Sorry to be a bit blunt in my answer, but the client hired your "e-commerce web agency" to do e-commerce conversion optimization, yet your company doesn't know how to do e-commerce conversion optimization? Perhaps have a conversation with someone in your company or talk to your manager or the agency principal and encourage them to hire for e-commerce conversion optimization expertise. It's an entire discipline requiring years of experience and track record in driving higher conversions for e-commerce sites (in my opinion). In lieu of that, how many marketing dollars are going to be spent to drive traffic to the site and who is managing that part? Often new start-ups will spend so much of their dollars BUILDING the site, they don't leave much money to spend on AdWords or other methods to drive traffic to it. The amount of traffic will help determine how many tests to run and how often. Usually we start with two very different landing pages (do you have landing pages?), then fine-tune the split testing down to things like headlines and photos. The checkout pages, especially any pricing pages, are also critical in the testing. Is it a brand new concept or established product/service? If brand new, it will take very well-crafted pages to get visitors to pay money for something (vs. a trial). If established, why is your product best and why should I buy now? You should map out the conversion flows to the confirmation page (success page) and measure the drop-off or conversion rates at each step. Test different elements/pages at each step. Also measure things like average cart size (if more than one product), revenue per transaction and long-term customer value. Hope that helps. Best wishes to you!

Answer to question one: If your celebrity curators are big enough names and are really committed, there is a small chance that you could raise a seed round of $750k or more pre-launch. That said, a number of "celebrity-supported" ventures have had very mixed to bad results so it could cut either way so it's more likely that you will want to raise on a rolling convertible note with anyone who is willing to believe in your vision and ability to execute. Answer to question 2: The closest parallel I know to an entrepreneur is a special forces operator. The risks they take despite knowing the tremendous risks with every mission is similar (at least in mindset) to that of an entrepreneur. And especially being unmarried with no kids, you are in an ideal situation to take big risks. I'd be happy to do a call with you to give you more specific advice relevant to your idea.

I am currently working on a similar project to the auto tagging software for a client that would like similar functionality on Facebook. I think this is very useful especially with the two requests I have received from two different clients about developing this. Tagging is important, because it makes a website or social network pop more. With auto-tagging, anyone in a photo can be identified and it makes any website more user-friendly if you think about it. Bruce

Either find a partner with money to help you out or use services like Kickstarter.com If it was me, I would first learn everything I need to know about launching a transactional website (if you are able to sell your product online and ship it ). Websites like Shopify.com make it possible for anyone to get their product online. From there, if you do not have any money for ad spending, start using social media and other sites where your target clients hang out. Get involved in those communities. This will help you get discovered. I would try my best in selling the product within my network first so that when I decide to raise money for marketing, I actually have some numbers to show for it. Hope this helps.

I don't think there's a best practice, similar to how much you should charge for your B2B SaaS company, cause it really depends on the market size, cost to deliver, and perceived monetary value you're offering via your API. That being said, the way I've baselined any pricing for my products has been to look at 100 companies that share similar customers and pricing model and either look on their website or email their sales team and ask directly. Even if you get 10% response that's enough to get you started.

Little costs, huge market, positive innovation climate, partnerships opportunities, capital

Say you are releasing one feature. Now imagine you release ten features at once, and you manage to introduce ten serious bugs. If that happens, you probably have more to worry about than your release strategy, but it illustrates the point. In agile software development, we often talk about the importance of delivering value. What that means is getting the result of expensive development hours out to users as soon as you can, rather than storing them up in unreleased repositories. You are almost ready to release, and someone says, “feature x is nearly ready, can we just get that in as well.” And when feature x is done, you may as well wait for feature y. Consider a new feature in the app that requires a change to a backend API. Let us say you have added the feature to your code, but the new API has not been released yet. If your app does not work without that API feature, you are now in a position where you cannot release an update. This also blocks the release of subsequent features and makes it much harder to release emergency fixes. You will need to test your app, archive it, upload it to the store, prepare the store page with marketing information and screenshots, put your app through review, and finally release it to end-users. If your release takes too much effort, you will be reluctant to do it frequently. If you’re in a position where something is stopping you from releasing, it’s easy to end up in a feedback loop. This is a simple strategy, where you decide when you have enough features to release. Once the features are completed, you make the release. It can be hard to get your code in a releasable state, with everyone in the team lining up finished features together. Rather than being a release strategy per se, this is an entire delivery framework. In scrum, teams work in sprints. These are regular, time-boxed intervals, typically around 2–4 weeks. The features to be delivered are agreed upfront and released at the end of the sprint. On the downside, scrum introduces heavyweight processes and ways of working that can slow you down, so I wouldn’t recommend it for teams that are already working well, or where there isn’t a problem that needs fixing. Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath

It depends on your needs. Have you explored SalesForce or Infusionsoft?

