I want to begin by assuring you I don't want to rain on your parade. Now... Ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is what is critical, and hardly anyone does execution well. NDAs are nice but they won't protect your idea from being ripped off in the medium term at the latest, if it's a winner. Your best protection is that execution thing...people sure like to talk, but they don't like to Do. Do NOT have your prototype made in China. It will take months in shipping back and forth, misunderstandings, finding the right manufacturer, and other difficulties. Do not embroil yourself in that mess. Absolutely you should get a prototype made first. Will it cost you 10-100X what the final version will cost? Of course. Do you need something to show investors, suppliers, channel partners, retail outlets? Yes. All a patent does is protect your idea for awhile from being duplicated in the exact way you are executing it. I can't go make a sticky-note that uses a strip of lightweight glue to hold the paper onto something. 3M has that patent. But I could find another method for holding the paper on, and that would be fine. Worrying about protecting your idea is kind of a waste of time. You should do what you can afford and what makes sense in terms of your time invested to accomplish a level of protection, but don't let this be all-consuming. It's just not worth it. Get out there and make your product and find paths to market. That's what will really pay off. Someone WILL copy your product sooner or later if it's a money-maker. That's why developing great branding is so important: keep the knock-offs in the knock-off category in your buyer's brain, and you as the top quality original.

Putting aside the legal question for the moment, here's a bigger problem I think you will be facing: Of what benefit will users or advertisers have for this service? As I current understand what you are doing, this is asking to be abused on multiple angles. First, it only benefits advertisers if they are getting in front of relevant buyers interested in what they have to offer. So to get clicks from people not actually interested in what they have to offer will only increase advertising costs to reach the same audience. Second, the user is just going to be deluged by offers that they really aren't interested in receiving. This means they will either de-select the company as a page they like or simply ignore the ad and get slightly irate with the irrelevant advertising. Sorry to say, but this system is asking to be abused by click-farms. If you've got potential paying customers, figure out some other type of advertising system that will benefit both the users and advertisers, and see if it works!

I think 13% is good - that's what mine is too. I think the bigger issue is getting more people to your profile page. It doesn't matter how good your page conversion is if you don't send people to it from your website or email marketing efforts. it also depends on your per minute rate.

The first thing you should do (if not done already) is analyze your current traffic. You have to make sure a good percentage of your visitors are actually sticking around to either watch the video or at least enough to look at your other content. If this is not the case, then improving targeting for your ads might be your best bet. It is not just the quantity of the visitors but the quality that makes them worth it. 100,000 visitors that just bounce off immediately after arriving are worth less than 5,000 visitors that actually stay for the intended purpose. A visitor that is on your site for a minute is much more likely to see an affiliate link and/or ad than one that just exits after a few seconds. The next point would be looking at your site performance and formatting. If the site is slow to load, then people are more likely to exit as fast as they came in. Also, if they are there to watch a video clip and all the page is filled with ads everywhere, it does no good to the user experience. Finally, make sure the ads shown on the pages are either relevant to the content in question or relevant to the customer. Good Luck and let me know if you have any questions!

It depend of if they have security settings that their accounts could tagged anonim posts.

I've helped lots of SaaS companies improve their onboarding processes over the years, but I just published my best (high-level) piece on doing this right: http://sixteenventures.com/customer-onboarding The bottom line is (though I suggest reading the entire article) you need to know what success looks like for your customer - what their Desired Outcome is - and then reverse engineer the steps necessary to get there. Going through that process will reveal the steps necessary to get them to that Desired Outcome outside of the product; we're not talking about functional steps within the product yet. Map this out using flow charts, line lists, mind map, white board, etc. The tool isn't important as much as doing this right. Now, once you understand the process required to move them from Step 0 - deciding to take action to reach their desired outcome to Step z - achieving their (at least initial) Desired Outcome, you can start laying out, designing, and building the in-product processes necessary to achieve those success milestones and ultimately, their Desired Outcome. You should then peg your email (or other lifecycle messaging) flow to those success milestones (rather than doing a timed follow-up), where each message is sent like this: "have they done this milestone? yes, then send this message to get them to the next one." Since each user and customer will achieve success on their own cadence, it's best to not have a timed autoresponder sequence but to actually trigger based on milestones reached. The good news is that this is relatively easy to do given the availability of lifecycle messaging services. See this post for more on this topic: http://sixteenventures.com/email-follow-up-sequence Hopefully this helps, but if you want more details or - more importantly - want to figure out how to apply this thinking directly to your situation, request at least a 15-minute call with me.

