See my earlier posting on 3 tiered memberships and backend purchases of goods and services. If you don't think about your backend you can work your backend off with little or no profit to show. Michael T. Irvin NoHogWashMarketing.com michaelirvin.net

Video marketing - make a video talking about a typical problem your niche faces and post it on youtube. Choose the key words carefully. Make sure your phone # is in the video title. Forum marketing - find forums which your target market is gathering on. Answer their questions. Develop a reputation. Have a signature or profile page that leads them to talking wtih you. Linkedin/Facebook marketing - Get into groups your target market is in. Engage with them. Develop your rep as the expert. Each of these costs your time, but you can generate leads and sales with them.

Instead of looking at who does what .. why not look at the things that need to get done for a small techology team. Product: 6 people - 3 full stack engineers - 2 front end developers - 1 designer / product person Marketing & Community, 1 person - Full time hire, or CEO Support & Operations, 1 person - Part time hire, or CEO + Whole team I believe it's important for everyone on the team to help with support. Also, if you have a great product, then support shouldn't be that taxing. Q&A is usually needed when you have a bad development process (no unit testing or continuous integration deployments). Outsource everything else. - Bookeeping - HR stuff - Legal - Government program paperwork Hope that helps. P.S. I would put as many people on product as that's where you'll get the most bang for your buck.

I think you should give equity to anyone who's going to have an impact on your team. That's true for engineers, designers and especially marketing people. Some of the most important people are marketers - however, the best marketers are more product marketers then just a PR / community person. Equity usually vest over 4 years, so there's 0 risk in issue equity to anyone ... cause if they don't perform, just let them go and no big deal. Hope that helps.

My vote is to kill it. Focus your team on what's important for your business. Just because it's done is not a reason to keep it. I always think. If the feature is not helping the product achieve its primary goal, it most likely getting in the way of it. It's really hard but keep your product focused and trim fat when possible. You and your Team should be ready for it. Clear goals help this process.

The amount of people who pay others over the phone for advice around the world. - Lawyers - Consultants - Coaches - Advisors - etc. So it's VERY big.

If you want information that matters in "Creative Financing Techniques" find a person with the experience/insight. Most of what is in books is dated. Many of the more creative methods are a function of current tax code and market factors (like QE).

As you can imagine this is a vast question. The key elements are to be able to pay attention in 4 different ways simultaneously: 1. Diffuse Focus: You must keep an open mind to give you a global vision of what is happening within and outside of your business. This means keeping up with industry news but also knowing what is going on outside of your normal frame of reference. Keeping this global vision helps you take better mid & long term strategic decisions without being overwhelmed by daily pressure. 2. Narrow Focus: You must keep a very narrowly focused set of priorities and short term action points based on your mid & long term strategies. Having a precise laser focus of activities helps increase day to day performance and return on investment. This is the way to grow in a lean way as well as to manage employees successfully. Having a clear narrow focus is the key to get things done. 3. External Focus: Being able to take distance from your business and taking unemotional decisions helps you take the right strategic decisions. You must be able to step away from your baby and do what is best for the business rather than holding on to the past. It is easy to become to attached to certain aspects of our business that is detrimental to the well being of the business. Taking an external focus helps you get distance and take the right decisions. 4. Immersed Focus: By being in touch with your personal vision, values and goals, your business becomes more than simply a cash cow. Knowing why you believe that your business adds value to the world and communicating it with your employees gives a meaning to their work. The best way to inspire others and to keep motivated through the difficulties of running one's own business is to be in touch with the meaning of what you do. If you can pay attention to your business in these 4 different ways simultaneously, you will stay on top of all the moving parts. This means you will be able to simultaneously understand what is going on in your industry at a macro-level, as well as how to manage employees, deal with customers, keep track of finances, and update your strategies to maximise success.

I think if you're going to pursue a studio approach, you should assume that you will not be able to raise much in the way of outside equity funding. Most investors do not want to invest in a team that is pursuing multiple projects at the same time for a variety of reasons. To the extent that any of your apps have demonstrated any kind of initial traction, there is a reasonable chance that you can recruit competent growth professionals who could be compelled to take a big portion of upside, but I'd caution that true experts (as defined by people who have done it more than once at 100,000 plus users) would rather do this for their own app or be a cofounder in the overall venture so be careful about professionals who present themselves as experts who are all too willing to venture for a largely performance-driven deal. With regards to proof points for funding, assuming you want to abandon all others in favor of the one that gets the most traction, I've written several related answers here on Clarity about the benchmarks for angel and seed funding so I encourage you to review my profile and look at previous answers. If you'd like to talk by phone, I'm happy to help.