I might suggest starting with Bitly and exploring the possibility of getting a custom branded shortener, which you can set up through Bitly once the domain is purchased. For example, my website is philpallen.com but I shorten all links to philp.al/link so it's more professional. I feel like many other shorteners look like spam, but I'd say your safe with Bitly because it's widely used. A custom one would be even better!

I think BuiltWith will do this for you. Plug in the domain and it will tell you which technologies it is built on. Most of the well-known video sites are custom jobs, but I'm sure WP could do what you want.

Companies that will have the resources to setup and manage a large aggregated program will most likely be large public companies whose existence as a company won't go out of business and their points are trusted to be usable. A place where you can buy from one entity and use among many entities: points.com and American Express.

I'd need to understand a bit more about your business, but I suspect one answer is to work toward getting an accounts receivable-based credit line. Amazon is a good company that pays it's bills. Lenders will either loan against the Amazon receivables or buy them from you at a discount. This approach is expensive but if cash flow is your issue, worth exploring.

The best way to raise money is using websites like indiegogo.com or www.kickstarter.com Another approach is to put ads on your website (even though it's not done yet) and add a donation option to your website.

If you want full control for the checkout, Magento is probably going to be the best option. You can also do it with woocommerce. The woo checkout has gotten better and you can tweek it to improve conversions, but you will get more flexibility (if you have a developer) with Magento. Saying which system has the best conversion rates between those two, BigCommerce and Shopify is hard to say because there are too many factors. To get the best conversions in your cart, the tips would be to ensure you QA the full experience thoroughly on every browser and every device and then iterate consistently to find ways to push more people to complete the sale. You can also use Qualaroo to find out why people do not convert.

STOP!!! DON'T DO IT. GO GET A REAL JOB!! PLEASE! You don't plan to be a consultant. You become a consultant because the experience and wisdom you have is so obvious that those around you are eager to pay you for your insight. It's a calling -- not a job. Giving your "business advice" to a startup is like telling a 2-year-old to go "poo poo in th potty" -- anyone can do it. You just have to be a little bit more sophisticated than a baby. To service people who have money (and who are serious about how they spend that money) you need to take you game to a whole new level. I suggest you intern or partner with an amazing consultant who does this already. Learn. Do the gritty work that no one else is wiling to do. Everyone is a coach. Right? Drink a beer on game day and you supposedly know more than than the dude on the sidelines with the clipboard. But is that "really" the case? Of course not... DON'T BE A COACH. BE A LEADER.

This is a great question, and my best Googling / Amazon-searching efforts aren't turning up much. Maybe time to write that book :) After considering this one for a bit, I can also imagine why this would be a tough book to write. With browser technology iterating relatively quickly, and with new CSS features continuously developing, any resource that dives into specifics (specific browsers, specific features, specific issues, etc) would inevitably be out of date within a matter of years, if not months. This isn't to say there can't be great resources on designing across browsers, just that talking specifics can pose a unique challenge (although perhaps great incentive to release new editions of the book each year!). That said, here are some resources that I've found helpful and somewhat timeless in their advice. Some are more general in their discussion of best practices and considerations, while others are more specifically issue- or browser- related. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/07/the-principles-of-cross-browser-css-coding/ Smashing Magazine (June 2010) - a great article that covers general approaches to creating CSS/HTML to work across browsers as best as possible - an oldie but goodie. https://www.modern.ie/en-us/category/code-with-standards Internet Explorer (November 2013) - somewhat ironically, Internet Explorer has a great article on fundamental best practices for ensuring you have to do as little browser troubleshooting as possible late in the game. http://css-tricks.com/search-results/?q=cross+browser CSS Tricks (search archive) - when I have a CSS issue I'll often turn to CSS Tricks. If you want a good overview of general cross-browser issues to watch out for, this search results page gives a good top-level perspective. Like I said, there are lots of great articles out there covering all the issues and solutions surrounding something like IE8, but they'll be somewhat irrelevant in the coming years (e.g. https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/blog/cross-browser-development-tips-css). So no book recommendation, alas. Hopefully some of these links might be helpful. If not, I'm serious about writing that book :)

Its a combination of the First Data Offerwise Platform and the CardSpring API. You need to get certified by First Data in order to get access to the datasets required to build a service like that.