I actually pre-sold copies of my book in order to pay for the inital setup and printing costs. Here's my suggestion: 1) Create a list of people you'll invite to the raffle 2) Don't just email people, call them to get them excited about the raffle and ask if they'd participate 3) Have a compelling business story or story behind the raffle 4) If the prize can be a holiday gift, that would be ideal since many people need gifts for co-workers, the mailman, and other nonfamily members. Feel free to call me if you'd like to discuss the strategy further.

A lot will depend on your negotiating leverage. Where there's leverage, there's opportunity. But your leverage is going to largely depend on what your license agreement says, and the form of the transaction between Company B and Company C. For instance, if Company C buys Company B's assets (as opposed to shares), and your license agreement includes an assignment clause that does not allow for assignment without your consent, you have a lot of leverage to impose terms because technically they can't transfer the agreement to Company C without your permission. If you'd like, I'd be happy to look at your agreement and let you know my thoughts. Ronan

Crowdfunding is the best option in the present market. It gives you, 1. Early feedback 2. Exposure to more audience 3. VC free innovation / agility To start with, you may find the below useful: http://www.boardofinnovation.com/list-open-innovation-crowdsourcing-examples/ Hope this helps. Thank you, GK http://gk.palem.in/

It depends on the economics of your revenue model but as a general rule, $3.00 is the high point and $1.00 - $1.50 is the target range.

As a seed stage investor (13 deals in the last 12 months) I'm happy to tell you it is easier than ever before to meet seed stage investors. Here are a few ways: 1) conect with founders in your city who have been funded. Ask for their advice. Impress them and let them introduce you to their investor. 2) apply to an accelerator (eg techstars) and nail it on demo day. The audience is filled with seed stage investors. 3) attend an event featuring the seed investors and ask for their advice after the show. Requests for advice are a great way to showcase your venture. 4) kickstart your project. Raise funds and engage early customers. Nothing impresses as much as sales and users. 5) leverage clarity, LinkedIn and product hunt. 6) use the same service providers (eg lawyers, accountants) ask them for an intro. 7) find out where their funds originate from and ask those LPs for an intro. 8) apply to present to your local angel group. If I look at the deals we've done this year. 80 percent come from the channels above. Until then -- bootstrap it.

1. Lucid understanding of the objective behind business plan development 2. Customizing the content plan (skeleton) per objective 3. Adopting planning the business approach than writing a business plan 4. Knowing "How-To" and "What-If" Hope above to be of some help. Looking for anything specific? Feel free to reach out.

Ignore them and stay focused in growing your iOS community while proving out your CAC and engagement and retention numbers. Small, resource-constrained teams need to absolutely *nail* one thing at a time. Stay focused on the feedback from real, existing users not excuses from people who aren't using it.

Micah, I am usually the "biz dev" guy for many startups and founding teams. I have also hired people in this area. One thing that would be helpful to bring up would be to understand where biz dev guys hangout. Generally, the best places to find individuals are within your ecosystems network. The best biz dev guys/gals I have hired have been people that are tenacious and are willing to make strategic business decisions for the benefit of the company. I know your question is fairly large, so if you would like to chat about it, feel free to reach out! Chirag

I have worked with a client with a similar issue. Their competitor was bidding on the brand name of my client. You will have to donate some Adwords spent and create “branded campaign” where you focus on bidding on your client’s business name. Your client should have a high quality score for their brand keywords since their website should but an authority on the brand name. As far as stopping a competitor from bidding on the name the most you can do is send a cease and desist letter and I would only recommend this if the brand name has a registered trademark.