This is an incredibly convoluted scenario that I would suggest is likely not worth the trouble. Let's first start with the equity. Let's assume that the current value of the domain you wish to acquire is $40,000. They want $20,000 and 2% of your company. For the example's sake, let's also assume your company is currently valued at $1,000,000. Now you go raise a seed round at $5,000,000 pre-money, so the value of that equity you gave up is worth $100,000. Now let's fast-forward a few years and you've just finished your series C round that values your company at $100,000,000. To buy a domain name, you gave away equity that ended-up being worth $2,000,000. I encourage all entrepreneurs to think about this type of scenario when "spending" equity on anything. Your question gets even more stranger when asking about a mechanism by which these shares can be repurchased. Why would they agree to cap their upside in equity? That defeats the whole purpose of taking equity in lieu of cash. Lastly, even if everyone agreed that this domain name was exceptionally valuable, a complex agreement around it would certainly give many investors pause, and might result in investors negatively perceiving this deal. So unless really your whole company is dependent on this domain name, then I'd suggest you find the cash they want to fully purchase the domain name without any strings or find a different domain name. Happy to talk to you about any of this in further detail.

The best thing to do is to do physical, on-the-ground outreach. Part of the success of Tinder as well as many other apps before it were that they threw great parties and events on or near college campuses. The promise of free booze, free food, or really free anything will draw a crowd. Start in your own backyard and then recruit "college ambassadors" and pay them a small flat fee to host the parties and provide them a small incentive structure to hit a certain number of registered attendees. Happy to talk through this with you as I've had some success with college and high school outreach initiatives in the past.

It sounds like you have a wound care physical product? Is that correct? Who will b the end user? Nurses in home health? Hospital nurses and general and trauma surgeons? Who buys products for these end users? Cmo of large health systems? Ultimately, you may need to consider cardinal health, McKesson for distribution? How will you manufacture this product? Check out alibaba for starters. How much will your customer pay for this product? How is it better than what they are using now? Will this product allow burn victims to be discharged earlier? Will it reduce hospitalization in nursing home residents? You will need to assemble a team, probably an MBA for starters... What is the total addressable market? Start a conversation with the buyers for your local healthcare system and ask them their pain points in wound care? Work with a local physician who might be a champion user and persuade administration to try a pilot with your product. In short get one customer who will pay a certain price for it, consider presales, like tile is doing now. This should get you started! Once you have these answers you may be ready for a grass roots fundraising campaign on medstartr! I am happy to help! Best, dr hodge

I co-founded and owned what became the 13th largest Century 21 franchise in the USA. I did the majority of the training. We hired hundreds of new and experienced agents each year maintaining an average active agent count of around 95 in our single office. Here is some of the advice I gave each prospective or new recruit. 1. Make sure you have a cash reserve to cover your personal and real estate business overhead for 3-6 months. 2. Treat your real estate business like you are in business for yourself even though you are not by yourself. Sound business principles still apply. 3. Networking and relationship nurturing are the keys to the kingdom. Prospect, prospect, prospect. (The agents that were proactively prospecting for clients were three to four times more successful than the ones that merely placed ads and waited for the phone to ring.) 4. Avoid the busy-work-trap. That is, do all the non-income producing work during non-prime time hours. If you can be prospecting, showing property or writing contracts, do it. Don't organize your desk, configure your CRM, write your ads, etc., in lieu of the activities that will earn your income. This happens more frequently than you might think. 5. Ignore the naysayers. My best agents earned between $250,000 and $500,000 regardless of the housing market or economy. Ironically, some of them were "intentional" naysayers. It was part of their strategy to discourage the new people. 6. Become a student of the business. Attend every conference available. Read every book. Listen to the CD's/DVD's on how to master the art of selling real estate (to borrow a title from Tom Hopkins). I've traveled the country training real estate agents & brokers. Give me a call if you have any further questions or would like a coach to accelerate your learning curve and success rate. All the best! Kevin McCarthy

Please clarify ;) the situation : - do you have a contract with developers ? - do you own the app ? or does it belong to the developers until you pay them ? - why are the developers asking payment ? - do you have a running app ? which needs does it covers ? - did you set a company ? - who are your investors ? why they don't help you ? what do they expect ? - do you have schools using your app (even for free) ? - can we see the app features ? - how many competitors do you have ? what is your unfair advantage ? - why did you spend one year on this without a real customer ? - why are you looking for a company rather than paying customers ? - who are your customers ? - what are the 3 main problems you solve for your customers ? - do you know schools that uses classroom management apps ? which apps ? how much does it cost them annually ? - do you want to stop or continue this project ? - have you ever heard of "Lean Startup" ?

1) Finding someone I can trust to fix things that go wrong (PS: If you are doing anything in the energy/HVAC/integration space I have a lot of experience in that part of the home market)

You could ask Vincent http://clarity.fm/vincentroy if you have anything further to discuss.. but here's the short version. We built custom code for all our trigger emails & notifications, and use www.sendgrid.com for SMTP API. We looked at others, but I'm friends with the founder at SendGrid and like them personally. For free, you can use Google Mail api (if you send less then 500 messages per day I believe). It's simple / and gets great deliverability. Hope that helps. P.S. The emails I write, hence the personal feelings .. it actually comes from me.

Do you have anything to show him? Find out what his timeline is and what his goals are and see if you can deliver Also make sure this fits your own goals (Have you set any?) What are the delays in your development pipeline? Will this interest help resolve any?

