http://makersrow.com - this is probably your best bet. I wouldn't use a website though. I'd talk to entrepreneurs and creators of high tech textiles in the USA. Look specifically at http://titintech.com and Klymit jacket. Reach out to those founders and learn as much as possible. Both of them are really nice guys and might be better equipped to share horror stories as well. Also be sure to look at http://reddit.com/r/textiles

I've been impressed with http://subscriptiongenius.com. Best of luck to you with this endeavor!

No. In the decade plus I've been doing e-mail marketing this has never been an issue. Also, this on the sales page is a huge turn off: "Pick the most expensive plan you can."

If you are early stage then you need two things: an accountant and accounting software. When it comes to finding an accountant, find someone who understands your area of business. Most firms will meet once or twice to get a feel for your needs. In my experience, good accountants will tell you outright if their firm is a good fit for your business. Accountants can recommend great software packages as well. Most desktop software does not lend itself automation and integration. We use Xero at Picatic; which handles a lot of our day to day stuff. It has also enabled us to have better reporting to our investors. It cut down a lot of the work we were doing manually before. They have a wide selection of partner integrations to do payroll, collect money on invoices, etc. Their biggest win in my opinion is their open API. You can automate nearly everything you would need to for accounting. This is a big win for many tech startups. WaveApp is another alternative. They are "close" to releasing an API and provide many of the same services. Worth looking into as well. Online accounting has one big win, you can access it anywhere in the world. Incredibly useful tool if you are pitching your company and an investor wants to know, "Who is your biggest client?" Give me a call if you want to know more on how we are automating much of our financial aspects of our business. http://www.xero.com/ https://www.waveapps.com/ https://www.picatic.com/

I've got experience in this actually, would love to help you figure it out.

Most Software as a service vendors generally don't book annual deals except in highly specialized cases. Most customers prefer to be able to cancel/change anytime they choose. Also, deals done "offline" end up actually often being more trouble than they are worth to administrate especially for a $2988 ticket. Generally, companies don't view prepaying for SaaS products a year in advance as a "convenience" (to them) so if the debate is internal (not customer driven), I'd set this debate aside until it's requested by the customer. Most customers will request a discount to pre-pay annual service. Happy to talk this through with you in a call, to work through the specifics of your situation in more detail.

Thanks for asking this question, its a good one with little answers out there. Having been a phantom equity partner in a start-up myself, I would say phantom equity didn't give me the push to be all in as much as real equity would have. I never felt like a true partner. Reason being, the owner wasn't fully committing to me, so how could I with him. If you have the right potential partner who's quality and is going to come into your start up with all their time and heart, equity will pay off. A SARs based system works great for entry level employees that join early. Helps to justify the risk on their end. Good luck.

It depends on what you mean by 'stuck'. Emotionally or business not moving? I am going to assume the latter. Then by your business being 'stuck' are you referring to revenue growth, profitability, business not expanding, business you are in is boring or all the above? For the purpose of my answer I will assume you are referring to revenue growth. There could be many causes behind a business not moving. The key is to find the thing(s) that will get the wheels turning and then put that thing(s) on steroids so you can ramp up quickly. Some reasons why your business may not be moving are the following: - Your product/service is not meeting a strong enough need - The quality of your product/service is not good enough - Pricing is too high or too low - Your target market doesn't know about your business or your product/service - You don't have the the right members in your team to improve any of the above - You are short of funds and find it difficult to improve any of the above - Your experience and skills. Are you doing what you are good at? Therefore the way out is analysis. Objective analysis. - Speak to your customers. Existing and prospective. - Review the feedback you are getting. - Review product and site analytics if you are running an online or app business. - Try different ways of marketing. - Honestly assess the skills and ability of your team and yourself. - Of course speak to an experienced advisor. If you'd like me to assist further please give me a call

It varies and it's very very specific to what you want to develop. The concrete design of your circuit matters. Also prototype building costs are usually a factor 10-100 higher than series. If you already have your prototype then you can shop around various manufacturing companies. To do that, you need Gerber files (your PCB design) and a bill of materials. You also need to think about casing: designing it and creating the mold is expensive. If you don't have your prototype yet, I recommend having it engineered in eastern Europe. Custom engineering is cheap there and high quality. IP protection is a problem. One thing to do is to distribute the work to different manufacturers. For the design phase you are safer if you design your prototype in Europe or the US where international patent laws apply. I could give you more specific advise in a phone call, getting to know a bit better what you are trying to build.