First of all, there is no "one size fits all" attitude in angel investing. I will tell you that the *best* angels will make a snap decision by playing with the product and assessing founder/market fit. At the right valuation, the kinds of angels you really want backing you will invest purely based on a killer early product experience and conviction of founder/market fit. But if you have made your app available in the US app store already, you have made a critical tactical error if your app isn't already trending towards 100,000 installs within the first 30 days of availability. Apps should first launch in a non US, english-speaking store to do early product/market fit work. Your "day one" event in the US app store matters to seed investors and many angel investors. While there are exceptions (most often in SaaS or enterprise mobile models), there are only 4 times to raise funding from seed funds for a mobile start-up stage company: Pre-product: A deck, a market opportunity and a team. Pre-launch: Product fully built but holding launch for funding. This will usually involve a private beta of at least 1000 users or a soft launch in an international store. 30 - 90 days after US launch: Must be at or trending towards 100,000 installs with very strong month-over-month growth. If you miss those windows, the next time to raise is after you pass over 1,000,000 with strong retention and engagement that correlates to your business model and user personas. As a mobile-first entrepreneur and angel investor, I'm happy to talk to you about this in more detail

Many open-source forum software are available (that are easy to use). You can try starting with bbpress (https://bbpress.org/), wordpress. Hope this helps. Thank you, GK http://gk.palem.in/

Simplify. Go explain the tool to a group of kids (I usually use my own) but someone else's will do just as well. Explain the tool to them and take notes. Keep track of points that confuse them and make a point to clarify until its clear. Once you are done compile the notes into a presentation of your choosing or a Youtube short. Then market the heck out of that presentation. At the very least this will give people a basic grasp of the tools benefits. Best of luck!

Go to city hall. There will be a desk for development...what name it is, well, that will change depend on the municipality. Talk to the staff and tell them what you want, and they'll send you to the right place. You want to talk to engineering and development staff and ask them who the best developers are. They will recommend who you should meet, and maybe even introduce you. When you are changing land use designations like this, it is very helpful to be familiar with city staff. The staff are the people who write the reports that go to council. Council depends on those reports for information to help them decide which way to vote. Ideally, you want a developer who is well known at city call, is used to working with staff, and is appreciated for their attitude. Density bonusing can be achieved in exchange for amenities, and if your developer has a history of making these kinds of horse trades with the city, all the better. What you don't want is a partner who gets the staff's backs up, and doesn't know how to get the best bang for their buck out of the development. Six years of city hall experience and in the construction field on my end.

Step 1: Innovate Step 2: Kickstart, Self-fund, VC Step 3: Repeat

Hello, You have not enough information, but I can give some general suggestions. 1. I suggest you make to yourself a friends in that country, in where you looking customers, make many friends and they will help you in the future. 2. You can visit trade shows, exhibitions, fares. 3. You can connect with your country to ask help- Every country have ministry or trade departement, what focuses on expanding and increasing the export. They can help you and connect you with right people in your export destination country. 4. I have good experiences with ICC ( International trading organization), they can also help you Best luck! Martin

