You should try posting this on HARO http://www.helpareporter.com

It's great that this employee has been transparent about the fact another company wants him. The problem is that this employee is ambivalent about his connection to your Company. Really, under 100 employees at least, this is unacceptable. I would first reflect on why you think he's looking elsewhere. Then, I'd ask him that, admitting that you have failed to create an environment in which he has stayed engaged and motivated on what he's working on. If his answers seem reasonable and you can commit to making the changes necessary, then you won't need an employment contract, he'll stay on his own desire, because you listened to him and improved his situation. If his requests seem unreasonable or you know you won't be able to make those changes, fire him *today.* This situation can contaminate your entire company quickly. Yes, swapping someone out will always be a bit of a setback, but you want *everyone* on your team, feeling motivated and excited by what they're doing. It sounds like you're making your decision out of fear (having to find and hire another engineer) versus what's best for the Company, long term. Happy to talk to you in a call. Problems like this are within the sweet spot of my skills and passion.

I don't even know how to answer this. Do you know what the difference between McDonalds and the local burger joint that is filing for bankruptcy is? It's marketing. McDonalds is worth billions of dollars not because of the quality of their food, but because of their marketing. Marketing is not an expense. A janitor is an expense. Your computer is an expense. Marketing is an INVESTMENT. Would you shop around for the cheapest heart surgeon? Of course not. Because you would likely end up dead. Why, then, do you shop around for a marketing expert? Are you ok with your company going bankrupt? Is that worth the small savings to you? No. Of course not. Hire someone who is good at marketing. Hire someone who knows what they are doing. Buy yourself a Lamborghini with your profit the first quarter. Get a beach house in hawaii. Grab a yacht. Or, try to find your business the cheapest heart surgeon you can and then spend the next five years wondering why such a solid business idea failed in the first 6 months. I'm passionate about this exact topic because all those statistics you read about "70% of businesses failing in two years" are solely because of horrible marketing.

It's never too late to develop your first app. The most successful companies/apps are started by people with unique perspectives targeting like minded customers. As a 41 year old, you certainly have insights and perspectives that others do not. Are you looking to develop the app, yourself, or are you considering bringing in a developer? Either route is possible, but the latter is much more time effective. There are plenty of programs designed to pair visionaries (like you) with technically minded people (developers). Some programs are even free or offer development a reduced rate. You are off to the right start by posting on Clarity. I would strongly recommend having a conversation with mentors on this site or in local networking groups. If you would like to talk about getting off to the right start, I would love to help. Best of luck and keep hustling!

Some questions you'll want to answer before moving ahead: How strongly do you believe this idea can become a successful product? Why do you think they approached you? How comfortable do you feel running a company owned by someone else? What happened in your previous CEO role? What confidence level do you have in the founders? I personally wouldn't take on such a role, because there's no way I would ever run a company I didn't own. Too much blood, sweat and tears need to be put in for the return of a salaried payoff. I know you're asking about equity but are they even open to giving you some? Around 20% is the minimum, one-third feels right. They're never going to give you more unless they are crazy or totally inexperienced. And they are probably going to want to keep some aside for the CTO. You do not want a failure under your belt so make sure this is a winner before you consider taking it on. The fact that they don't have a viable product with customers already sold to concerns me greatly.

First and foremost you need to look at all ways to fund your start-up not just outside investment. How far can you bootstrap your start-up and self fund? Are their ways to get your first clients to fund development for in return for free life-time use etc. If this is not possible then you move through the different avenues of funding - Owner funding (how much can you put in - Outside investor look favorably on an owner having skin in the game), friends and family, angel investor, VC etc. I did not put crowd funding within the list as I would consider that more friends and family just organized through a kickstarter type site. The second thing to consider a compelling story on how the funding will be deployed to grow the company and to what level. From David Rose's book on angel investing; a typical angel will be looking for 25% IRR for their entire portfolio (Or in simple terms a 3.8x return on their investment on a 6 year hold period). In a portfolio of 10 companies 5 will fail on average, 2 will return 1x, 2 will return 3x which means that the final one will need to return 30x to make the angel's desired return. If that is the case any of the 10 need the POTENTIAL to make 30x return. How and to what degree can you offer returns for your potential investor.

