OpenERP and Zoho are both fragmented modular systems that can be very confusing. Without knowing your industry and complete set of needs, have you considered NetSuite, Sage, MS Dynamics, Aptean or Epicor? Aside from feature sets, implementation and ongoing support and training are critical elements to consider. The other big challenge is getting buy-in from the users. Have you considered starting with an open source or semi-custom, previously developed product and having it customized to your needs? If you would like more information, let's have a phone call so I can better understanding your specific needs and point you in the right direction. Best regards, Kevin McCarthy www.KevinMcCarthy.com

The obvious answer is that you have to create content that has value for educators. Think about the problems they have, the questions they need answers to, and write blog posts that address these concerns and answer their questions. The second thing you should do to grow your readership is to make a list of the top 3-5 sites where educators are going today to get their information, and start commenting on those sites. As you leave smart and relevant comments on these sites that educators are reading, it will increase the chances of them checking out YOUR blog. Do both of these together, and you will see your readership grow pretty quickly.

I'm going to talk from the perspective of a founder, not a lawyer. I also live in California and your state laws might defer. I think if you are putting hours into your startup, you are also an 'employee' in addition to a founder. Your board (ie. your cofounders) can decide at any time that you are not pulling your weight in the project and don't want you involved. Thus you can also be 'fired'. In most vesting agreements there's a right to repurchase unvested shares that the company has. This is essentially how vesting works. The company decides that they don't want you anymore and they have the right to repurchase from you all the unvested shares at the price they were given to you initially ( not current market price ). You can only keep the vested portion. I hope this helps

If I was going to start over, with a blank slate I would do several things differently. 1. I would hire an accountant and bookkeeper on day one. I know that on the surface it's easy to look at the cost of an accountant and justify spending those resources in other areas, however I have seen this play out horribly for a number of businesses (ours included.) An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. 2. I would make a list of all of my start up items, edit it and then edit it again. Start as lean as you can. We started our t-shirt company with basic equipment in my mom's attic and slowly moved into proper production space as we needed to, however we made the mistake of buying too much equipment early on because we thought we needed it. Get by with the bare minimum for as long as you can, get traction, customers and cash flow and then expand cautiously. 3. Don't listen to salespeople! Talk to friends, other businesses and look on the web for answers to common questions. Salespeople are great when you know what you need to buy, however often times you are going to end up wasting money that would be better spent in other places, like on your accountant. 4. Don't take on bad customers just to make a buck. If you are interested in knowing our 10 tell tale signs of bad customers, schedule a call with me and I'll run down the list. It will save you hours and it only takes a few minutes. 5. Find a team of advisors and listen to them. I wish I would have listened to advice that people were giving me for free when we first got started. There's an old saying, "if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in trouble." Find good council and listen. Hope that's helpful, I've been a freelancer and small business owner for almost twenty years and enjoy coaching startups and entrepreneurs in getting their ventures off the ground. Feel free to schedule a call and I can help get you started.

For a technical co-founder, the minimum should be 33%. If you've been paying him, there is no way he should be 50/50 but how to determine the exact number is a calculation of a lot of variables that are impossible to answer without knowing more about your situation. Most investors want to see a team in place (especially a strong technical team) so incentivizing the right person now might make a lot of sense. What is standard is for all employees (yourself included) to be vesting over 4 years, with a one-year cliff. Given that you have invested cash, that should be treated differently (not subjected to any vesting) but your "earned" equity should be vesting just the same as this developer. BUT, keep in mind that if you are only a month away from launching, you might be best to continue investing cash. After a product is validated (assuming this takes place), the amount of equity a developer should expect to earn could be significantly less than 33% and even single-digit percentages. Happy to talk through the specifics of your situation in a call.

Based on my experience, the biggest challenge is getting the right talent that can pull off a quality work, I have done this by sending out small tasks to different developers and evaluate their works after. (But I guess this isn't your issue since you have 4 yours experience of working together). The next challenge I faced was time difference. Both parties need to be flexible enough with their schedule meaning working in the evening to get things resolved right away. Exchanging email with hours/one-day-delay to reply kills the momentum and motivations. Let me know if you would love to get more information about my experience with outsourcing.

