to send an audio notification, though.) This is all untested, so I can't speak to whether or not Twilio can/will support that setup, but — assuming multiple calls are allowed through their service — it should be possible using something like that. Good luck!

Kickstarter has indeed a stronger brand and the quality of its projects is generally higher. It seems Indiegogo is always the fallback plan. However, Indiegogo has a few strong points: * It is very strong in internationalization. It supports many more currencies, languages and countries than Kickstarter. Kickstarter seems happy to be present mostly in Anglo-saxon countries * Indiegogo is very strong in community (non-profit causes) and also in film projects. Additionally it has many health tech projects and finance projects that Kickstarter has not. When was last time that you saw an innovative finance project on Kickstarter? * Indiegogo is growing faster than Kickstarter. Lately, Kickstarter has announced they will switch to a non-profit status and it's been a while they haven't announced new expansion while Indiegogo has fresh investment $$ and has announced new products * Indiegogo has a staff that can help entrepreneurs and creatives. They will give you support before you launch and can give you advice to raise more. Kickstarter has very little support - apart from its shiny interface and automated interface. At the end of the day, what matters is selecting the best platform that is best for your project. Conduct due diligence and see where the best performing projects are in your industry.

Why a coach? You'll probably have an easier time finding a hire or someone outside to help. There's no shame in bringing on skills in another person instead of building them in yourself. If a venture backed startup founder told you that they've lost tens of thousands in revenue from server downtime, would you recommend that they hire a coach and learn it themselves? It would likely be cheaper, faster and more effective to get an outside IT service provider, and at some point it would make sense to build a team internally. Maintaining a competitive skill set is tough enough in one discipline. There is a big opportunity cost to trying to chase two.

Obviously that wouldn't hurt, and there are likely benefits to doing so. The thing to consider is will doing this save you time and make you a better leader or will it take time away from leading, growing and building a vision for the company? Only you can answer that. Being in a technical industry myself there is no way that I can know as much as my team knows. They are the ones in the trenches and understand the details better than I ever could. But I still need to have an overall grasp and understanding of how each of their roles applies to the projects and coordinate how they work together to get the job done. I could spend more time digging into the details, but ultimately that would take my time away from leading the company.

Message the expert directly and make the request. Many of us are available pre-call to address this kind of issue. If they're pressed for time, they'll let you know and you can reschedule the call. Otherwise, they'll just keep on the call until you've answered all your questions. The calls do not get cut off if they go over the accepted timeframe.

Clarity is a great platform for people to connect with Experts. If you feel that you'd be able to offer expert opinion, or can add valuable insight to someone seeking information, become an expert here.

check out https://www.getambassador.com/

Social media is probably the best channel available, with reasonable returns. However, "free" may be a false economy, as it takes a lot of time/effort to do it effectively. Pick 1 or 2 relevant social media platforms (Twitter & Facebook?) and put your effort there. A lot depends on who your target market is, and what level of reach you need. E.g., if you need to a very specific set of users/customers, then make a list of your targets and try and reach out to the individuals on social media. If you have a wider set of users/customers, reach out to specific hashtags/keywords. Alternatively, put some money towards Google AdWords, LinkedIn ads or Facebook ads. Go for the "long tail" of keywords, which should be fairly cheap. Let me know if you need more detail around this.

You're definitely going the wrong direction. That's my opinion. But I'm right, and here's why: Your domain strategy is hyper-extended. You've got 4 domains in .CO.UK – hopefully 8 counting .UK rights. That's all well and good for a British audience. But you deliver work online; so why not appeal to a global audience? Here in the USA, ccTLDs (a.k.a. country codes) are not recognized. Your business will look strange and be misremembered as .COM. That means your marketing will be inefficient; you'll leak traffic to Google, parked PPC pages, or even competitors who develop sites with the same brand name(s) in the same niche! Meanwhile you'll pay extra in ongoing advertising costs to compensate. And you don't own the 4 corresponding .COM domains. I checked. They're owned by a pair of people / companies – both known to me already. To acquire these 4 matching domains, you'd need to spend about $10,000. That's based on the typical list prices these guys set, which you can verify, I'm sure. On top of this, you'd face brand protection issues for at least 4 distinct names. That obligates you to further domain purchases or risks ... in proportion to the number of brand names you're attempting to operate. After all, WantApp is confusingly similar to WantApps; and WantWebsite resembles WantAWebsite. And let's not forget .DESIGN and .WEBSITE, which means your WantDesign.co.uk is competing against both WantDesign.com and Want.Design, while your WantWebsite.co.uk has to shout extra-loud to be heard above WantWebsite.com and Want.Website. Things get complicated fast! You'd eventually face competitors with these names unless you bought them all. You might even get embroiled in trademark disputes, which are no fun. For that amount of money ($10k upwards), you can buy a really great domain name and consolidate all your efforts on a single brand name with worldwide appeal and a single website. In the long run, going the way you're going, you will pay thousands of pounds one way or another. Maybe you won't buy those other domains, but you will put extra cash, sweat, and time into marketing. You'd probably lose a few customers over the years as well, since they'd go somewhere other than your site and find other people to hire. I also have concerns about branding with multiple domains, managing multiple websites, or asking customers to bounce around between several sites. But there's no space to go into that. The domain issues already sank your battleship, I'm afraid. If you'd like help selecting a single unified brand name for all your services – which is what I recommend – let's talk. Naming and domain procurement are both areas I specialize in.