I recommend a cleanse. It should not be a knee jerk reaction, but should be calm and calculated. There is a wonderful blog post about this at http://realitywithrashell.blogspot.ca/2009/05/life-enema-try-it-youll-like-it.html

A couple of things: 1) Picking a co-founder should be treated as seriously as picking your wife or husband. So the best way to avoid conflicts is to really date as long as possible. 2) 50/50 splits almost *never* work between co-founders. Unless you are already very close friends with a lot of arguments and challenging scenarios behind you, I think co-founder scenarios that are most healthy are where there is a decisive difference in equity (in excess of 60% to the one Founder). 3) 4-year vesting & shareholder agreements ensure that if a Founder leaves or is fired, the remaining unvested shares are cancelled. The idea of a class of shares specific only to you is a *really* bad idea. It makes you appear unfavorably to others (especially potential investors) and absent massive traction, a deal-breaker for anyone but incredibly unsophisticated investors. I would also be remiss if I didn't answer your question by asking you to reflect deeply on your own involvement as a leader and whether the differences of opinion could and will be handled differently with other employees and co-founders. The best founders I know encourage differing points of view and are willing to change their own opinions when presented with stronger options than their own. Obviously, I don't know you so or the individual(s) you were involved in but ultimately, every move a startup makes is the Founder's responsibility. Happy to talk in a call if you have any questions.

Assume 1,000 air conditioners are sold each year, 50% of housholds have a smart phone, and 25% of households with a smartphone have wifi. Then your potential customer base is 1,000 * .5 * .25 = 125 customers. But that's a top down analysis; generally, bottoms-up analyses are more robust.

I hold scrum meetings with my developers and tech team every day, so I think a good agile software and a disciplined project manager are probably the best source for scrum and learning about it. There is nothing like a good project manager to act as a scrum master, but one experienced specifically in scrum itself. I have personally utilized YouTube as a good source for scrum meetings, but do not forget that Agile is also the counterpart to scrum meetings. If you'd like to speak about this in more depth, I'd be more than happy to work with you and show you what scrum resources have worked for me. Bruce

There are quite a few issues multiplying apps on the app store itself. So I'd save that for a time when you have some very precise discovery to do. My recommended growth hack strictly for a short-term test is to price the app on the store at the lowest figure you want to test, while naming a range of prices in the FB ad set. Your data is going to come from the FB ad clicks, and conversions in the app store are going to be unreliable as whatever price was shown on the ad, the user is going to see the fixed price. This method lets you test multiple prices very easily, and if your budget allows for a reasonable volume you can even do a little covariant analysis to estimate the value of top features.

I heard of a startup that recently launched called http://sketchdeck.com that has become pretty popular for fundraising decks. Happy to do a dry run of your pitch with you in a call.

I would focus on having each page optimized in such a way to serve your target client within each specific geo location. Simply make sure they don't share duplicate content.

Generally bootstrapped startups should avoid salespeople, for a few reasons: a. they typically can't afford the base and overall comp required to attract sales people who can actually sell / or afford to support them with marketing, management, etc b. it will be very difficult to find the rare person with the right mix of sales and startup DNA along with the critical domain knowledge, consequently the startup is likely to settle c. the founders need to be very involved in the selling and customers will demand it That said, if the plan is still to hire a salesperson, find someone who has demonstrated sales success in startups and is excited by the early stage in company building. Create a comp plan heavily leveraged on sales results (unless you are in an industry where 100% commission is a common practice, would recommend against $0 base as this creates the false impression that your hire isn't passing time with one company while looking for another job with a richer comp plan - you want your rep focussed). Sell the vision and opportunity to be part of a growth story. I have written a several blog posts on hiring sales people into start-ups. You might find these useful: http://www.peaksalesrecruiting.com/ceo-question-should-i-learn-to-sell-or-hire-a-sales-person/ http://www.peaksalesrecruiting.com/start-up-sales-and-hiring-advice-dont-stop-selling-once-you-hire-your-first-sales-rep/ http://www.peaksalesrecruiting.com/hiring-start-up-sales-reps/ http://www.peaksalesrecruiting.com/startups-and-salespeople/ Good luck!