I lived in the US for 28 years before returning to Russia. My name is not easy for Americans to pronounce (anything outside of the Anglo-Saxon standard names seems to fit that category). Short version of Stanislov is Stas, so I went with that for them, but I never would change my name. Take pride in the name you were given and the culture you came from. Your parents gave you that name and you have it for a reason. Just because others don't pronounce it just right is no reason to throw away your culture. Oh and Misha is the short Russian version of Michael, if you americanized it, it would have to be Mike.

I'd start with messaging the admins of the various Facebook groups dedicated to mobile game development and asking if they'd be willing to 1) enable you to put up a post about the SDK, and 2) pin the post for a week so that you get a bit more visibility within those communities. You can also find the appropriate thread on the various mobile gaming forums and chime in there. I would recommend trying to be helpful 9 times before you ask for something once. You'll notice a much better response if you've become an active contributor to each community before you start selling your stuff, no matter how soft the sell and no matter how valuable the stuff. Hope this helps, Austin

Beauty isn't my field -- not the cosmetic / fashion variety, anyway. But I see companies from other industries eager to pay bloggers for advertorials. So I assume that the same demand exists in the industry you're examining. I'd also imagine that such a database would make the process of connecting advertisers and bloggers much more efficient. If I'm right, then you have a promising idea. But you ought to be asking (1) the bloggers and (2) the companies who'd be paying to advertise. If they think it's a good idea, then you're off to a good start. Then you'll want to research existing platforms (if there are any) and assess your own readiness to build and market the service you have in mind. Good luck! P.S. If you get to the stage where you're thinking of a brand name for your project, talk to me. That is my actual field. So the beauty that primarily catches my eye is VERBAL beauty.

I think you need to think outside the box. You can definitely make 50k a month but someone just giving you ideas is not going to help you. Remember Ideas are just 1% execution is 99%. Find something you're passionate about. Find a problem that people have daily that can be solved. But if you wan't ideas: E-Commerce is going to be really big over the net few years. Helping people increase their conversion rate will definitely make you over 50k a year if you can execute it right.

I am assuming you are in the US? I'll assume you are. The fact that the patent has been approved proves that in the it can be, its a precedent and US law is precedent bound. As for lawyers, no you'll have to pay for your own lawyers.

The best way to solve chicken and egg problems for marketplaces is to prove market need on each side independently first with a low-cost MVP-type test. Once you've proven the market on both sides with metrics it is much easier to leg in supply and demand with a strategic or enough funding to match a market on a local or niche level to ensure liquidity. For a deeper analysis, here is a post on medium that I wrote... http://bit.ly/1k2vYbY Also, feel free to schedule a call with me if you'd like to dig deeper.

You won't find anyone worth adding to your team willing to work for equity only, no matter how compelling your product and business is. The realities of the talent market for mobile developers anywhere is such that a developer would be foolish to work only for equity unless they are a cofounder and have double digit equity. Happy to talk about hiring and alternatives to full-time hires.

What kinds of start ups? You may find some scattered IT here and there but I highly doubt you'll find a lot of high tech. There are reasons why the term industry clusters was coined. High tech requires more than just facilities and infrastructure, it requires people and teams that are more than 10meters from each other start to degrade in performance. Simple reality. Also, hi tech heroes tend to want the thrills of a big city or a city and if not them, then their families...and good schools and so on. Setting up in the middle of no-where means a lot more expenses when you need to hire talented people and relocate them. As for Russia, out in the middle of no where we have a lot of farming start ups: huge intensive growth orchards in Chechnya, with a German partner. Angus ranches, fully automated, out in south western Siberia and so on.Agriculture or mineral/petro extraction rules in those areas.

Hi, I have been a PHP developer for 13 years and have experience building enterprise applications. What framework are you using? Most PHP frameworks have a built in authentication and authorization mechanism. For example, Yii has a builtin RBAC system that allow you to define a hierarchical permission system. If you're not using a framework or you just want to implement your own system for whatever reason then you can utilize Object Oriented Design and implement a Base controller (if MVC) that checks the permission for each request. That won't use a lot of if statements. Probably need more info, to give definitive guidance. Hope that helps.

The simple answer is: good developers get paid. You have a few options that each come with different risks. 1. Find a development agency looking for equity projects. There are more out there than you would expect but be prepared to show them all the details. They are going to want to see that you've done ALL your homework. 2. Find a freelancer looking for passion project. This is hard. Really hard. Try places live Reddit to post what you're looking for with as many details as you can share. 3. Create a "simple-er" MVP. Can up just design a mockup and sell that to investors or customers first? Can you find a way to do it without coding? People will see value in a lot of ideas but the more you can show them that you've put time into the idea and have hard plans for success, the better the likelihood of finding someone for your project. Hope that helps!

