Unfortunately, the best answer you can get here is "it depends." On your country and state or province and primarily on the terms of the shareholder agreement / charter and also any documents pertaining to you leaving the company. Your best option is to consult a law firm in your jurisdiction to first review the core documents and then evaluate what your potential avenues are for addressing this. Best of luck. Best of luck.

Start by reviewing everything your competitors do.

Mark is wrong. I personally know of a handful of companies in that exact same situation and most importantly that have good traction and the cap table NEVER came up once, and each of these companies have raised in excess of $1m in seed funding from great investors this year. Especially if your shares are common shares and/or have no particular unique traits about a share class, and especially if you can document the time and resources your firm expended to build and maintain the service that now has traction, this will not be a problem. Investors give many excuses when they don't want to do a deal but those excuses are rarely the reason for not pulling the trigger. The issue is more likely to be that there are two business folks running a company without a technical founder, which is almost always a deal-killer but that has nothing to do with your equity share. Happy to talk to you in a call if you'd like.

I am based in Canada and ended up opening a US bank account with Harris Bank in Chicago without physically visiting their office. This was about 4 years ago. So maybe contact them and see if they could help you.

I've never built an mhealth startup, but I have spent a lot of time researching and implementing gamified product experiences. I would suggest the following resources: 1) Anything Gabe writes + videos online http://www.gamification.co/gabe-zichermann/ 2) Anything Nir writes + watch his videos online http://www.nirandfar.com/ On Clarity: https://clarity.fm/nireyal 3) Anything Amy Jo Kim writes + talks http://amyjokim.com/ On Clarity: https://clarity.fm/amyjokim These are the 3 people I turn to .. they're brilliant

What? You are obviously unqualified for this position. You need to quit and let someone else do it.

This is a very open ended question. I would need to be able to see the website in question and gain access to google webmaster tools and analytics. I can say, if you fell entirely out of Google's results, it is a major error or you were caught doing some aggressive spamming. If it was a minor drop, it may be normal fluctuations.

I am not sure of the specifics you're asking, it seems like a lot of technical data. This might help in your search for these statistics though: http://jobsearch.about.com/od/networking/a/linkedin.htm http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2014/01/21/how-linkedin-is-thwarting-your-job-search/ http://mashable.com/2014/06/19/linkedin-job-search-app/ http://www.cio.com/article/2403150/linkedin/10-linkedin-tips-to-boost-your-job-search.html

Tracking offline events is difficult. Be prepared that it will be impossible to track 100% of your offline branding efforts. For example imagine somebody sees your poster, remembers the name, googles your org and lands on your site. They will be considered organic traffic. The old way was to use different phone numbers for each poster, and measure the number of calls that each poster generated using call tracking. This is the same way that infomercials test markets/times/channels/etc... Nowadays we use websites but the process is still the same. You can use bitly codes, or multiple domain names to measure which poster drove which traffic, just keep in mind that rarely does a poster convert right away. People riding the subway or driving etc are in a completely different state of mind. You could try and attach a unique incentive to manipulate that (free t-shirt!). Alternatively you can _infer_ the success of your posters based on what neighborhoods traffic is coming from, how much on mobile, and other analytical cross sections, but you should remain skeptical of the accuracy of this process. Personally I wouldn't worry about which poster, I would just worry about posters total. If you see traffic increase and keep all other things equal then yay! Good luck!

STOP. DO NOT DO THIS.... I would never want help from someone like you. Don't get me wrong -- you aren't evil (that I know about) but you don't seem have any value that I could pay for. What would you be "consulting" a CEO like me about? How do you expect to make my business better when you don't have a clue about your own business? THAT'S THE TRUTH... Fuck the truth. If you want to get clients then you hustle -- every waking moment. You try an angle and fail and then try a different angle. You can't outsmart your way to bigger results. 2 plus 2 does not equal 4 -- it equals you going bankrupt. If you want to be successful then you need to exert massive amounts of effort to get off the ground. So get your ass out there and start asking everyone you meet: "What is that one big accounting question that's been bothering you for some time now? If I can't help you i'll buy you a cup of coffee" Then just go be a badass...

If it's generating USD $10,000 or more in MRR, then you can try listing if on ExitRound but based on your description, I think a sale at this moment is unlikely. Acquisitions like the one you're dreaming are either motivated by the book of business or an engineering team. Code is thrown away and product discontinued. So the idea that a business is going to buy you to fix the problems of the product is unrealistic. Happy to talk to you to help you determine if the business is potentially salvageable.

If you haven't already have a co-host organization or have sponsor that adds to the guest list to grow both networks. Engage a charity to co-host that would benefit in some way plus you reach their audience. Put referral program in place - bring a friend get something in exchange.