Simple answers for simple problems - Three quick options that can be used solo or together. For Amazon, you have to get in the Buy Box on the product detail page. Also, having a high amount of positive feedback and the lowest price helps - as well as shipping out for Prime customers. 1. Get a repricing script, there are lots of vendors out there. Set your ceiling and floor pricing and then reprice to be under your competitors' price. 2. Setup an inventory management solution online - that will integrate with other multiple marketplaces. Think fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), eBay, Rakuten, etc for your solution when choose something like Lettuce or UnLeashed. 3. Setup an E-Commerce store through a Shopify or BigCommerce If you are selling a ton - you could have FBA manage fulfillment. I have helped a number of power sellers online so if you need more help, I will have recommendations --

Social Proof (customer testimonials), Press or Analyst Coverage is a key driver in checking-out new tools. Unfortunately, there is such a significant number of vendors offering recruiting solutions that it's difficult to get a customer's attention, even with a free offering. I would focus on your messaging: Why are you better than similar solutions and what proof or anecdotal evidence can you offer? Also, LinkedIn ads targeting just recruiters or HR execs can be effective (though expensive). Happy to talk through this with you as I have built products in this space that have achieved product/market-fit.

It's a bit difficult to give an estimate with the information provided. I'm not sure if your question is related to adding privacy to an existing server code or you need the whole server side done. The later is significantly more cost and has an unknown scope based on only the info given. You might also want to look at platforms like Parse and see if you could get all you need done there vs a custom server side system. Happy to chat more on a call if you want to provide more info or have more detailed questions.

My preference every time is direct response marketing when selling B2B. Write things, with a compelling offer, send them to people. Start by building a database of SEO providers - they all have websites, and create a mailing list from this. Back up the direct mail campaign with awesome content marketing around the SEO space - not telling them how to do their core job (SEO) but other peripheral tools which are useful e.g. client handling, new business development, analytics to prove your success etc. If they like what you write, they'll be more open to trying your app for their clients. Happy to amplify around this area and scope out a strategy and detailed tactics for you to execute. Here's a series of blog posts we wrote around a SaaS offering which we resell http://creativeagencysecrets.com/category/feedblitz/ Should give you an idea of where to start even if you don't hire me to work with you (;-)

Depending upon what aspect of AdWords you want to automate, you can look at various tools. As Megumi suggested, Marin is a good option for bid management. You can have a look at Optmyzr (optmyzr.com) to automate account management activities. Cyfe is another option to automate reporting and building dashboards.

Hi I have ben working in the field of Mobile Marketing since 2008 and even though most of our activities has been targeted a consumer market the mechanism is much about the sam. If you could provide me with some words about what type of products you are trying to sell to whom - I'd be glad to help out. BR/Anders

I'd ask Rocco Baldassarre. He is the best online marketing consultant I've ever seen and can surely give you concrete advice. Said that, my advice would be a) your own e-commerce store so you can drive traffic to it without losing money on commissions b) learn from best selling products (you can see sales ranks of competing products if you register as an amazon affiliate marketer; it's free) and copy their structure, split test regularly Hope it helps!

While the development of a "freemium version" might help you build a customer base, it could consume a significant amount of your time and money without the assurance that your free users would every become paying customers. Since you're a one person operation, and running on limited capital, I'd suggest a different approach. If indeed you've gotten good traction with big companies, I'd approach one ore more of these companies and ask them to invest in the continuing development of your product up-front, in exchange for a significant discount on the per-user licensing costs. This will both serve as validation that your application is as valuable to your target customer base as you believe it to be, and would also provide you the additional income necessary to move forward. You might also put serious consideration into trying to find a salesperson who would work with you for either straight commission (if you expect your deals to be large enough to make this attractive), or for equity. In either case, this would enable you to significantly increase the number of paying customers you can target with your unique solution. I'd be more than happy to discuss these and other strategies in detail with you if you'd like to schedule a call with me. Good luck!