You could look at views to each slideshare to determine which pieces of content are most popular/resonating best with your audience, but the key metric here is really the number of demo requests you generate from this channel. You can include a different tracking token in each slideshare link that sends viewers to your website or demo page, and use that to determine which ones are leading to the most conversions.

Hire an independent valuator. In the case of US companies, a 409A valuation has to occur at every priced financing round, so if you've had one done, that would serve as guide. But you might not even have the right to sell your shares. Your shares should be subjected to vesting and your voluntary resignation would likely cancel all remaining unvested shares. Even should you have shares to sell, if you have Preferred shareholders, it's likely that there are terms that might make selling your shares to a 3rd party difficult. Happy to talk in more detail about the specifics of your situation.

Parse is indeed one of the best for user accounts, IAP tracking, custom push, analytics and user data sets. You can watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_0llIdtYNA on Youtube for some basic understanding of the Parse platform.

Absolutely, now more than never! If you take aside the psychological factors (motivation, strong desire, etc.), business success in general is dependent on 2 key variables : money and time (*not* experience). You cannot start a business with no money and no time. But if you have either of the two, you can make it happen. As per how, with all the dogmatism of brevity I would say: The easiest is to create a service that you can learn and deliver yourself (zero cost, only requires time to learn the required skill - could be writing content, teaching a language, coding apps, walking the dog, etc). Check out craigslist for about a thousand more ideas. Even for a product, you can ask your first customers to pay for it in advance (to cover development costs) so you get the funds to pay tech peoples to create it. Either way, there are 3 skills you must master if you want to have success : - get good at asking questions to find where people's problem are (the seed of any business is in resolving a problem, so you got to stop talking and listen!) - get good at asking them what their ideal solution would look like (you would think that people already looked for a solution if they already know what it looks like, but this would be over-estimating human behavior - you will find many were not even *aware* they had a problem before you started asking) - get good at hustling to put this solution together for them and then sell it! One word of caution : the real challenge in starting a business is in finding a profitable niche that can sustain you over the long term doing work that you love. To achieve this, you must approach it the same way a child learns how to walk. By falling down, and trying back again. If you want a fantastic example of what this kind of hustle can create, look no further than Clarity's founder Dan Martell (check out the 'About Me' page on his website for a great example of the "entrepreneurs' journey") To get the proper mindset, I also suggest a total immersion in the entrepreneurial world : listen to podcasts (free), read blogs (also free), and invite entrepreneurs for lunch to pick their brains (ok, that one is 20$).

The previous answers are really excellent. Let me resume them quickly and add a fourth point which is critically important to help you putting all this together : 1 - keep in mind the psychological aspect to make sure you reach your goals : a book has a much lower value in people's mind than a training program, and for a pdf it's even worst - people are used to get pdf for free! To break this psychological link (pdf = low cost = you will never make much money out of it), consider creating a multimedia training program including both videos and the pdfs. Higher up in the 'value scale' is offering group coaching, and even better one-on-one consulting. 2- Be aware that the key thing your customers will be looking for is PROOFS. With so much hype all around, this is THE thing that will "make or brake" your goal achievement. So if you already implemented this strategic planning methodology yourself with great success, that's enough proof to get started. Otherwise, consider offering your methodology for free to a customer in exchange for a testimonial (proof). 3- Either way you go with this, offering part of your methodology for free is an excellent proof element and should be used as part of your marketing to generate leads. You can do that by sharing a pdf (or by doing a webinar). 4- Note that the real question here is : what business do you want to create for yourself? If you create your own digital product (pdf or others) and service line, you will have to manage the web 'infrastructure' and marketing but you will then have direct access to the customers (which is the real asset in your business, NOT your product). If you create partnerships for others to sell your product, you may make some money, but you will never be in contact with the end customer - hence you won't have any real asset to grow a potential business on.

I think a natural choice is large provides like Amazon. However, if you want to sell eBooks on your own and maintain all of the revenue, then WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads would make excellent options. Both software packages are WordPress plugins and they make it very easy to deploy an e-commerce store for digital goods. Both plugins have strong development teams behind them and they have a slew of independent freelancers who can offer assistance if needed. I've used WooCommerce myself for multiple years and we've deployed many WordPress websites that use it. It has hundreds of extensions you can add on to it for maximizing the potential.

