It can certainly be tough to build up a substantial follower base, starting from nothing or very little, especially if you haven't launched your product yet. But here are a few tactics to help you get in front of more people pre-launch: 1) Start sharing tons of useful content. Before you bother sending people to your Twitter feed or Facebook page, you want to make sure they'll find something valuable once they get there. If you have the time, create original content that ties into your industry, your product, or your company in some way (without directly promoting yourself, though). If you don't have the bandwidth to create your own content, find other articles from bloggers you admire or experts in your industry, and share their content. Just make sure you're putting out information that's highly relevant and valuable to the audience you're trying to attract so you can engage them once they find you. 2) Create conversation. The people who aren't following you yet aren't seeing your tweets, so how do you show them value and get them to discover you? Start a conversation! At Change Collective, we're rolling out our first course on Becoming an Early Riser. So I'll do a Twitter search for "need to wake up earlier" and find a bunch of people who are tweeting about the exact problem we're setting out to solve. By favoriting their tweets or replying with -- "That's great! We think we can help - check out our newest course & let us know what you think!" -- I'm getting our product on their radar and simultaneously providing value to them. 3) Ask for help. Start with your fellow team members, and ask them to share the company's Facebook posts or retweet some of your tweets. You can even create lazy tweets for them to share. What about your board members? Advisors? VCs? They all have a stake in helping your company grow awareness and adoption, so find an easy and appropriate way for them to help by leveraging their networks. And if you have friends and family who are excited about your business and supportive of what you're doing, they probably won't mind a friendly request to help spread the news every once in a while. Hope this helps! I just joined an early-stage startup and I'm currently building up our marketing from scratch. Happy to jump on a call and offer some tips from the trenches if you'd like. Best of luck!

I respectfully disagree with Lane. I don't think that his suggestions are going to to yield results for this site. A 200,000 rank on Alexa isn't actually traction. Sign-ups by themselves aren't worth much until you get to the high tens of thousands, and even that number isn't worth much in a sale. If you have over 10,000 monthly active users, you *might* be able to sell it to a similarly positioned business for a small amount of cash, and at this point, I'd suggest that if you have that kind of user activity or better, you focus all your energies on selling. Happy to talk to you about how to research and identity potential acquirers but I wouldn't invest *any* more money/resources in trying to grow it. Happy to talk in a call if you've got minimum viable traction to sell.

Some of this is stage dependent and all of it is highly dependent on the team above the product manager. The simplest answer of course is to find PM's from companies who have had exemplary success where the Product Manager candidate either led prior success or was exposed to it in a meaningful way. A simple starting point is to ask them to give you examples of conflicting opinions on a feature and how they evaluated the conflicting opinions and made a decision and tracked the success or failure of that decision. AirBnb actually gives PM's homework as part of the interview process where they have to actually present a unique idea (from scratch) to the interviewing team. Happy to talk to you about best process based on your stage and existing team.

If the problem is vetting, really the best way is to get someone technical you trust (or with good reputation) to evaluate them. There are plenty of technical people whom you could hire for a day to give their opinion of any candidate. However the real problem is usually finding the candidate and convincing them to want to join you. The people who you really want as a technical partner have a lot of other opportunities vying for their attention. You have to figure out how to stand out from the crowd.

Convertible notes are by no means "earned." They are often easier to raise for early-stage companies who don't want to or can't raise an equity round. Equity rounds almost always require a simultaneous close of either the whole round or a defined "first close" representing a significant share of the raised amount. Where there are many participants in the round comprised mostly of small seed funds and/or angel investors, shepherding everyone to a closing date can be very difficult. If a company raises money on a note and the company fails, the investors are creditors, getting money back prior to any shareholder and any creditor that doesn't have security or statutory preference. In almost every case, convertible note holders in these situations would be lucky to get pennies back on the dollar. It would be highly unusual of / unheard of for a convertible note to come with personal guarantees. Happy to talk to you about the particulars of your situation and explain more to you based on what you're wanting to know.

I very much disagree with Mark's assessment. You shouldn't compensate this person for the COO role until they are confirmed into this role and working full-time in this capacity. If they are a part time medical advisor, they should have a very small amount of equity to begin with. It would depend mostly on how much (if any) you've raised to date, but it would be unusual for an advisor to have more than 1% of the Company. Happy to talk to you about the details of your situation to come up with a fair offer that doesn't hurt your chances of raising capital in the future.

I would suggest you search for and read out blogs. I can't think of any entrepreneurs who aren't also blogging. I have two blogs: brightideas.co and http://groovedigitalmarketing.com

Music curation is something that greatly interests me as well, and one of my projects slated for 1-2 years out will be in that area. Don't forget that -- apart from being united by musical taste -- fans usually have MUCH else in common as well. Musical taste is a great predictor of other demographic features such as age, nationality, race, gender, region, economic class, and a million much subtler social characteristics. Fans of Steely Dan or Yo Yo Ma are different overall than fans of 50 Cent, Garth Brooks, or Lady Gaga. That's obvious, and you know it already. But keep in mind that sites like Facebook are valuable for advertisers, yes, for the eyeballs but partly because they can CHARACTERIZE those eyeballs and predict their behavior as consumers. You may be making a site that's laser-focused on music as such. But monetizing music has become notoriously difficult in the post-CD era. So you may want to look at non-musical ways to monetize music, based audience characteristics that various fan groups happen to share. If you're wondering about a brand name or domains, call me.