Raising capital for a game in todays world is no different then raising money for a movie as it's a "hits business". Find other people who have raised money and ask them who they got money from, then try and convince them that you'll be able to make them money with your game. It's really that simple. 1) Create a list of all games you know that have raised money 2) Cold email the CEO/Founder (tip: firstname@company.com) 3) Get them on a call for advice 4) If they like you, ask them who invested and if they'd make an intro 5) Persuade the investors you're a good investment. Outside of that, get a bunch of credit cards, ask your friends and family or max out your available credit. If you think $1 invested can generate $1.50 - then invest yourself on credit. That's how many people have done it, including myself.

No. My $0.02 is that you're over-engineering a solution to a problem that just isn't that painful to most people. And besides which, you kind of snooker yourself from a customer perspective. As a frequent flier, I always travel light. So you're not targeting the frequent flier. You're targeting the very occasional traveler who isn't aware of these weight restrictions. The idea that they are going to discover your app prior to traveling and then remember to use it every time they travel feels like a really big stretch to me. Happy to talk to you more about how to do effective customer development and validate/ideate your ideas.

The first thing you need to do is believe you can get those kinds of rates. You question is littered with reasons why you can't - but the first question you need to ask is "Is there anyone doing development living in Brazil getting paid $100+/hour for their work" - the answer is YES. So, the better question to ask is "What are they doing different then me to get those rates?" I know I've paid for remote developers + designers at the $100/hour range, and the thing that justified it was. 1) I had a budget and have paid that kind of rate in the past 2) They're past work, portfolio, online profile, and all interactions with them world spectacular 3) They had passion for their work, almost like craftman. 4) I felt I could trust that they could over deliver on my expectations 5) They were focused on doing one thing great (ex: Mobile Design, iOS Dev, Ruby Dev) - they didn't do it all. 6) Someone I trusted vouched for them. You don't need all of them, maybe 2-3, but those are some of the things that come to mind.

I've been through several acquisitions and a few IPOs. If the company is acquired, you should contact the CEO and the CFO to ask the price per share at which the company was acquired. If you have vested options, they should send you a letter letting you know whether your options are "in the money" should you choose to exercise them (your exercise price is lower than the acquisition price per share). If the company has an IPO, then look up the price of the shares and figure out if your shares are "in the money" (your exercise price is lower than the IPO price) and read through your options agreement and the company's S-1 filing to find out if there is a mandatory holding period before you can sell any shares you may purchase through your options. In an acquisition scenario, you are either exercising or not. In an IPO situation, depending upon your exercise price and the number of options you intend to exercise, there may be tax consequences you'll want to take into account and timing of exercise. If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact me.

I would look at a startup call Introhive. They have a unique approach to this issue based on personal connections. *Disclosure - I do not work for them but I have friends who do.

No one is going to get motivated by a business plan or for that matter, a landing page. Your first step as a first-time, non-technical founder must always be to prove that your idea is not crazy. This means that you must do extensive customer development as comprehensively as possible. This could be that you build a landing page that converts into hundreds of qualified leads, it could be that you have a customer that has provided at least a verbal that if you build it, they'll pay for it or better yet, is willing to prepay. At the very least, it should be 100+ recorded or verifiable customer interviews all indicating that they want the vision you're outlining. From there and only after that has been achieved, would I begin by recruiting a technical cofounder. Search through my past answers on my profile to find how to recruit a technical cofounder. You want only a commitment that if you can raise money within the next 120 days on this idea of yours, a commitment that they will join. Anything more than that, and it's likely too big of an ask. Then, you need to raise money. Enough money to fund at least the cost of your technical founder to live while focusing 100% on this for 9 months. Being a non technical co-founder is REALLY hard. It can be done but I really don't suggest most people try it as their first foray into startups. It's better to join an existing team and learn so much from being with a great entrepreneur that you admire and respect. But if you really want to jump into this, happy to do a call with you.