Don't Outsource. Period. While there are big drawbacks with outsourcing related to building internal expertise the real reason I would never outsource at your stage is the need for speed and flexibility. Per your description, you are an early stage start-up with a MVP that is gathering data. Congratulations as that is a big accomplishment! However, you inevitably have a ton to learn about what your prospective customers need most and what customers deserve your attention most. The means you will be tweaking your product constantly for the foreseeable future and having to submit ideas to an outsourced team, make sure they understand what you want, wait for the new feature to be scheduled, etc is just too slow and too expensive. You should have your developers literally sitting next to you and (if you have one besides yourself) your product person so you can quickly and constantly share information. Good luck! You are in for a fun ride...

Not necessarily, if your app can potentially serve different markets with different demographics, it may be beneficial to market to each market individually. Since app interface often serves as a marketing tool, it is important that it resonates with its target audience. This means having a different interface for the same set of functionalities depending on your audience may be prudent. On the contrary, if you are simply trying to create variations of the app for a single market by short-cutting user testing and hoping that one of the interfaces will generate more interest, you are then over-saturating the market and may actually hurt yourself by creating unnecessary confusion for your users. I would suggest looking into what other apps your target audience is using and working off that to create a single user experience which would resonate with them. My name is Michael and I am an Entrepreneur, Adviser and Innovator in a Small Business and Technical Solutions arena. I'd be happy to offer you additional assistance if you are interested.

Having done over 35 different financing rounds over 7 companies I've built in Silicon Valley - you should be giving up 15%-25% dilution in each round with a plan to never raise beyond a Series-C. Investors get equity for money invested, don't start doing "special deals" or it could poison the well for future investors. If you want to "slightly" sweeten it for a truly early investor , then put them on your advisory board for 1/4 a point equity ( vesting over 2 years). Then they have to deliver some value for that equity. -MD

With an upfront of $10-15k you are in the 'sales range'. Companies won't part with that money without a few conference calls and whether it's you or a team someone needs to hold their hand to get that sale. CAC is a lot easier to gauge on consumer products because they can be sold on an advertisement. But you can't sell airplanes on adwords, as they say. So assuming you will be using a sales team to close this sale, the real question become cost per lead. And that is a 'how long is a piece of string' question. But don't worry. Industry averages won't really help you anyways for two reasons. 1. Consider the fact that the average human has one testicle and one breast. Forecast around the average and you'll be no better off than guessing 2. CAC will rise to match LTV over time. There were these guys selling sugar water at a ridiculous margin called Coca Cola until these other guys started selling their own. Now instead of making gobs of cash on each can, they are duking it out with some of the most expensive advertising in the world. What I would do instead is test a proxy. You know your market, you know your message, and even if you have the most elaborate campaign out there you will be able to develop a proxy for it using plain old images and copy. Test it small scale and you'll have a MUCH closer approximation for what a lead will actually cost than any industry average. You can look at your own historical close rates and divide your CPL by that for an effective CAC. Hope this helps. Give me a shout if you have any questions.

Your interpretation of Facebook's ad platform is pretty accurate and it may not be the best fit for your purposes. This may not be the answer you're looking for, but I don't feel that traditional FB and Twitter ads offer the quality or quantity of leads you are looking for. Given that you are hyper focused on location, you want to target groups / events / organizations in your area. You are targeting small business owners so you may want to target professional networks like LinkedIn. Posting into local groups or running ads should be more successful than FB and Twitter. You are targeting business minded people while they are on a business minded network. I'm sure you are targeting ad networks because they are automated and light touch. But you may want to look at listing on websites like https://www.sharedesk.net/. Lastly, there's always a good old fashioned Craigslist post! :) If you would like to talk more about your options, feel free to give me a call. Best of luck!

