The best way to approach this problem is by identifying primary pain points that users share and focus on those feature-wise, a common denominator of some sorts. These pain points need to be very high/strong though to be valuable for multiple target audiences. If you're facing two target markets (you're a connecting middleman of some sorts) then you might consider building two separate entry points with two functionality sets. That is only justifiable when one target market offer cannot exist without the other. In a typical situation you still want to identify the target users that contribute to the biggest market with largest growth potential and tailor your offering to those. Once you identify the segment try to understand who early adaptors are and make your product for their biggest pain points first, then expand once you have traction. As a conclusion I would suggest that sometimes you have to choose who you leave behind in your offering at least until you have traction and growth with your primary target audience. Please feel free to reach out if you want more advice, as I deal with that on the daily basis with my current job. Cheers, Denis.

The total addressable market is a function of the app's value proposition itself. Given that photos and messaging are now simply core features of pretty much any mobile-native application, you could cite every mobile user as your potential TAM. Anyone telling you that TAM is a useful point for you to address in pitching early-stage mobile investors for this concept is giving you very bad advice. What I would recommend you spend ALL of your time on is why you can dislodge users from the incumbents and why there is a specific unaddressed consumer pain that will gravitate them towards your app. I'm happy to help you frame your pitch in a call but call or no call, TAM as a specific data point is not something to concern yourself with here.

Back in 2010 we went through exercise of first using a local data center and then using a CDN in a different country. Interestingly enough using a remote CDN had much smaller latency. After doing an in depth analysis this is what we discovered. There are two factors that influence your latency: throughput of the pipe and speed of the physical server. Let's start with throughput. Consider two scenarios. In the first one you're using CloudFront from Amazon (or any other big name CDN) which probably has direct connection (or near direct) to the continents fiberoptic pipe. The second scenario is if you build a data center in the country. In this case you will be removed from the main pipe by several hops through internet providers which in turn will narrow the throughput after every hop. Unless you are willing to pay very expensive bill for the access to continents, or at least contries main pipe the latency will be higher than from big name CDN's. The second aspect deals with the type of servers involved in servicing GET requests. You need to install top notch hardware with very speedy SSD hard drives and extremely fast networking cards. You can go as far as start optimizing bus speeds between the components. All that leads to increase in price per server. If you're using a CDN then you're much better off because all of that is taken care of for you and you constantly run on latest and greatest hardware that you don't need to upgrade. Count in the amount of time/money need to be spend to service a data center. From my experience the companies that do administration on demand are slow for near 100% uptime requirements so you will need to hire and staff to do monitoring and maintenance. Also never forget about redundancy that also needs to be provided as your server will fail and will go down. Security is also a concern. My conclusion from the the evaluation done in 2010, which is much stronger today, go with CDN unless you're a Fortune-500 company and need a dedicated special use data center. Current CDN's usially offer multiple data centers at different continents for your disposal that can further shrink your response time. Good luck! Denis.

Because the startup costs to get a lot of their customers actually set up on their platform are too high, so free trials for say, 14 days, are out of the question. For example, take a look at http://www.curalate.com/ which uses some really amazing technology to track a customer's brand imagery across (almost) the entire web. Naturally, most of these types of services are usually $300++/month, so again, it's all just about mitigating setup costs for the provider. Hope this helps :)

I actually created a list when I was raising capital for my startup. Hope it is of use, I visited at least 1/2 of them so happy to give any directions on how to approach them. http://blog.tareasplus.com/100-fondos-de-capital-de-riesgo-en-silicon-valley/ Happy to jump on a call :)

Building a brand takes more than a logo. With that said, consistency is key for obtaining a competitive advantage that speaks to your market for longer. I would recommend against using different styles and colors for various purposes and instead maybe avoid using in lieu of the logo use maybe instead borders or patterns that use your logo's or brand colors. The idea of a logo is to engrave a mission or product into potential customers when they simply see the brand or logo... Once a logo is pushed and promoted you can strengthen that image by enforcing the brands colors through different materials or media :)

A startup is in essence the "art" of juggling. Of course you need some sort of "income" to pay for rent, food while your startup or business begins to generate cash flow. Ideally you should have at least 6 months of saving, sufficient time to give you a clear outlook of what will happen with your business. But some businesses start generating cash liquidity at faster pace. What is definetely certain is that you will need "leverage" in order to get your business started: savings, past clients, loans, investor capital, or even grants. Happy to jump on call and explore more :)

First, make sure that as part of a follow-up call, a General Partner is participating. Without a GP participating, the opportunity is actually not advancing in a meaningful way. Second, highlight what's new since last you spoke. It's likely that they identified some potential promise in what you're doing and want to check-in. The best way to build credibility is to show that the things you said you were going to do, you've done, and that momentum is building. Third, answer their questions concisely and to the point, and no more than the answer to the question. That's all the generalizable advice I can offer without knowing more of the specifics of your situation and what kind of investor you're dealing with. Happy to talk to you in a confidential call.