Hmm. We'd have to see how you're emails are worded. They might feel extremely spammy. I'd reach out to Donnie Cooper on here. He's an expert in email drip campaigns.

Hello -- I've hired and grown both field sales representatives and inside reps for the last decade. I think the answer to this question depends on how your deals are currently won. If your deals are currently won over screen share or phone, it makes sense to hire the person on the west coast, and have them work directly in your office. Monitoring activity and understanding how deals move through the funnel, and fall out of the funnel will be easier when someone is in-house. If your deals require that you visit the customer in person, then I'd advocate for hiring them wherever your customer base is located. It seems to me like at 40k, this is an opportunity for an in-office hire. I'm happy to jump on a call to discuss in more detail.

Planning software projects — especially estimating timelines — is a consistent challenge for developers. When I ran an agency, I constantly struggled with my team's ability to hit deadlines until I figured out how to plan more effectively. I've written up my approach here: http://lengstorf.com/effective-project-planning/ The short version is: 1. Make every task a yes/no question. If there's room for interpretation, it's not clear enough. 2. Keep the goals visible and track progress in a central location (somewhere you can both see). 3. Break tasks into single-day efforts whenever possible. So instead of "build home page", it's "A) style navigation; B) create opt-in; C) add testimonials section; etc." — the goal is to create momentum with a daily deadline that can absolutely be completed. It takes a little more effort up front, but it pays dividends in the long run. I used this strategy with my team to decrease our average turnaround times by nearly half, and my consulting clients have used this strategy to similar effect. I'd be happy to help you create a concrete plan using these techniques. Schedule a call or send me a message and we'll get started. Good luck!

Two key issues in your question: (1) when you say "majority are making millions" you're not seeing the hundreds of startups that failed in the same space... (2) if it's such a great idea, you should have traction. CHALLENGE: Adding photos to menus is tricky... Good pics are very expensive, and bad pics will detract from a menu's appeal. I could let a restaurant owner fax me a menu and get it online for around $2 using offshore labor for data entry. But a good photo shoot would cost hundreds or more and require local talent everywhere (or place a large and expensive burden on the restaurant owners). It's also labor-intensive to get thousands of restaurants signed on to something. Are you planning to scrape other sites and spam restaurant owners? Walk door-to-door? Buy a mailing list? If you've been personally soliciting restaurants, that's useful for market research - but obviously can't ever be profitable. You should test a scalable strategy for acquisition. Remember, a menu service that has only 30% (or even 60%) of the restaurants in my neighborhood is pretty much useless. Can you acquire them all, cheaply? Do they even want photos of their food? Only restaurants like McDonald's, Cheesecake Factory, and Chinese take-out do that these days. To earn investment dollars, you'll need to prove: (a) you can execute this concept at scale, on boarding hundreds of restaurants, (b) restaurant owners are signing up, and (c) you're able to gain sufficient traffic to the site for the business to generate ongoing value. RECOMMENDATION: prove yourself in one city, and investors may help you to expand to many. But if you want funding to pay for initial marketing / webdev / photography while you "gain traction", then that would be a wasted effort. Investors need to see scalable proof, and since fund-raising is time-consuming, better to invest your own energy in proving the business first.

I think you have to go with your gut on this one. We've worked with clients to coordinate the use of telemarketing services through UpWork and have had a good experience. But we stuck with native-English speaking freelancers. Most on them were from the US. When they call, ask them to not only explain the service, but also ask them to request an email address where they can send more information. Give the telemarketer a company email address and a pre-set message about your service to email. Or you can do this yourself. If you're simply trying to raise awareness, a phone call is no big deal and would be great. If you're trying to sell, it will be a little tough, and it might be better to simply have them setup a time for you to return the call and close the sale. Whenever you're having to talk and explain a service over the phone, it's important to have a firm grasp on the language and vernacular phrases. Look into some of the telemarketers from outside the US who list themselves as expert English speakers and setup a time to talk with them over the phone to gauge their phone skills and grasp of the language.