Your question is very interesting and gives me a feeling you have a real commitment for success because it makes me feel you care for your team. If this question could be fully answered in a couple of lines, you can imagine all managers and executives would lead their teams successfully. The 2 key principles to remember are: 1. Everyone is different: you have to adapt to each individual. It is time consuming but pays off in the long run because everyone has their own learning styles, speed and attitude. Take the time to have 1:1 conversations about them as individuals: likes and dislikes, under what conditions they perform best, how they learn most easily and about their career goals. 2. Create a team spirit. This is the exact opposite of point 1: as much as you recognize everyone as individuals, you have to also build unity and cohesion. There has to be standardized rules of behavior, common values and a shared vision. You have to take time with your team as a whole. This will lead you to create: 1. A personal development plan for each individual in your team, which helps you develop a tailored approach for each person, create reward & recognition systems and monitor people's happiness and performance. This helps you understand your team from a micro-perspective. 2. An organizational development plan for your start-up to give you a more global vision of the talents you need to acquire, retain and grow. This helps you understand your team from a macro-perspective. Team building requires taking time for all the different aspects of bonding: forming, storming, norming, performing, mourning. It's always about balancing two extremes: On one hand you want to take time to work together and alone, to learn & grow, to brainstorm, to create, to plan, to prepare, to research and to measure performance. On the other hand you, you also want to take time away from the office to stop & think, take time to have fun, take time to get to know each other, take time to rest & relax. Do you need any guidance to build individual and organizational development plans that will support growth and team building for your start-up?

Having looked at your website, I'd suggest that an overhaul of your site is likely required prior to spending too much on new initiatives. I find the overall messaging of the site confusing and somewhat inconsistent with the description you've provided in your question detail. I'd be happy to share my feedback in more detail with you and if you find that you agree with that feedback, provide you some simple actionable steps you can take to put yourself in good position to grow your company and take it to the next level.

I think the premise of your question is wrong. The best way to recruit experts that are most likely to be helpful is not by building a Board of Directors. Being on a board has a tremendous set of responsibilities that most people aren't prepared to take-on initially. Furthermore, most early-stage investors believe that a working board is "overkill" for companies that haven't raised at least $1m in seed funding, so you might be exposing yourself to negative signal by actively building a board. Given that you live in SF, you probably have already experienced the tremendous spirit of helpfulness that exists throughout SF and the Valley. If you are able to get through to people you consider a potentially good mentor, you'll most always be able to get at least a 30 minute coffee. If there's strong personal chemistry between yourself and a mentor, they might be willing to formalize an advisory relationship where in exchange for equity, they might agree to do more work for you including making introductions. But I'd be very cautious about formalizing a board relationship with anyone at this early stage. I find LinkedIn and AngelList to be very powerful when combined. AngelList can be used to find people who are actively investing and advising, and LinkedIn is a better means of cold contact if you make your request contextually relevant. Happy to talk to you in a quick call to share more of what I've learned in recruiting great advisers and investors.

Generally speaking for early-stage companies with less than $1m in total funding, boards function on a very bare bones basis. They would convene *at most* 4 times a year (and 4 would be atypical) to pass resolutions that require board approval. I believe you were the same person who asked about recruiting board members. If you have questions that remain upon reviewing my two answers, happy to do a quick call to provide you further clarity.

I recommend that you get technical cofounder as soon as possible. Using a contract developer to create a prototype is ok but keep in mind that startups need to iterate and be very flexible in the early stages of company/product development. A contract developer works best on a fixed spec and will be hard to adapt without a lot of extra costs and frustration on both sides. Go get a tech cofounder, somebody invested in your product and willing to be flexible and adapt as you discover what your product really is.

We use sprout social. They have a free tier and pretty complete. http://sproutsocial.com

Most advisors get between .25% to 1%. 1% assumed they are VERY important and will be active in either recruiting or raising capital (2 of the most important areas). Advisors don't do it for the equity - at least they shouldn't - what they want more than anything is recognition from you publicly that they've been helpful to you + feedback loop (follow up) that you're listening and implementing their feedback. Hope that helps.

For background, I'm an active board member for two charities, am a past board member of CIRA (which runs the .CA domain) and am a graduate non-profit governance essentials course from the Institute of Corporate Directors. I also built Canada's first crowdfunding website that distributed over $3m to charities from over 115,000 members and in the process interacted with literally hundreds of charities on social media and cause marketing. Every board member needs to be willing and able to raise funds. I believe that every board member of a small non-profit (less than $250,000 in operating budget) should be able to raise at least 10% of the annual budget. Also important is values alignment ensuring that the board member understands and agrees with what the organization stands for. Finally, as much as is possible, ensure that each board member brings a missing skillset. Social Media competency in one, accounting in the other, for example. Final piece of advice is that good board members should be hard to get. The commitment of time and energy is significant and so therefore, anyone who is willing to join without much convincing or discussion is probably someone who isn't going to be prepared to do the heavy lifting. Happy to talk to you in a call about board composition or anything else. I have a huge passion for helping the non-profit sector and especially grassroots organizations like yours.