(I'm a small biz attorney who helps people with copyright, trademark, and other IP law, and I'm answering per U.S. law.) As soon as you take your idea and put it into a tangible format (write it down, create an infographic, record a video), then that writing/infographic/video is automatically protected by copyright law. You can record the copyright on it too, which makes it easier to protect and get damages from other people taking it. But the formula itself would be probably protected under trade secret law or patent law. Patent law obviously takes a bit more effort, because you have to apply for the patent and get your application examined by the USPTO, which takes years and $$$. Keeping it protected under trade secret law means you have to make an effort to keep it secret (which may not work if you are disclosing it as part of your marketing efforts), such as keeping it confidential and requiring NDAs. As someone else said, the other terms you use might be protected under trademark law. If a member of the public would use those terms to link your products/services with the source of the product/service (aka, your company), then they could be trademark-able. There are some state law protections for trademarks, and you can also file to register the trademark with the USPTO and get more protection. Hope that gets your started!

If you're not seeing this feature in your Facebook account (in Ads Manager or Power Editor) it's possible that facebook hasn't rolled out this feature yet in your country. They roll out features on a country by country basis but typically start in the UK or USA in my experience. What country are you in?

There is nothing more harmful to a good idea than other ideas. By that I mean, the inability to decide which idea is worth pursuing over others, causes each idea to suffer when trying to distribute resources in support of more than one concept at a time. Your question presumes that the most important aspect of launching an online business is to have a site built. That's only where the hardest work begins. In order to achieve any traction whatsoever, a daily focus is required to optimize a site's messaging and conversions, optimize customer acquisition tactics, and iterate based on customer feedback. The idea that a single founder can achieve by having to do what is a full day's work for one site multiplied across 3 different sites is fraught with problems. You may wish to check my recent answers as I answered a question earlier this week about how investors perceive multi-product companies and their founders. The bottom-line being the idea that this is going to produce a more attractive outcome to investors is also one that has proven time and again to result in failure. Happy to talk all this through in a call if you'd like to dive deeper.

There is no such list and that's not the way you'd make a connection with a great advisor anyway. First, your best advisor won't care that your company is based in Southeast Asia. Focus on identifying people who have significant expertise and credibility in your business area. Make your own list based on relevant experience and as a second filter, experience in building traction internationally. Then, start reaching out to them with very personalized appeals, relating what you do to their experience and why you think they might be interested in meeting you. As you get interest, you're next looking for personal chemistry. Do you build off of each other in your exchanges and do you feel inspired by and supported by this person? Once you go through this process as above, feel free to message me as I have a template I have shared with other clarity members that has standard equity offers against various levels of commitment for advisors. If in the meanwhile, you'd like to discuss the process of finding advisors in more detail, happy to do so in a call. Good luck!

This can be tricky. Generally I recommend paying commissions on revenue-generation events only. The reason being, if it is free to generate a lead then it makes it really easy to take advantage of the system. That being said, there are some ways to go about it. Calculate (you should already have this) your cost of acquiring a lead (CAC). That's your baseline. You can now set your referral commission at or below that CAC number. Since you only pay a commission based on the generation of a new lead you guarantee a positive ROI. A prize/sweepstakes is not a bad idea. Make sure to create a prize that really resonates with your target demographic (YES: set of All-Clad pans, NO: an iPad) I would run the program the first time based on your best estimates; if you expect to generate 100 new leads, and would normally pay $10-$15/lead then you can afford $1,000-1,500 prize. You can then adjust the process during future iterations based on: 1) The quality of the leads you received. Referrals are generally more valuable, but scam/spam leads are not. 2) The number of leads you generated. If you want to work through details in your specific case let me know, I'd be happy to set up a call to discuss further. Good luck!

Funny I actually started a project *JUST FOR THIS PURPOSE* called AppDea.net. It got overloaded and crashed my server so the database is currently down, but I am moving it over to a telesc.pe install right now and will let you know as soon as it is back up. Cheers!

Basic Errors and Omissions insurance should cover what your describing. There could be local/state laws concerning running the vehicle for prolonged periods of time, a call to your state department of permits should give you a solid answer to that.