Good question. I wouldn't be worried about litigation. Your (normal) worst case might be penalties from the OTA, a difficult ongoing relationship with their Market Manager and perhaps listing removals. All independents can find ways to reward their most loyal clientele, without market visibility. Happy to discuss this briefly over a call to share the tricks.

Top 2 tactics: Existing Users and Industry Influencers. First, leverage the existing user base. Incent referrals with $5 for every new free user they get to sign up and start using PT Engine for a new domain. Second, reach influencers and offer them the same deal when they tweet / post to / email their audiences. Make the offer a 60 day free trial instead of the standard 30 day so that they are providing value to the people they refer as well. This is critical - don't make them feel sleazy, make them feel (and look) like heroes to the connections they share PT Engine with. That's $9k to get 1800 users, leaving you $1k for graphics, referral tracking system, administrative costs. I assume the $10k budget does not include your time - if it does you'll have to reduce the incentive, which will definitely make it less appealing. If you want to dive deep on reaching influencers, schedule a call with me at www.clarity.fm/ryandraving

I see many great ideas here and strongly agree Facebook is a great avenue. Outside of all the "Online" answers I'd also suggest forming partnerships with other businesses in your local market that work with a similar audience. Do an open-house together, referral agreement or other simple partnership type of arrangements. I'd also suggest working with local realtors, PTA Moms and get active in the community events. These all helped me just as much locally as online advertising (if not more). Good Luck!

There are a lot of players in this market. Many that integrate with all the major CRMs and append and clean data. I would say I get at least 1 email a day from a data vendor and I have been on countless demos and calls and because my client is so niche they never have more 5-10 records even viable for me. I am sure for larger companies with broader markets this works well. They all tend to have very aggressive sales outreach. I have one company that has called me every 3 months for the past 2 years. At this point hes basically just asking about my health and the weather :)

First of all, what you have is a provisional patent **application**. For now, the provisional patent application is not publicly available. This can be a big advantage to you. You can use this time to improve your invention and file additional provisional applications. If you don't plan on making/practicing the invention yourself, you should make sure to try to think of everything possible regarding how that invention can be improved. This would (hopefully) come naturally to a practicing inventor. When you file your non-provisional application, your disclosure will be made public ("published") 18 months from the filing of the non-provisional. While your applications are not publicly available, I suggest waiting until you file your non-provisional application(s) to talk to others. Quite often, provisional applications do not have the detail or the scope that the non-provisional will have -- due to the time spent on getting drawings accurate and making sure everything is included in your non-provisional applications. It is best to have a complete application before talking to practicing companies. Sophisticated companies will take advantage of information not disclosed in your provisional application to file their own patent applications. If your applications are not publicly available (or even they are published), you should sign confidentiality agreements (non-disclosure agreements) with anyone you talk to about licensing or buying your invention. Keeping track of who you talked to with confidentiality agreements can be the basis for "notice" of the invention by an infringer -- when they eventually steal your invention. You can sell your idea anytime, but a provisional application is worth a lot less than a non-provisional application which is worth less than an allowed application or issued patent. Provisional applications are generally not as complete as they could be -- and require additional time and finesse to complete the non-provisional application. In terms of appearances, if you are not willing to put in the money to file the non-provisional application, the invention is likely not worth that much money. Companies as well as non-practicing entities may look at provisional applications, but not for long, and will not give you the kind of money that you may get from selling a fully examined patent. Of course, it depends on how good your invention is.

Have you tried attending local UX networking events and rubbing elbows? Websites like meetup.com are a good place to identify these events. Best of luck!

The income should be reported by the individual or business that provided the service and earned the income. If the 1099 is in your name, you could ask the issuing Company to change to the S-Corp if that is who earned the income. In the future, have a written agreement between your S-Corp and the Company you are providing service. Also, provide them with a Form W9, so they know where to report the 1099 income at year end.