UserTesting can be instructive in terms of understanding whether people understand your copy, CTAs, and intended flows but generally, I've found the quality of their panels to be pretty low. You're almost always getting people who are not your actual users, so the feedback can only be generally applied as above. I find whatever web analytics package or packages you're using are generally able to provide much better insights. I also really do believe in *real* user panels. Buying pizza or offering small financial incentives to real users to click through new flows where they are talking out loud or answering specific questions is going to give far more actionable insights than anything else. What I like to do is take my best guesses as to what's not working or what I'm looking to improve and then discover/validate via real in-person customer panels. Happy to talk through this in more detail with you in a call.

Being a Google Partner has many benefits, but they revise them all the time. Google seems to protect their intellectual property heavy, so as a partner, you can display their partnership logo to your potential clients. Also, when they roll out new products in beta, you know before the public does. As Google products go, that's a huge benefit. They provide enhanced support when you need it as well. I also do a lot of public speaking, so the one benefit public speakers enjoy is that they let you speak at their events; a very valuable benefit to us public speakers ;) I hope this answers the question. Bruce

I consult with clients who are looking for the right outsourcing situation all the time, and the best way to get started is to figure out what kind of outsourcing partner will be the best 'fit' for your needs. After that, it's easy to find out where that type of outsourcing partner/contractor/freelance hangs out and pick a winner. Try writing up some notes about things like: 1) You mentioned you had a small budget - how small? If your budget is $1500 your options are going to be very different than if it's $25,000. Both of those could be considered 'small budgets' in the right context, so try to put a number out there. 2) You also mentioned that you wanted 'good quality, clean code'. What does this mean and are you willing to pay for that? If you are building an MVP and are really short on funds, you might have to use a less senior developer/team and take the risk of getting sloppier code - but sometimes with an MVP that's ok! If you are building a production app, that's a different story. 3) What is your technical and management expertise? Can you create specifications and manage a developer on your own (not easy to do)? If so, you can save money by using a freelancer, etc. If you are very non-technical and will need PM support, you might consider a small group or agency. 4) What does 'website development' involve, in your vision? Design? Copywriting? QA? Server migration and admin? ui/ux? 5) What is your tolerance for going offshore? You will hear lots of people saying that offshore teams all suck, and lots of people saying that they did it and it went fine. Like most software projects, there is a high failure rate but lots of success with offshore. You can save a ton of money, but you can also take a bath so you need to consider whether you are up to the challenge or not - going offshore takes much more patience, attention, documentation, etc. but it can work. 6) What are the skills/tech that you will need? It's best to get a team that is great at the skills you need. If you want a ruby site, hire a ruby shop. If you want a augmented reality site, find a team that is great at that. Watch out for the generalists :) By thinking through questions like the above, you can change your statement from "Where do you go for outsourcing website development" to something like this: "I am looking for an outsourcing partner who would be interested in a 15k-20k project that will be build in python. This application will be evolved into our production app so the quality must be good. I am a good project manager and will work with the developer on the requirements/spec side, and help test. We will need application/db design and development, server administration, and technical support but all design, content, copy, ui/ux will be provided. We will consider offshore teams but you must have excellent spoken english." When you expand your 'what we're looking for' paragraph, the whole search for outsourcing partner gets much easier! If you like, feel free to give me a call and share your 'vendor profile' with me and I can help point you in the right direction.

I've always hired only ridiculously brilliant engineers and those that were either entrepreneurs or entrepreneurially minded (i.e. attended startup weekend, contributed to open source, blogged, etc). The best way to find them is to go to the events they attend. Typically it's developer meetups, open source or programming language oriented conferences, etc. To add a heightened filter, maybe only entrepreneurial oriented events like Business as Software, StartupSchool, or StartupDrinks. Also, using Angel.co to find companies that were once listed, but didn't raise or seem to have "Sunsetted" might be a good strategy. The question I always ask myself when I'm about to do sourcing for talent, or marketing is: 1) Who do I want, or what are examples of those people in the real world? 2) What places do they go/hangout, tools do they use, news sources they read, etc? Be strict with your filters and you should find some candidates... the hard part is convincing them that your project is more interesting then their current job/project/ideas/company/etc - cause these people typically have many options for work.

I would suggest that web design services is going to have a very low conversion on Yelp. One of the best ways to advertise design is through Dribble, Behance and sites like it. Generally speaking, unless you've got a compelling offer that you attach to your campaign (e.g. free consultation), you're likely going to have pretty low conversions from typical ad networks, to the point where I don't think it would be worth the money. Happy to brainstorm some more creative ways to rise above the noise.