If you want a system that doesn't require any hardware or infrastructure, then a virtual PBX is the best bet. These systems just use your existing phone numbers (cell phones or whatever) and routes the calls among them. The big player in this space is http://grasshopper.com/ They have been around for quite awhile and have a lot of features for managing calls. They're well known for their reliability and customer service. I've also used http://www.ringcentral.com/ and they are very good as well. Never had any issues and they support various softphones and hardware phones as well. I've also heard about a new up-and-comer https://aircall.io/ - But I know very little about them and they look to still be in beta. But you should definitely try it for comparison.

Meetup is a great resource for events, so that's a good start. Have a look on Eventbrite and other sites to see what sort of networking events are happening in the city. See if there are relevant LinkedIn groups that you can join and use those to find interesting people to connect with. You'll also find that a lot of the bigger/more popular groups will have news feeds with useful links to events and more. Find out what big conferences are on and head along to one or two that are particularly relevant. You'll find a bunch on Lanyrd and other sites. Ask your existing clients for intros - not leads - but just intros to people they know in NYC. Can they help you get coffee with a few people. If they can and you manage to impress those people, there's a good chance that referral will lead to some work. Cherry pick some of the people you'd like to work with - specifically ones where you think you could add real value. Reach out to them with a two or three sentence email saying hello and seeing if they have five mins for a coffee. It's never a bad thing to meet more people. Follow people you'd like to work with on Twitter and build a bit of a relationship with them that way. Use that relationship to potentially get a meeting or a coffee with that person. Maybe they can do some relevant intros or help you in some way. Be useful - if you're going to meet all these people, make sure that you provide them with some reason for meeting you. Maybe you can intro them to someone or help them with some advice or insight. Whatever it is, make sure that you have something to add into the mix. Good luck!

The patent process can be fairly expensive (depending on the product and your claims). I went through it over the course of several years (yes, you read that correctly) and it took MUCH longer than anyone projected and cost MUCH more as well. So depending upon your financial situation it might be cost prohibitive to proceed until you secure sufficient capital. Since the implementation of the FITF (aka FIF) system the rules and recommendations that stood for years have shifted. So the general recommendations you may think are good ideas may no longer apply. Know that if you DO decide to file a provisional patent you have 12 months from the date of filing to file a non-provisional patent. And if you make any changes (aka "new matter") you may have to file another provisional patent because you cannot add any new matter to the non-provisional patent. The provisional patent can be a useful tool - but depending upon the product and the strategy you are planning to execute during development and market testing - it may or may not provide the protection you desire. I would highly recommend that you consult with a patent attorney to get an idea about what's involved (i.e. costs, processes, time-frames). At the very least hire a skilled professional to do a patent search FOR you - not only to ensure that it in fact is unique but also to ensure it is "patentable". You may already know this but it's worth repeating: (1) Your fear of your idea of being "stolen" is one that almost every entrepreneur with a "big idea" holds and (2) It's far less likely to happen than you might think. I wish you the best of luck!

There is no valuation until you sell something. An idea or a company is only worth what its sales are. Once you have your initials sales, sales strategy and forecasting length (ie 9 months from first customer lead to close) then you have a formula for valuation. Valuation for start-ups is generally 3.5 x last years sales model should be the growth factor. When you are looking for investors, you will want to have atleast 9-18 months of SALES, not just pipeline and they will be looking at 5x revenue for a 3-5 year payback.

Sounds delicious. I LOVE ice coffee. My advice is to definitely generate buzz on social media as well as a series of YouTube videos of every day people using the unit and enjoying the iced coffee. Some ideas: 1. Join a coffee lovers group on Facebook and LinkedIn. More importantly, an iced coffee lovers group. There are several on Facebook for both regular and iced coffee. 2. Once you join those coffee lovers groups, definitely start talking about making iced coffee manually. Don't push the product yet, but if you have an employee who can post on Facebook every day, I suggest posting, liking, and getting into the group conversations. Make your brand known by making your presence know. 3. YouTube videos. You do not need anything elaborate, but definitely decent. Have several YouTube videos of people using the product and enjoying it in the hot outdoors. Also, a video where you can teach people to make iced coffee like a recipe and have your product in the spotlight throughout the video. I have so many more suggestions for Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Google Plus. I'd am available to provide you more solutions as well, if you are interested. Bruce

I'm a developer at Clarity and was involved in the development of this feature. This specific feature was developed in house. We keep event logs around for a log of things and this feature is built on top of that. When you visit a certain page showing interest in an expert, we'll schedule a job to send this email. A few hours later, when the job runs, it verifies a few things against other logs and we send the email if it's a good fit. These days I would take a good look at Intercom (https://www.intercom.io/) to do this. They recently came out with event tracking (http://insideintercom.io/power-of-behavior-driven-messaging) making this kind of feature a lot easier to build.

The ideal way would be to hire the engineer while the project is still under development. You and the engineer should follow up with the outsourced partner in the process. This will give hold to the engineer and later more staff can be trained in upgrading or follow on versions of the product/service.