This is a good route to take and the same one I took after leaving undergrad. An MBA is for the birds, anyways ;) First things first, take credit where credit is due! You're a founder now it sounds like, and you're working on your first MVP I'm guessing (hoping?) as well. At the very least, get together some sketches, etc... as well. You'll definitely want a prototype in order to feel "whole." So, more importantly, just list this startup's name as a part of your career in your resume as you would when working for any other company. When asked, be completely truthful, and let your exuberance and fascination with being a self starter shine through. These few factors alone will signal to any future employer that you would be a valuable asset to have on their team, but you may find that you enjoy working for yourself a bit too much before then ;) Have you setup a corporation or LLC yet? Or are you using a partnership (assuming this is all U.S. based)? Once you have your business' infrastructure in place, things will definitely feel more official as well. Also, be sure to incorporate NOW rather than later to avoid any major legal headaches. Feel free to message me any time if you'd like to chat further. Cheers, Lara

I help B2B SaaS founders optimise their product experience and delivery by implementing scalable design systems and improving cross-team collaboration—so I spend a lot of time working with enterprise teams that struggle with inefficiencies, bloated processes, and fractured communication. What you’ve described—managers stuck in ineffective meetings or endlessly polishing decks—is a very real and widespread pain. I’ve seen it play out inside product, design, and marketing teams across industries. But here’s the key: just because the problem is widespread doesn’t mean the solution needs to serve everyone. In fact, early traction only comes when you pick a narrow slice and go deep. 🎯 How to Narrow Down Your Market & Spot Early Adopters 1. Don’t Niche by Industry—Niche by Pain Context Instead of looking at departments like "enterprise finance" or "enterprise healthcare," try narrowing by the context in which the pain is most intense. Ask: • Who really suffers from wasted time due to meetings/decks? • Where is that wasted time measurable and costly? • Who is actively trying to solve this problem (hacking Notion, trying AI, etc.)? You’re not looking for everyone with the problem—you’re looking for people actively looking for a fix. 2. Find the “Time Poor + Change Ready” Personas Inside large companies, there are people who: • Know their time is being wasted • Are frustrated with legacy tools and politics • Have the power (or budget) to test new tools or ideas These are usually middle managers in fast-moving teams like: • Innovation or strategy departments • Internal design or product teams • Marketing leads under pressure to ship faster These are your early adopters—they’re more open to new ways of working than someone buried deep in traditional ops. 3. Validate by Framing the Pain, Not the Solution Instead of pitching “a tool that fixes meetings/presentations,” start conversations like: “Have you noticed how much time your team spends refining slides vs refining thinking?” “What have you tried to make meetings feel less performative and more productive?” This lets you spot the most engaged, pain-aware leads. Early adopters will lean in and share their workarounds or frustrations. 4. Start Narrow—You Can Always Expand Later Traction is a byproduct of focus. Once you land 3–5 early adopters with shared traits, then you can look for lateral markets. Think of it as bowling pins: knock down one first, use it to knock down the rest. 🤝 Want Help Finding Your First 5 Ideal Users? If you want help refining your positioning, identifying your “change-ready” personas inside enterprise, or validating your offer with the right language—I’d be happy to walk you through it on a quick 1:1 strategy call. 📅 Book here: https://clarity.fm/varunprasad Let’s turn vague interest into early traction.

When you state a % you are being pragmatical, but if you are rasing a convertible note valuation might not be so clear you will then be defining a cap and a discount. Silicon Valley VC's want to understand more what your burn rate is for the next "x" months and what would be your next funding or goal event. So in that sense you might find that your ask will be for the total amount needed to cover full expenses for a team of 5 for 18 months at $10-15K in a city like San Francisco till you reach your next milestone or funding event. Happy to talk more strategy on a call

Unfortunately, in most cases where a transition occurs between contract developers prior to a shipped product, it's almost *always* the case that the new developer starts the code largely from scratch. When problems dictate a required transition to a new developer, it usually means that the previous developer left enough of a mess (in the codebase) that no good developer would want to try to waste your money and their time cleaning up the mess. Happy to talk with you about your current predicament and offer you advice based on more information.

Everyone who starts a magazine has definite passion in their respective genre and have certain idea about their audience. The one thing they wish they know, sometime after starting out, is that striking a balance between the content that users like to read and what investors (ads) like the viewers to read, isn't always easy. To get ad investors, you have to have audience and to sustain the audience, you need to have the investors' money. Think it through.

I started my business unexpectedly in 1994 when I found myself out of a job with $70K in debt. While it took me 90 days to land my first client, I picked up a job supervising a catering kitchen, and also went to teach evening education classes at three local universities in Atlanta. It is often better to have a deadline or be forced or you won't make the jump. It takes everyone a different amount of time. I was debt free and earning six figures in 18 months.

It sounds like you need design with backend programming to accomplish this. If you are interested contact me directly to go over your tech. needs for this... Maybe Visit CodyL.com They are a team I am aware of that implement code with easy to use backend for clients own updates and build tools for the websites their work is more than just web design.. And kind of cheaper than most... Not selling but trying to help here... Humberto Valle

Make certain songs or part of songs, interviews, etc available until you get X amount of thumbs up on Youtube or Likes on Facebook. Gate it so they have to bring a crowd to open up the doors to new content.

