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.

Focus on having one place for your editorial schedule. We use teamwork.com for our project planning - but other solutions include Trello and Basecamp. Set in place working processes that force users back to the project management app for all their work. E.G. we use Teamwork as the agenda for our update meetings - it is immediately obvious if someone isn't using it or it isn't up to date with their status. Name and Shame works as a motivator. Secondly, the editorial calendar (which can be a spreadsheet of monthly activities) sets out what needs to be done in advance so you can plan. Thirdly use cloud services so there's only one version of any document you are writing. We use Google Docs and from the fall you'll also be able to do the same on Apple with their Yosemite update. One document, multiple users. Fourthly, if you want to be picky - as I am, have a file naming convention on your documents. We use date followed by client name and detail of the document. Note using a YYMMDD date format means all documents sort into reverse date order easily (the US date format does not work). How is that for starters? Get in touch if you want a 20 minute update on what you've chosen and I can try to spot any issues or working practices you may need to reinforce.

One of the considerations to answering this question is the business type, I mention this only because of the tax treatment of earnings. With an LLC or S Corp the owner pays taxes on the earnings of the business regardless of whether they are distributed or not whereas a C Corp pays its own taxes on earnings. Having said that I think the best way to approach this is to set a goal of a fixed amount (and review that annually), in order to build that fixed amount up it usually a good idea to set aside a solid number like 10% or 20% of monthly earnings. I think it's also important to set this amount and be disciplined in funding it, rather than take the approach that you will just put whatever is left over at the end of the month, taking that approach often leads to nothing happening because people often find other things to spend the money on.

As far as targeting a single high school, I don't know. But, in terms of platforms this audience uses, Tumbler, Instagram, Snap Chat & Vine would be good targets.

Hello, If you have time, I suggest that you learn coding yourself. That saves you money but takes a great amount of time to do. And if your interested, I'm a coder myself. You can give me a call and we'll discuss the details of your idea.

In my opinion, phone support is frequently requested but hardly ever needed. I worked at Twilio and as part of my role as a Developer Evangelist I responded to help desk tickets part of the week. We didn't do any phone support and we were able to help people effectively. The key is to be very detailed, thorough and courteous in all your correspondence and also to ask for clarification if you don't understand their questions. You should also have a library of online resources like documentation, frequently asked questions and forums that you can refer people to so they can easily find answers for themselves once you point them in the right direction. One caveat to all that though: I worked at another company that provided phone support but it was something you had to schedule and pay for in advance. At first, I thought it was crazy but our phone support people were busy all day helping customers. It wasn't a lot and it didn't even cover our costs but it prevented your phone from ringing off the hook and people calling to ask really stupid questions. Hope that helps! Also, if you're looking for technical advice on setting up phone support options I'd be glad to help you... over the phone! :)

Try using Geckoboard. There is definitely a time investment in the setup, but you can get a great suite of products/metrics integrated into one dashboard. https://www.geckoboard.com/

I disagree with Sal's answer that you shouldn't be pitching at conferences. I built a good chunk of my early network doing exactly that. To be clear though, Sal is right that most investors hate being "pitched" at a conference and that's because the vast majority of founders do it completely wrong. The right way is to selectively identify people that are attending that conference by screening them for relevancy and interest. It's your job to know who is in the room and to find the people most likely to be excited about what you're doing. The right way to do this is to use a combination of LinkedIn, Twitter, AngelList and Google to map attendees to relevancy of your company. You're looking for prior operational interest or successful investments that have similarities but not competitive overlap to your own business. Approaching them with a relevant and respectful opening line that makes it clear you know what they're about is a great way to start. And then either they will ask you what you're doing or you can find the opportunity to explain what you're doing. If they take interest, say that you'd love to reach-out and talk more in a few weeks time. The most important thing is not to press hard on closed doors and don't waste their time or yours trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole. The founders job is to be always raising awareness and building an army of people that are excited about and potentially helpful to the company at all times. As to the metrics that matter, Sal is correct that without knowing what kind of company you have, it's impossible to provide a useful answer to that specific part of the question. Happy to talk in more detail anytime.

There's no downside to raising on a note other than that any fundraising is time-consuming. It is becoming standard practice to raise money from angels on notes with caps adjusting upwards based on key points of the business proving more viable. The worst mistake I see many accelerator companies make is that they don't fundraise enough to really stand-out at Demo Day or whatever the conclusion event is for your accelerator. The reality of it is that there is significant accelerator fatigue and most cohorts from even top accelerators are failing to find much investor interest/enthusiasm upon graduation. Companies must really be striving to be the *most* exciting (by way of traction or evidence of viability) by the time they graduate, so raising additional money now makes a lot of sense.

10% of the total monthly sales churning on an absolute basis is near fatal. That means that within 5 months, you have 50% absolute churn per year, which reveals fundamental flaws with the service itself. Anything above small single digit churn is telling you and your team that customers are not seeing enough value in your product. I'd start by doing as many exit interviews as you can with those that have churned out, including, offers to reengage at a lower price-point while you fix the issues that matter to them. Happy to talk through this in more detail in a call.

A specific solution just came to mind utilizing wooCommerce. If WordPress is your platform, this could be very simple with a subscriptions plugin.

I own and operate several brick and mortar shops (health related) and have had good success with online strategies. By good success I mean that nearly 50% of my client base finds my business via online search. While I am certainly happy to share my strategies with you - I'd strongly suggest you do some initial work learning more about your market before taking action. If the goal is to build your business and gain more market share your strategy should include the highest probability venues that get you the highest return on investment (ROI). And this may or may not include online marketing. So social media and/or reviews may or may not be the top choices to invest resources in for your business. This will depend on the behavior of your market and your overall business strategy and business model. Of course it's up to you to decide how to build your business... You can take the "ready-fire-aim" approach and just give it a try. Just be prepared for a low probability of success using this approach. Even with excellent execution you'll potentially burn through valuable resources (time and money) that you could have otherwise spared if you were more patient and strategic. A wiser approach would be to invest in learning WHO your market is and where they are looking for your service or where you can find them to educate them about your services. And this will ideally be a part of your overall business strategy and the business model you constructed. Doing this initial work will save you time and money. In my opinion it's one of the best investments you can make in your business as these factors will all other business activities (including marketing) to give you the greatest probability of success and the greatest ROI. I am happy to help you with both approaches (though I'd strongly suggest the latter). Give me a call if you'd like to explore this further. If you are interested - message me and I'll send you a code for a free 30 minute consultation here on Clarity. I wish you the best of luck and massive success!