Honestly is not as hard as it might appear to you right now. I have a few Chiro friends and first met one while visiting then through one met a few more... What I've learned is that most practices are small and thus operate very quickly.. They can make decisions on the spot if they like something or remove a system of they don't... Same as hiring their staff... Call for an appointment and simply let the receptionist know you're bringing in a product to help their office... All doctor visits have a first time meeting anyway.. So getting to chat with you about a product (specially if is actually helpful) might give them a joyful break in their day... Go with a solution and maybe some sort of trial for them to experience it then is just a matter of not necessarily closing them but retaining them through that much smoother "close" via trial... There's nothing better in a pitch than a free goodie... Also, try having your pitch incorporate an existing user that might be a competitor.. No one wants to be the first but no one wants to be last either so play that in your favor...

Honestly, you're going to have a hard time getting any company to do a run this small. The main reason is that setup costs to configure and turn on their machines are going to be so high that your unit cost per box will be $10-$20. Custom cardboard doesn't really start to make sense until 500-1000 units, and even then the economies of scale don't kick in until ~5000 or so. Your best bet would be to think about stickers. With 2-4 well placed and full color stickers, you can make a stock brown (or white) cardboard box look pretty custom. Checkout Uline to see what boxes they offer, and try to think about what stickers you could add to make them your own.

This depends on your definition of popular, but I can help you out. You're not going to be getting thousands of hits per month, but you can gain some popularity. 1. You're going to need to publish two posts per week, so you better be ready to write. One for your blog, and one for someone else's. 2. You won't be publishing any "round up" content, like 10 best tools for "blank". You're going to need to deliver ACTUAL value here. 3. Make sure that the topic of your blog is first about something people are actively looking for online. User Google Trends to test out some keywords. 4. Use BuzzSumo.com to search for keywords of blog posts and check out how many people are sharing those. Take a look at the most popular posts and then out do them. Write an even more comprehensive and valuable post than that one. 5. Build your email list as quickly as you can. Use Appsumo.com and install their list builder app. 6. Provide a content upgrade for each post. For example, an eBook, a checklist, anything that relates to the value of the article you wrote. Exchange the free item for their subscription to your email list. 7. Email your list once per week with a new article you just published. Ask them to share it if they like it. 8. Guest post for the second article you wrote each week. Find popular, related blogs and pitch them a post idea. Link back to your blog, but to a landing page that specifically outlines the value of signing up for your email list. OR 8a. Link back to a landing page that gives away content bonuses that you mentioned in the guest post. 9. Run a contest where you give something away related to your blog topic. (don't give away an iPad if you're a real estate agent, you want to attract subscribers that have to do with your niche.) 10. Die from exhaustion.

Do an independent lab test of each item to test for heavy metal contamination, specifically cadmium, lead, mercury and arsenic. Better that you get this information in advance before someone else does it and reports it, which could lead to a very fast business demise. For reference, check the protein powder tested by Natural News and also Adya Clarity - both found to contain heavy metals and both with ingredients sourced from China. Good luck!

It sounds like you just have a simple sales issue, and thankfully a high quality product :) The solution is simple, and you seem to have realized it already: you need to reduce the friction in your location for getting customers into your "front door" and providing them with (what I'm assuming) is a proposal. Also, feel free to use the word "agency" to describe your combined services. It's what we do :) So, my suggestion is to try reaching out to sales professionals in your area (Paris), and more importantly, with experience in your industry. You'll need to figure out how commission or payment will work, and then let them work their networked magic. Achieving sales leads is really just about your network. So if a sales person simply isn't within your budgetary reach, the next best thing you can do is just have every employee of your agency be their own salesperson. This means reaching out to colleagues from completely different industries, friends, successful people in business that you may have known from grade school, etc.... While sales seems like a crappy process at the start (yes, you are just asking for work from people), what you're building is long term, quality relationships with these people, especially if your final deliverables really wow the end client. From there, you'll find that your happiest clients will do most of the traditional 'sales' work for you :) Hope this helps! Feel free to give me a ring any time.