What an awesome question! Businesses are running into this issue more frequently that ever, good news is, it can be done. Having worked on projects with oDesk, Fox Television and Wikipedia and having a very very small staff, it's certainly possible. Here's how I say it in our pitches to larger organizations: "Tractive West provides tailored video production services to organizations of all sizes. We have developed a distributed workflow using the latest digital tools. We leverage our small creative and management team with a world wide network of creative professionals, that means we can rapidly scale to meet the demands of any project while keeping our infrastructure and overhead lightweight and sustainable." Cheers and best of luck.

Khuram's reference to what I call the "gap technique" is spot on. Few people will rate something 10/10 or A+. This gives you the opportunity to ask them how to achieve that highest rating. Once you do that: "Shut up and listen!" :) -- One of the worst mistakes is to get a participant talking (and many people talk way too much) but then to cut them off even though they're giving you substantive information (obviously, if it's drivel, then you do want to move on). You also have to assess those you survey: some are founts of information and insight while others have nothing to say. All are not created equal, as it were. In all surveys, whether in person or on-line, I recommend open-ended (i.e., unprompted) questions (where possible) followed by close-ended (i.e., prompted answers) questions. In other words: What is your favorite brand of cookie (with no list specified)? Perhaps they say Oreos. Later on, after they've forgotten that, you have a list: Which is your favorite cookie brand: a) Little Debbie; b) Mrs. Fields; c) Oreo; d) Duncan Hines? Now if those two don't match up, how valuable are these answers? So that gives you the ability to test for validity. Once you present the prompted answers, you've poisoned the well, which is why they have to come later. Hope this helps and should you have any questions, I would welcome the opportunity to discuss with you. Best, Steve

Great question. I think you'll find that most video production companies are "reputable" however the bigger question is what kind of quality do you want and what is your budget? Having been a creative and video director for 20 years, I've seen budgets from $1,000 to $100,000 for videos, for widely varying types of projects. For a simple explainer you are looking in the realm of $500-$5000 depending the on quality and customization. There are places that charge more and do amazing work but those companies are typically creating work for bigger brands. Hope that helps.

Sounds like you have a bad apple. Customer complaints should almost never be excused by "they should know better" and these seem like actual functional errors. I would encourage you to replace this person as soon as possible. Happy to talk this through in a quick call

Strange, I answered this question a few days ago here: https://clarity.fm/a/2890 but this seems to be a repost of the exact same question. Andrew's comments are spot-on about building a waiting list while you build your product. You want to be able to point to a meaningful uptake of customers and transactions early after launch. The challenge of raising VC with a product that is already launched is that the data available to investors has to be compelling enough to believe you've got all the pieces more or less in-place for significant growth with their investment. Depending on if you have a strong enough team, you might be best to not build and launch the product but get enough customer validation of the demand for you to try and raise pre-launch. Because they can always "wait" to see if in 3-6 months, you're much better than you were or if you're still at the same level. To be absolutely clear, once you launch, the burden will be on your data to show exceptionally strong and significant metrics in order for you to raise a seed round of $750,000 or more from any VC firm or fund. Dan is missing one key point in his investor analysis scorecard and it's the most important when VCs evaluate new investments, even at seed and that's TAM. Total Addressable Market. Put another way, it's "can this business become a billion dollar business?" If a VC firm doesn't believe with conviction that your business can achieve that, then you're not going to get an investment except in the rarest case where you're a proven team with enough great traction that they'll consider the seed bet a "blind to see the flop." But this is extremely rare and shouldn't be considered a possibility for most entrepreneurs. I'm happy to talk to you in a call about the realities of fundraising for startups.

Apps are difficult to fund on IndieGoGo as few are successful, and we rarely take them on as clients. Websites like http://appsfunder.com/ are made for that very reason, but again, difficult to build enough of a following willing to pay top dollar for an app that could very well be free, already existing in the marketplace. A site that is gaining more traction you may want to look into would be http://appsplit.com/. Again, Appsplit Is Crowdfunding For Apps specifically.