It's difficult to give specific advice without knowing the actual traffic level(1) and type of ads and placements(2) you have on your website but I'll make the assumption that those visitors don't record visits of extraordinary length resulting in at least several hundreds of thousands of pageviews/month. In this case, your best bet would be to sell your ad space in a tenure model (per month, for example) as opposed to CPM or another, less advantageous pricing model. This would ensure you're covered for any traffic fluctuation, don't have to deal with monetizing remnant inventory, and usually translates in higher eCPMs overall. Tip: offer campaign features not usually associated with smaller publishers, as a strategy to stand out. For the Politics vertical, I'd suggest looking into a guarantee that no competing campaigns would be displayed simultaneously (you can do so in pretty much any ad server out there). (1) pageviews, ad impressions (2) number of ad placements, sizes, location, type of ad creatives

Hi, I'm Ed. I'm Head of demand generation for a Uk startup. I've built our blog and academy area from 0 to over 20,000 hits per month generating over 500 leads/month. This sounds like a brilliant idea. Especially in a market where it's not so crowded. I'd say the key points are to: 1.) Make sure you fully understand the companies you are working with so that you can create really high quality content 2.) Do some work for free initially to get some really great case studies. You will need the social proof to convert clients. 3.) Make sure you track the ROI on your content marketing as closely as possible. In the end this is what is important. Don't focus on traffic, focus on quality leads. 4.) Make sure your content marketing has a very clear next step. This may be a CTA at the end of blog posts or a drip campaign with other relevant marketing after someone has signed up for an ebook and given your email. 5.) Don't just focus on the content. Design is extremely important. 6.) Always spend time on marketing your content. Many people forget to do this after sending a huge amount of time creating the content in the first place. You have to work at it to get great content seen. There's a great company in the UK called distilled that are hired to do a lot of really creative content marketing for companies around the world. I'd check them out. Let me know if you're interested in chatting further and we can potentially set up a call. Good luck! Ed

My best guess is that you'd get it close to wholesale price, which is anywhere between 30% and 50% off retail price in the electronics industry. You'll need a sales tax license number to prove you're a business rather than an individual. Pricing requirements will depend on the manufacturer. Some will have a "MAP Policy", which stands for Minimum Advertised Price, that dictates the price you advertise on your website. Note that "advertise" and "sell for" are not the same thing - that's why you see some sites that say "add to cart to see the price" - they're circumventing a MAP policy. Unless they make you sign a MAP Policy though, you should be free to advertise and sell at whatever price you want.

Complete the following sentence Stealth has developed or is developing .... that solves the problem of ..... for ...... When completed you should be able to identity venture capitalist firms who wish to and or have made investments in that space. Corporates are more problematic if your reasons for stealth are to avoid the industry they are in. Angels are also problematic we typically syndicate which raises more possibility of them doing due diligence where you might find your cover blown. Hope this helps

I know the Firedog routers, have an extender device that's explicitly for extending. Apple Airport Expresses have an "extend" mode as well.

A prototype will not get you an investor, to be honest. This is just a fallacy. If you can fund the prototype, launch it in the market, get some traction from users. See if your mobile app resonates with your users. You need to track whether your app is able to retain those users so that they keep coming back to it. If you have a good amount of retention with the first few set of users (100 or 1,000), that's a good pitch to take to an investor. Investors are not looking at ideas, they're looking at businesses that can get, retain and engage a customer.

The items that you're talking about in this situation would be immaterial in my opinion. Before you even get to the technicalities of accounting properly for something like this, do you really want to start a new business where your first transactions on your financial statements are transferring assets (furniture is not an asset even) that are all worth essentially nothing right now? Your entire focus should be on getting customers and not speaking with an accountant about the treatment of something that doesn't matter.

Hi! I would be careful in compensating only by commission. This will give you the kind of sales reps you might not want. If you were to invest your time, would you not want to receive some kind of fixed fee for the invested time? Also, by paying commission based, you are telling the sales guy that you don't know if the product will sell, but that you don't want to be the one risking the time invested. I'd go for a mix.

I don't think anything much has changed, and the only result is tightening the business rules. Two codifed bits of CASL are similar to guidelines and regs in other countries: • Responses to a current customer, or someone who has inquired in the last six months. • Messages that provide information about a purchase, subscription, membership, account, loan, or other ongoing relationship, including delivery of product updates or upgrades. So, you may already have noticed they bug you a lot every once in a while, to check your account settings, etc. That's to get you to come to the site, manage your account, and they call that an ongoing relationship. Make sure that's at least every 6 months and you are within the letter of the law. Probably. Charities have a specific exemption. This may not be the exact wording of the law as I am using a general reference. I am not a laywer, so check with yours: "Messages sent on behalf of a charity or political organization for the purposes of raising funds or soliciting contributions." There are some others as well that might allow you to say, disclose where you got their name from, etc.