If you're not technical yourself, then you might not be able to gauge the efficiency of a candidate's algorithms or critique her code. But there are still some higher-level, more behavioral things that a non-technical interviewer should be looking for in a strong development candidate: 1. What are some tech blogs that you follow? Explain an interesting article to me that you read from one of them. The software development world changes all the time. Best practices are constantly evolving and new libraries are regularly released which make developers more productive. If a candidate doesn't keep up with the latest software news, that might be a red flag that they're not curious or trying to improve themselves. Also, having them explain a technical concept to someone who's non-technical is a great way to gauge their communication skills. Do they seem like someone you could work with and understand easily? Do they care about pausing to make sure you understand, or do they just drone on with jargon? If you feel overwhelmed while they're explaining this answer, imagine how you'll feel when they're telling you why the product has bugs or isn't going to be done on schedule. 2. Tell me about a time you ran into a big roadblock with something you were building. How did you get past it? It's inevitable that a software developer will get tripped up or have to solve some Gordian Knot. Everyone has to bang their head against the wall from time to time. Maybe an API didn't have the data they needed or some function was running too slow and they weren't sure how to speed it up. You're looking to see how they are as a problem solver. Did they come up with a clever but hacky solution? Were they methodical or did they fly by the seat of their pants? Did they go back to the stakeholders and see if the feature's requirements were flexible? Did they work on it for hours and hours trying new things? Did they ask for help from colleagues or on the internet? No right or wrong answers here, but you want to get the sense that this isn't someone who throws up their hands when they hit some friction. 3. Tell me about your favorite project that you worked on. What work are you most proud of? By asking them about the project they're most proud of, you'll get to see what it is that they value most. Maybe one candidate is most proud of a side project they built, even if it wasn't that technically complex, while another candidate is proud of their esoteric PhD project or some specific algorithm they improved. Again, no right or wrong answers, it really depends what type of candidate you're looking for. But it lets you see into their mind a bit, and get at some of the aspects that can make someone a strong development candidate. If you want to talk more specifically about hiring for your team, I'd be happy to do a call!

It's best to keep everything in a single company to start with. Before going further with my answer, I'm compelled to tell you that launching multiple products *rarely* works and unless you have very significant prior success, most investors will take interpret diversification as a very negative signal. So just wanted to provide you that warning. You should do nothing in the early stage to your corporate structure to optimize to sell or spinoff what the Company develops. The reason for this is that it incurs legal expense prematurely and often limits your choices instead of facilitating the desired optionality. Investors almost always want "the whole hog" and also want to back a whole team focused on making a single product or service as big as it can get. Let an investor or buyer drive a spin out discussion, not the other way around. Happy to talk in more detail in a call.

Of course and have in the past.. With FB's Open graph search you can laser target buyers and weed out tire kickers.. This is a no brainer :)

2 different categories come to mind. H&R Block or other tax preparation services. The second is restaurants. This may seem like a product more than a service but I think it truly falls into the category of service, especially if you look at the national chains. Think Applebee's, TGI Fridays etc. The reason people go to these places is because of the experience they receive. The franchisors have created a system that generates nearly identical results nationwide. The first thing you need to do is figure out what makes your service superior to others out there, then you need to figure out how and why this is the case. From there you need to document it and make sure that you have a mechanism in place to ensure compliance. Granted that is a huge amount of work, but the basic premise is quite simple. You want all of the people you hire to do things more or less the way you would do them.

Depends on size of project, time and location commitment. Day, project, hourly and change fees are all common for our small team. Large companies offer different pricing structures.

Depending on average transaction size, number of transactions and the potential risks you are taking on (i.e what are you responsible for if your friends product or service isn't delivered on?). Anywhere from 2-20% could work depending on the above. As for accounting, I would recommend keeping the transactions in a separately coded lines of revenue and expenses so you can clearly show the in and out flow of money for his app. It will be taxed as income so you can include that in your fee if you wish. Also know that banks these days are very sophisticated with detecting fraud and money laundering so ensure you document the arrangement with your friend so you can easily show everything is on the up and up. I hope that helps!

The steps are the easy part. It's the execution. You can put together a great lead gen machine using content, cookies, and email marketing.

Licensing a platform is a terrific way to generate revenue. We struggled to gain an audience to our site and didn't have the funds to market as heavily as we would have wanted. In came the offers to license. Margins were tighter, but the exposure to new customers made a world of difference.

Depends on where your team resides. In SF, you could use an average of $135k for all-in costs for each employee. In Toronto, you could probably drop that by 20-30k per person. But there are so many other factors related to burn beyond headcount that just using a headcount cost + overheard to estimate burn would be pretty inaccurate to reality of calculating a cash-out date. Happy to talk through the details of your situation in a call.

Competing in this category when there are so many dominant incumbents is really difficult. You'll need a product that significantly leapfrogs that of the existing leaders, which means it's likely mobile-first and focuses on a simplified, minimalistic user experience that delivers on the core use case of these apps. To answer your question as you asked it: 1) Build the best product in the category; 2) Find a few key reference users (Social Media Managers at known companies who are themselves influencers about social media management) who are willing to declare your product as better than anything else; 3) Make it easy for enterprises to adopt this and establish some use cases that demonstrate how the more users who use this within a group or enterprise, the better their business results are vis a vis social media. 4) Buy inexpensive ads (Twitter is likely best) promoting these case studies encouraging sign-ups. 5) Talk to everyone who signs-up and hold their hands and lead them to become advocates for your service AND paying customers. The challenge is that customer acquisition costs or even lead costs are high, driven up by the significant cash that the incumbents can afford to spend on acquiring new users & prospects. Virality has proven difficult to achieve in this product category so it's really a function of convincing users to flee their existing tool in favor of an unknown, unproven product. Happy to talk to you in detail in a call.