Could it be called Sketchy? Yes. Does everyone do it in every industry to get insider info on competitor pricing and presentation.... Pretty much. With that said if any do present as people you would like to work with, then for sure let them know what you were doing, that they made the cut, and that you would be honored to work with them.

Start by getting a doctor to 'sponsor' you - to recommend it to their patients. Give them a few for free so their patients can try it out - which will get the physician sold on it. Meanwhile, also start reaching out to the right people in the appropriate insurance companies through LinkedIn and via email. You may also want to connect with people who have been in Insurance - like Jeff, Daniel, Craig, or Liran here: https://clarity.fm/search/insurance When you reach out to executives in insurance, keep it personal, and tell them you are looking for their advice. I have a 12 step system to walk you through the sales process once you get a call lined up, but to get you started you could read The Little Red Book of Selling (quick read) or The New Strategic Selling (dense but invaluable). SNAP Selling is good too. Remember, this is all about relationships, so start with personal. InMails recently changed to make it easy for you to keep costs down for outreach. As long as you get a high response rate, your cost of $10 per unanswered InMail will go a long way. If you can't use InMails, try sending samples with testimonials and call them to discuss the day after you expect them to receive it. Use FedEx sign on delivery to increase the chance it gets to them instead of a mail room or secretary.

It is difficult to give you a clear answer without knowing more about your company and product. Are you looking to sell or just want someone to advise you on what/how to do it?

This kind of problems a lot of companies face but obviously there is a solution. Although, it would involve huge amount of patience and dedicated efforts but result is guaranteed. Intensive use of LinkedIn is the best bet instead of focusing on keywords. A lot of people do use LinkedIn but their experience of generating qualified leads is not that great. I suggest you look for LinkedIn expert/Lead Gen Company who can help you to mine qualified leads which can eventually become your customers. I am saying this based on my past experience of working with some of the top MNCs across the globe. Should you need help, feel free to get in touch with me.

Distil Networks is more like a CDN (Content Delivery Network), so every traffic to customers website should pass through Distil server. In other words you have to point your DNS to their CDN (that can potentially bring down your site). They keep analyzing your website through out and if the traffic is found malicious they block. As you asked about competitors, ShieldSquare as a potential alternative, offers following benefits over Distil: Non-intrusive API integration that will not affect your website performance and uptime. Zero False Positives that will ensure that your genuine users are never troubled. I can offer more direction if I know more about your environment. Best Regards, Steven

Before I get to your question, let me give you a tip: always aim settle questions of payment before the work happens. It is ten times easier to agree on a price beforehand, and having done that doesn't stop you from changing it by mutual agreement later. The problem with paying cash is pretty obvious: you don't have a lot of it. The problems with paying equity are subtler. The first one is that early-stage equity is extremely hard to value. A second is that equity transactions require a lot of paperwork. Third is that entrepreneurs tend to value their equity much higher than other people would; if not, they wouldn't be starting the company. And fourth, people like designers are rarely expert in valuing businesses or the customs of of startup equity valuation. In the past, I've both given and received equity compensation, and it's a lot more of a pain than I expected. In the future, what I think I'd try is convertible debt. That is, I'd talk with the designer and agree on a fair-market wage. E.g. 100 hours x $100/hr = $10k. The next time we take investment, the $10k turns into stock at whatever price we agree with our investors, plus a discount because he was in before the investors. Note, though, that this will increase your legal costs and your deal complexity, so I'd personally only do this for a pretty significant amount of work. And I'd only do it for somebody I trusted and respected enough to have them around for the life of my business.

There are different ways that you can make a profit from a Facebook group. The key is to understand your audience and know what type of services/products they would be interested in. You can charge businesses or companies that are looking to target that specific audience a flat fee and post their products/services on their behalf. You can add affiliate links for products or services that are relevant to your audience and earn commissions on the sales/leads generated from those links. You can sell advertising on a CPC basis. Etc...