I have some experience in the past promoting my own services, apps,etc on Twitter. I've been able to build up a pretty good following of around 84.8K followers at the moment. I'm not bragging though because I know a lot of those followers are not targeted because of some mistakes I've done before. But I have been able to correct those mistakes and have very targeted followers now. I used to have 100K+ untargeted followers but I have been able to bring it down to 84.8K followers whose majority is targeted. It took a lot of work and I've been able to learn a lot of things on the way. You will need to have a structured plan on how you will promote your mobile app to your followers. You can't just promote it right out of nowhere just when you're going to launch. Instead give them some kind of value. Understand your potential users and what is of value to them. I can't stress enough how you need to be getting targeted followers who really care. I know it's not possible to have 100% targeted followers. But you need to try your best to have the followers who actually care and understand your niche. There a really simple way to do that and that's to only( or at least 80% of the time) tweet about things that are related and of value to your niche market. You could write a few very valuable blog posts and post that on your Twitter. I found that just promoting your product on Twitter is not enough and you could be turned off when you finally announce your launch to your followers and it just doesn't get the results you were hoping for. So don't rely on it too much. What worked for me is turning those Twitter followers to email subscribers. So what you do is give free high quality value to your followers through excellent valuable blog posts, valuable free short ebooks, etc. Your offering could be anything but just make sure that it's really valuable to your niche market. Now you need to collect their email in exchange of the value you're giving them for free(you can do this using services like Mailchimp,etc). So through this you will have built up an email list of people who are really interested in what you are offering. This is of lot more value than just having the Twitter followers. You can still tweet your launch to them but now you also have a highly valuable email list of people who are more likely to purchase. This way you've filtered your Twitter followers and captured emails from the cream of the crop! There are a lot more detailed and highly valuable lessons I've learned and I'd be happy to go in detail and answer any question you have through a call.

This one by Jason Daley on whether entrepreneurs are born or made is a great one: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/228273 Steve Blank is always an enjoyable read: http://steveblank.com/2012/06/04/entrepreneurship-for-the-99/ You gotta love this one by Richard Branson http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/09/screw-it-just-do-it-advice-from-sir-richard-branson-for-entrepreneurs/

Try and find someone your age that can code and persuade them to join you on your journey. It's either that, or learn to code. I've done both. Learning to Code www.udemy.com www.treehousapp.com + many other. Finding a Co-Founder - Go to meetups - Find a school that teaches computer science - Find someone on GitHub.com The truth is there's 100 ways to solve your problem, but it will take risk and based on your question it doesn't seem like you're willing to take any. If you believe in your idea, it may mean sacrificing school? If you're not willing to risk that, then why should an investor risk his capital on you? It just shows your conviction. Not everyone is suppose to be an entrepreneur. If you are, you'll need to step up and take action. P.S. I started when I was 17. Failed. Tried again at 19. Failed. Kept at it till I was 24. Won. Again at 29. Won. Again at 31. Still going (= Clarity). Just start.

The answer: do both. The first thing you need to know about patents is that the U.S. now has a first-inventor-to-file system after the American Invents Act (AIA) went into effect in 2013. I have to disagree with Dan above: for hardware inventions especially, a patent is an important part of the business plan. The first inventor who "races to the patent office" now is typically the winner. This means if you do not file for a patent on your invention, you can lose the rights to your invention much easier than before the AIA. The next step is to think about how a patent fits into your business plan. A patent application is but a tool in your bag when starting up. A crowdsourcing campaign on a site like Indiegogo can validate the idea. But it also puts the idea out to the public and starts the 1-year clock ticking on when you can get a patent. For hardware startups, however, if you're not thinking about a patent upfront -- you're likely leaving a massive amount of your product's value on the table.

Take the # of hours it takes you to do it and charge $50/hour. That's the price. Eventually you can charge $100/hour but that will require a bigger customer. If the customer is small < $1M in gross sales per year - charge $50/hour If the customer id medium < $1-5M / sales - charge $75 Over $5M - charge $100 The challenge you'll face is clearly defining the expectations and handoff so that you're not stuck doing stuff that you can charge for and always getting interrupted from past customers.

SaaS. Always. I am a founder of a Startup about to launch our first product (mobile app). We looked at this very question. In the end we looked at the impact the decision would have on our company's valuation. Based on my initial, informal discussions with funders in my area (Canadian Atlantic Region) with single point of sale revenue a healthy technical start up is worth approximately 4-6X annual revenue whereas the same company with a subscription or SAAS model is worth 10x and up.

Probably not but not because it's impossible to raise on a deck. Raising based purely on a deck almost only happens by seed funds backing an established team. In this case, the raise is much larger (usually between 1 to 2 million). Without a technical founder, and without you both having a track-record that inspires a lot of confidence, seed funds are unlikely to invest and they're certainly not likely to write such a small check. That leaves your options as accelerators, friends and family or angels. Most good accelerators (those writing 20k and greater checks) need product in the market to accept so id say that accelerators are likely not an option but you could try. Angels almost always want live product, at least a somewhat functional prototype, so unless you have a close relationship with someone who is also an angel investor, this is unlikely to be attractive at this stage to angels. So your best option for outside money is friends and family at this stage. Happy to talk through this in a call with you.