You don't post the entirety of any article. You link users off to the actual site (or iframe it in even or open a new view on a mobile app with a back button). You cite the source. OpenGraph tags (and other meta tags) are typically fair game for previews and such. Saving articles for offline use is a bit trickier. So long as you aren't storing their copyrighted material on your server you might be ok. There are, after all, tools out there to save offline versions of any web page. Of course they let the user enter a URL and do not lead users to specific pages. RSS feeds are also typically ok. If you look, many sites have a policy posted about how you can use their RSS feeds. Some sites even put ads in their RSS feeds. I wouldn't alter anyone's RSS feed. They want those ads syndicated. You might have problems there. Might. Ultimately, you are pushing traffic to them. Hopefully. That's kinda how this works. You want to build something that services them and your audience. That way everyone wins and no one has any problems. So even if they might normally say something about copyright issues, they likely won't because they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. Basically, make it worth their while. Make sure they don't want to say no.

As you already found out, there is no direct way of finding download numbers for a specific app. Some companies disclose such information when milestones are reached or within interviews and blog posts. Did you try searching?. If you're just interested in how competitive a category is, for ASO purposes, you can checkout app worth per category in SensorTower. I doubt the actual figures are accurate but it will at least give you an idea of how they stack against each other. Alternatively, you can look for 3rd party articles like this: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/27/how-do-you-break-into-iphone-app-store-top-50-try-23k-free-daily-downloads-950-paid-or-12k-in-daily-revenue/ Let me know if you want more help with you specific case.

Obviously, no 2 situations are alike; and multiple factors affect any outcome. Practically, the number of answers is infinite. But one factor I've looked at intensively, full time for years is the role played by the brand name and/or the site's domain(s). Think of doing business -- online or off -- as moving along a path. Some paths are rocky or go through quicksand. Others can be made straight and smooth. Obstacles can be cleared, or the surface may be lubricated. For most niches, you'll see brand names / domains that add friction -- friction that is compensated for by extra marketing inputs ... effort or money. Suppose your niche were nicotine patches. Well, ideally you might own NicotinePatch(es).com to simplify brand recognition, add trust, increase click-through rates, and so forth. Traffic can be built up without an exact-match domain. No doubt about that. Still, not all domains / names perform equally well online or in the minds' of an audience. Answers aren't always so clear cut. However, since the internet is built on domain names, domains and names are worth evaluating very deliberately.

I believe you may be talking about the Shoemoney tool system. I don't think it exist anymore as the link is not loading for me http://tools.shoemoney.com/

Take a look at how other companies with similar problem resolved it, for example: AirBnB, Uber, TaskRabbit and others. Every one of them, unless they were extremely lucky with timing, used a narrow geographic focus, approaching established communities and fulfilling demand for one side by hand for the first little while. In your case you can approach established organisations like universities, churches, foundations, volunteer organisations and the like to get people that would do things and do exactly the same for the other side. Initially you need to do it by hand until it starts going viral. Spreading the word through social media is great but it needs to be very targeted and approach people that can already find something in the application. If there are other organizations that do similar postings, for example if there are requests for volunteering on Craigslist, you can approach them to have it posted in your application. Narrowing on one geographic location is always easier in the beginning, because you can learn the area and all the players involved in the scene, and then maximise the output, expanding to new geographic locations when needed. It doesn't mean limiting your app, but just focusing your marketing efforts in one narrow location that can bring biggest output. Everything that I mentioned above can be applied to offline and online social marketing. Unfortunately there is no magic solution to your problem except for bootstrapping it in the beginning and finding communities that you can leverage with biggest social impact return. Good luck! Denis.