You are thinking about it wrong. Don't think of your organization as a pie. Think of it as a house. When you add an extension (say a new kitchen) to your house, the value of your new kitchen now accounts for a larger *percentage* of your house, more than it did before. But something else also happens. Your house is now worth a lot more. I highly recommend you watch the series on raising money for a startup by the Khan Academy - http://robt.co/1u1wCsx

As a tech marketer - I am always looking for the fastest, cheapest yet reliable research in order to create competitive intelligence internal documents, stats for blog posts, etc. Some people live by the "if it isn't on the first page, it doesn't matter" when it comes to leveraging search engines as a research tool. However, often when we are looking for value, we have to realize that anything REALLY worthwhile these days from a content perspective is typically gated behind a web form, or nestled inside a blog post. So, expect to spend a few hours in order to get through all the form gates, and also make sure you're using as specific and direct search terms as possible - then getting more generic if results are not ideal. Some other tips: -Have a few "burner" email addresses setup with gmail or hotmail, etc. - these allow you to get content when filling out forms to get White Papers, Reports, Case Studies, etc. without your primary inbox getting stuffed with marketing emails. -In the form fill process, if available put "student" or "researcher" as typically sales reps pass by these "leads" when the form gets dumped into the CRM queue. -Don't forget specialty search sites and tools like Wolfram Alpha for more "numbers" derived searches. -Also, like your question here - always seek the wisdom of crowds in addition to machine learning algorithms! Hope this is helpful! Search on!

Before building something, did you test your idea ? Life's too short to build something nobody wants ;) You can use clarity, sohelpful.me to conduct some interviews, build a landing page with quickmvp.com, unbounce or launchrock to validate that you solve a real problem. Then when your idea is validated, your can build a MVP (Minimum viable product) that might be for example a website (imho faster and easier to build than an app) to test your assumptions. Then if early adopters need functionnalities that really need to run as an app, you can provide them on pc, tablet or smartphone using your core web backoffice. If you want to discuss with me, feel free to have a free call here https://clarity.fm/laurentroger/white665 or here http://www.sohelpful.me/laurentroger

I don't live in Chicago, but there is a Co-Founders Lab there that provides networking opportunities to find fellow entrepreneurs and co-founders. Here's a link for more info: http://www.1871.com/cofounderslab-comes-to-chicago/

A 0.31 second Google search located this: http://i.cdn.turner.com/nascar/.element/pdf/2.0/sect/kyn/NASCAR_Prospective_Licensing_Application.pdf

I would suggest spending some money and cash hanging out at bars where some of these bands perform, Also, try to find a way backstage to talk to the musicians after they perform to do your research. If you're going after well-off musicians, contact their agents or band managers. They are always looking to make or save more money.

1. You want to make sure that your backlink is a followed backlink. Right clicking on the link and then clicking "inspect element" in the html code, it shouldn't say "nofollow". 2. One of my favorite SEO tools is www.ahrefs.com - they have a free version you can use. The more backlinks that the site has that's linking to you, then the higher quality those backlinks are. You can also tell if the website that's linking to you is trusted and has organic SEO by looking at the countries that are linking to it. If 20% of the websites backlinks are coming from Russia or some 3rd world country it's probably safe to assume that the quality of that website is fairly poor. ahrefs also gives you a quality score for domain authority and page rank. My personal website is www.HippiesHope.com (feel free to look it up in ahrefs), if you have any more questions about SEO feel free to send me a message or schedule a call.

I have to ask why you would start an agency in an area you don't have much experience in. Perhaps you'd be better off getting at least a little experience first?

Hey, A few points (and as someone who has sold a digital agency, I have some experience here) 1) "This is the biggest decision of my life"... No it isn't. Not even close. I mean no disrespect but, agencies are easy to start back up. You build a team, build a client base, maybe take investors, scale it, sell it. Sit on your hands for the non-compete period, then start another one. Don;t sweat this too much, you aren't facing a decision that you can't work your way out of in a year or two. So my tip number one: relax! 2) This investor is taking you for a ride Giving yourself a minority ownership in an early-stage company or startup is a very, very bad idea. You need to feel like you have a "big win" ahead of you. A CEO shouldn't own a minority stake in the company she or he founded until you're doing $Millions in revenue 3) This guy is bringing very little to the table He has no background in your area. If he's bringin money, sure. On £30k run rate you aren't hugely investible but hey, a £20k injection of cash at 20% equity might work for you. But seriously, right now you have a very early stage business and it's too early to see how his flower shop expertise would help. 4) It's really, really early for you Taking investments into agencies is usually a bad idea until you have some solid revenue. £30k is very admirable and you should be proud to be more successful than a LOT of small business owners. But honestly, just keep selling and hustling. Hire SLOW and fire fast. Move your sales reps to a basic and give them quotas. Use contractors to scale out delivery without taking on as much risk. It sounds like you have the beginnings of a great agency. but from the information you've provided and from remembering my very early days where I transition from freelancer to agency, an investor right now would be a bad move for you. Happy to jump on a call to discuss my specific experiences and how I scaled out my team and client base and then moved everything to SWEET retainers so we could sell the biz.