You can only solve a big problem that changes the world if you solve a problem that is deeply personal to you. Two great examples and why they worked: Roy Raymond was a sad pervert. He'd buy bras and panties at the department store and all the clerks thought their thoughts about him. Roy felt embarrassed. He wasn't really a pervert. He just wanted to buy lingerie for his girlfriend. So he solved this major problem he was having. He created a space where men could feel comfortable coming in and buying sexy lingerie for their partners. He called it Victoria's Secret. But Roy, by solving this important personal issue for himself, apparently solved the same issue for many other men. First year sales were over $500,000 and he quickly opened up three more stores. In 1982 he sold Victoria's Secret for one million dollars before trying multiple other businesses that ended up failing. One MILLION Dollars. A decade later Victoria's Secret was worth over a billion dollars but Roy Raymund was nearly bankrupt and had missed the huge run-up in it's value. -- Picture New York City in the late 1800s on a rainy day. It was disgusting beyond belief. 150,000 horses transported people up and down the busy streets. Each of those horses, according to Super Freakonomics, dropped down about 15-30 pounds of manure. That's up to 4.5 million pounds of manure A DAY on the streets of NYC. And now imagine it raining. Would you cross the street? How long could this last? How long would the city survive without being infested with crap and all the diseases brought with it. What would happen as population of both men and horses increased? Was someone working on inventing a gigantic manure scooper? How would this problem get solved? It never got solved. Instead, Henry Ford invented the assembly line to mass produce cars. Every horse lost their job. People began to drive cars. Manure problem solved. -- In both cases there is a common theme. Someone outside the industry solved a problem that was personal to them that then changed an industry forever. Roy Raymund wasn't a fashion designer or a retailer. He worked in the marketing department of Vicks, which makes over the counter medications. Henry Ford, I don't think, ever worked in the manure industry. Instead, each person focused on a problem that was important to them. A problem that excited them at that moment in time. Raymund wanted to avoid being embarrassed in the future. Ford wanted an efficient way to make cars. The ONLY way to change the world is to solve a problem that is important to YOU. They had to choose themselves for success before they could save the world. Raymund had to convince himself that he didn't belong in the marketing department of a division of Procter & Gamble. He borrowed $80,000 and took the big risk of starting a business. Ford had to survive numerous failures and bankruptcies in order to find a cheap way to make cars. He would abandon investors, people who supported him, and even companies named after him, in his quest to solve his problem in his own way. Nobody gave them permission. And neither of them set out to change the world. They only wanted to solve a problem that was personally important to them. It's unfortunate that often we forget that choosing ourselves is not something that happens once. It has to happen every single day. Else we lose track of that core inside of us that solves problems and is able to share them in a way that makes the world a better place. Ford forgot this and became obsessed with Jews. Ford is the only American that Hitler mentions in Mein Kampf: "only a single great man, Ford, [who], to [the Jews'] fury, still maintains full independence...[from] the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions." And what happened to our embarrassed marketing manager that has ignited the passions of men and women for the past 30 years? Roy Raymund saw the value of Victoria's Secret jump from the one million he sold it for in 1982 to over a billion dollars a decade later. He failed in business after business. He got divorced. Then at the age of 46, my age, he drove to Golden Gate Bridge, jumped off it and killed himself. Before you can save the world you have to save yourself. But you have to relentlessly do it every day. Sometimes the train wakes me up at night and I feel scared. What will the world be like for my children? I won't always be able to help them. I don't even know if I do enough to help them now. And then I remember. I'm alive for another day.

You need to be able to get feedback on your product as quickly as possible, so my advice is to choose the technology stack that will allow you to build a prototype efficiently. There's no right answer here: for some people it's LAMP, for others it's node, for others it's a Windows stack. Worrying about the technology at the stage you're at is a red herring: worry about the product, the problem it solves and the user experience of your solution, and get feedback you can iterate on as quickly as possible. I'm a serial startup CTO who's now a startup founder and CEO. Let me know if I can help.

Selling any product including "iPhone cases" on websites with high competition like Ebay is surely not an easy mission. There are hundreds of sellers on Ebay and other websites who are already selling cases. If you need to get some sales, you need at least one of the following: 1. High reputation, reviews or feedbacks on the website that you are selling on. 2. The product that you are selling must be unique in some way or simply not found anywhere else. 3. If your products are featured at your own website, then that website of yours must be ranked properly online and marketed decently around social media networks. In your case, a possible approach would be to create your own website to sell your products on or work as an affiliate marketer for other big sellers in exchange for commissions. Depending on your budget, you need to draw the right plan around. If you have a good budget to invest in your business, then creating a website for yourself is a must. Otherwise, you need to rely on other websites and seek to provide unique or special products to get an edge around. Hope that helps!

For the sake of getting your question answered here it would help to simplify but that aside without firm stats on engagement and sharing it would be difficult to say however with the paid expansion of game like Flappy Bird, Angry Birds I would say viral apps come close to if not over a k-factor of 1.