I have been managing multiple domains/sites for my clients since a few years now and I think the easiest and best way to do it in your case would be setting up simple WordPress sites on each one of them and managing them with something like ManageWP(https://managewp.com/) . If they're niche domains, you can monetize them through ads or use them as affiliate sites. Selling them can also be also an option. If you can get the sites to look fairly nice and if they are niche domains, you can sell them on sites like Flippa(https://flippa.com/) . Overall, you have many options. I'd be glad to help you in detail through a call if you want.

A few approaches I'm currently using: 1) StumbleUpon Once you create an account, add in some interests. These can be general (e.g. "Technology") or more specific (e.g. "User Interface"). Then, at the top of the page is a big dropdown that by default says "All Interests." Pop that open then poke on the interest you're looking to get ideas for. Start stumbling and see what comes up. 2) Facebook Create a new Facebook page for yourself. It doesn't need to be public. Then, when on that page, open the "Edit Page" menu at top and choose the last item, "Use Facebook as PAGENAME." Then, use search or whatever means to find pages that post like-minded content to what you're looking for and "Like" these pages. {NOTE: Because you are "acting as" your page, YOU are NOT liking these pages, your page is liking them.} Okay, so now you should have a page that you're acting as, and you've liked some other pages. Now if you go to the FB homepage, you'll see a custom newsfeed of posts from JUST those pages that you liked (plus ads). Over on the left (in today's interface at least) there's a little arrow next to Newsfeed. Click that and switch to most recent. Voila, the freshests posts from the pages you like. You can switch back to "Use Facebook as YOURNAME" using the arrow at the very top right of the desktop interface. 3) Sharegrab.com This is from the EdgeRank Checker people. Basically, you log in and create Pods (read: groups or lists) of FB pages. Then, you can choose a pod, and a date range, and it'll show you the most "shareworthy" posts from those pages. Hope this is helpful. Please feel free to reach out to me if you need any assistance implementing these ideas, or creating a custom blended RSS feed (which is still a fantastic way to achieve your goal). https://clarity.fm/toddlevy

The answer is what you do best! I have seen from programmer to UIX Engineer to Marketing or someone who dont know any of this managing App Developing Team. As any other business knowing HR and having clear vision and understanding of the industry is most important. In generally a Mobile App StartUp should not be a very big Team, I am assuming 3-10 is ideal team size. But retaining good developer and designer in most demography is a challenge. If you have not a programmer you could hire a CTO, if you are not a marketer you could hire a CMO. But to really run a company like Pro, a insider you have to have clear idea, which language, framework platform you are using, how marketing for your specific sector. You dont have to code, but you need to have basic idea, so you could at least understand your team's work load and time frame. Or you could also have a co-founder who knows what you don't. I hope it gives you some idea. I could give specific answer if I know your specific situation. Best of luck!

Meta coins are just another name for altcoins that are issued on the ledger of another coin or cryptocurrency platform. IE Ripple, Mastercoin, Ethereum, NXT are example of standalone blockchains/legers where you can issue new coins that transact on top of that network. metacoins can also be referred to as Digital Assets, Smart Contracts, DACs, DAOs, etc. There's a lot of buzz words around altcoins, the terms are fragmented since the industry is just starting.

YOU ARE ASKING THE WRONG DAMN QUESTION.... Who cares if anyone here thinks you can make it. Do you think you can make it? More importantly -- do you have the guts to create something that is memorable in a space that has seen enough start-ups angling for consumer attention. Fair enough?

Having been on both sides of the coin, I would say trust is the first factor. Mentor the one with less experience and as he develops, your time will thereafter be freed up to work on long term strategic goals & objectives.

My first question is, how did you get these email addresses? If they physically entered them, simply store them in an encrypted spreadsheet or database for importing into a platform. Of course, the best method is utilizing an email service to initially collect those addresses.

To help you with this, look at the offers on Box's website. There would be a sales support team for general questions and getting quotes and is basically the online sales. However, based on my experience, the biggest sales activity is probably focused on Business for the integration of Box within a company's infrastructure. This is what will generate the highest margin. This clearly a job on the field, being in contact with the companies day to day.

Personally, I have always found harder to finance and than creating opportunity. It is quite "easy" (once you have the right value proposition and target customers) to sell but getting paid is way more difficult. Most small business are dying not because they are not selling, but because they are not getting paid early for their work and finally lacking liquidity for their operations. So funding is a bit like getting paid in advance. What we usually do is split the total bill in bits to be paid out gradually based on progress and well defined target. I have seen your situation before with other customers. What they did was to start developing the product with the budget they had focusing on the most interesting part and then they went with this half finished but functional product to pitch investors. And this how they got the missing part of the funding.