Wow, this is sort of the penultimate question. I answer this not as a founder, but as a co-founder that watched several other founders and investors wrestle with this dilemma. I've seen the pattern repeat as a consultant as well. It's an issue! The problem with this common situation, is all about information... meaning who's got what information. When partnering with a developer, there's a brutal but sobering fact that a great developer will bring up right away: "Without someone like me, this technology can't happen." Like I said, it's brutal but sobering in a good way. A developer knows better than anyone else when things are being built versus being invented. In the case of the latter, all developers feel this is worth quite a bit. Conversely, most developers don't have the business vision to create a digital version of a successful analog business process, because they're supposed to be busy coding! That's exactly why developers are very into sharing, because writing code for a living is a process to achieve some other goal, and isn't magic. So both parties need each other, but one has the execution while the other has the vision. Geez, now we've got to negotiate? Before talking shares, you as a business visionary should keep one major risk-point in mind. The developer you're partnering with MUST be personally invested in the project. The difference in the code quality between a project done to get paid, and the code from a developers personal project are monumental. You want a dev that is ready and willing to give your model heart + soul, and obsess about things you don't fully understand during your shared journey. If the dev isn't personally invested in the project, you run a high risk of them giving you the code equivalent of a 3-door coupe when your business needed a custom rally car that raises eyebrows. In a start-up, you'll have to leverage what you envision against the cost-vs-quality debacle of acquiring a skilled developer. I can tell you from experience, that no matter where you try to save, other costs will pop-up in the development process. Cutting costs in the beginning, comes back three-fold in the end if the code is not easily maintainable. And worst of all, the first build is never perfect - while the second build usually results in epiphanies derived from the mistakes in the first build. This is the sort of stuff that a developer knows well, but it never gets brought up in meetings, because the cost of programming is so significant yet typically not understood by the key stakeholders. So when you negotiate with devs, be sure to keep in mind that their role in the team is massive, and their work (in their mind) will become the entire business sometime in the future. Even if that's not the case based on your model, a programmer who thinks that way about a project will give you bleeding edge work at all times. ;) So find a comfortable fit personality-wise, and with the right shared ambition. Then treat your programmer as democratically, and as evenly as you can afford. A great programmer will by pure habit give you more than you asked for, which seems to always be something that businesses need these days. The trade off is that you show the programmer in shares, just how important their best efforts are.

There are three angles to look at this structure from: 1) Is it the best way to set things up to hold your investment from a legal perspective? 2) Is the it the best way to minimize your taxes? and 3) Is the best way to set things up from an accounting (i.e. bookkeeping) perspective? In your question above, you initially ask about tax, but then ask about accounting at the end, so I'll address all three. The first angle is best answered by your attorney, and it sounds like they've already advised you in this regard. I will say that the structure you've described is one I've seen used often and seems to work well from a legal perspective. For the second angle, it is imperative that you engage an experienced tax CPA to advise you, and do it right away if you haven't already. Know that sometimes the best legal structure is not always the best structure to minimize taxes, and vice versa. These two sometimes work at cross purposes and you'll have to strike a compromise based on which is more important to you. For instance, having the sub as a C-Corp is likely excellent from a legal perspective due to the liability protections afforded by a C-Corp. However, it may not be ideal from a tax perspective as the subsidiary C-Corp pays taxes on income and then the income is taxed again when it is distributed to your LLC. I am neither an attorney or a tax CPA, my expertise is in the third angle, how to set up your financial accounting to track your financial results in a way that gives you useful information you can use to make decisions. From a financial accounting (i.e. bookkeeping) perspective, this setup should serve you well. It segregates the revenue and expenses from the new project from the operations of your own LLC, allowing you to separately measure the operations of both. Of course having two separate entities to track is more time consuming, and therefore involves more expense for accounting. But it's necessary based on the fact that you are going to have a different ownership structure and different owners for the spun out entity than the original LLC. In summary, I'm not an expert on legal or tax matters, I know just enough to know that you need good advisors talking to each other and you in each of these areas. From a financial accounting perspective, I think your set up is a good one because it segregates operating cash flows and allows for different ownership classes. I can consult with you if you need some guidance in how to set up the recordkeeping properly. However the legal and tax questions should take precedence over financial accounting. Helpful? Let me know if you need additional clarification, happy to help answer further questions. Also let me know if you'd like to set up a call to discuss further.

There are so many tools its actually difficult to make a final definition of which one would be the best. My team uses google drive, but dropbox also works. Here is a short list, you would want to go with the corporate version of each 1. Google Drive 2. Dropbox 3. Box.com 4. Basecamp.com 5. Prezi.com

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.