I think I get where you are going with this. Your company buys products/merchandise from people looking to sell that merchandise. Example: Amy has a printer and she is looking to sell her printer. She does not know where to sell her printer so she Google's, "Where can I sell a printer" and you want your landing page to surface specifically for that product. This is an excellent growth tactic and one that can be extremely effective. First, I would start by creating a general template for this set of pages including everything except that which would be specific to a specific category. Then I would go down a level and think about how you could speak specifically to each category. Example: Instead of saying something general like, "XYZMarketplace has bought 100,000 products this year" I would be targeted on exactly what they originally searched for. So this could be along the lines of, "XYZMarketplace has bought over 1,000 printers this month" or "Sell Your Printer in 5 Minutes". This talks directly to what they are searching for. Often times companies stop there and after a user clicks your CTA (call to action) the user is pushed into the standard onboarding flow. This often leads to a higher drop-off rates during onboarding. I would suggest that you customize your onboarding flow for that specific category. Example: The user that was searching for, "Where can I sell a printer" and landed on your printer landing page liked what you were offering and clicked the CTA of "Sell My Printer Today". Now you may have an onboarding workflow that says, "We are thrilled that you decided to sell your printer on XYZ. What type of printer do you have?" Then use icons and images, to take them through the decision tree. This does take more work than having just one generalized onboarding process, but it will greatly increase your conversions. The tools I would use to do this is a combination between Unbounce and Optimizely. They both are going to be hugely beneficial. If you are looking for a free alternative, I would suggest Google's little-known option called Google Experiments. This will get you started, however, based on what you are looking for it may not be powerful enough to effectively manage the number of A/B tests and landing pages you would be doing. In regards to spam, it is highly unlikely your pages will be marked as spam as long as your pages contents are considerably different. If you duplicate the product specific landing pages and only replace the instance of the product then you are running a significant risk. If you actually speak to the differences beyond the product name you will not have this problem. I would love to chat with you further about this. Here is my Clarity.fm VIP link for a free call. https://clarity.fm/lipmanb/vip/t

Their phone system works really and simply delivers what is expected. I think having an availability time calendar would be very beneficial so that scheduling matches our availability. Being able to record calls and charge clients an additional fee for that would be great. Also, screen sharing would be good too.

In short yes. In medium term, depends. In your case probably not. Most investors look for viable options that show that you can get real cheap production/sourcing of goods or services offered, actual market reach to capitalize on goods (example could be a stack of POs or preorders, or substantial email requests) and skillful team in place to pull it together. Im an MBA business coach and entrepreneur, I've also invested in a similar startup like the one you mentioned and they failed 2 years into it. Hey lacked one of the 3 I mentioned and just as a bar stool with 3 legs, you need all 3 to have a sustainable business. Savvy investors look for this... They look for your sounded and balanced approach, realistic forecasts, actionable plans, actions to date, financials, team and your leadership... But none the less i think all investors are also driven by their emotions- how good of a pitch man are you? How can you connect them to your product idea? Etc.. Etc... As you can see the more you dig into getting investors but depending on how you present the 3, to the right investor for your idea, the idea might be enough to give you a try. I would suggest to not waste your time pitching and burning bridges until you have a prototype, but I wont! I will instead tell you to go research your area, pitch your idea to valuable people who could help you implement something rough, create a landing page to capture emails, create social accounts and promote the idea there, it's values, etc. garner a community... Then once you have a community of supporters of your "what if" go get yourself a Kickstarter campaign going... And promote it through your community. Ask for support... Get some funding.. Then if that's not enough.. Go look for relevant business individuals who would be interested and could invest. Convince by showing off your community size, campaign support, effort, and your drive to do and maybe then you can get investors without an actual product. :) #unthink

I've done fundraising for two of my own startups, and advised 4 others. The only answer to this question is "now." As soon as you think you have product market fit, you should be getting in touch with seed investors. It takes time for these relationships to develop; and in the startup world, time is always running out. Your pitch may fluctuate and adjust while you're out there shaking hands and building presentations. But don't let that uncertainty stop you from meeting people. You may be tempted to try and perfect your pitch before you start talking to potential investors. But nothing polishes a pitch like repeated failure and feedback. So I'd recommend starting the process as soon as you have a firm enough concept to describe it in a meaningful way. Also, it's important to distinguish the start of a funding "campaign" and the beginning of a "round." Meeting with investors (the campaign) should be continuous activity until you exit. Once you secure your seed round, you immediately go into series A mode, and so on. The reason being that each funding round has longer and longer lead times. Each relationship gets more and more difficult to obtain. Actually issuing shares or convertible debt (the round) should , in most cases, begin only when you have lined up more investors that have said yes than you need to complete the round. Put another way, start collecting checks when you have more commitments to than you need to reach your funding goal. That way, you can use your momentum of receiving funds to motivate investors that are on the fence. The best case scenario is that you oversubscribe your round. But the moral of the story is starting campaigning for investors yesterday. It always takes longer than you want. So the sooner you start, the sooner you get funded.

This is actually kind of a funny question to answer on Clarity. Not sure if you're aware, but we (Startups.co) actually own Clarity, Launchrock, and of course, Zirtual! Zirtual has an amazing product and great people. The company ran into problems around how it managed utilization of folks, which is common among highly staffed businesses. There wasn't anything "broken" with Zirtual as a business, which is why we acquired it. It's a great company, just like Clarity which we also purchased this year. If you have particular questions about the level of service or the company behind it, you can simply ask me directly - wil@startups.co. I can give you any kind of insight that you'd like. But don't worry about the service - we have great people and we're a happy, profitable, growing company.

There are many companies that offer these services as a do it for you. I would recommend you look at a local business vs the services that are offered on line. I am in the LA area and just set up a corporation using the local resource. If they are legit, they will all charge within the same price range. I would look into the LLC vs a CCorp. If you wish to do it yourself, the forms and procedures can be found on the State of California's website. Nothing too complicated, but the process is time consuming.