Identify why freelancers would be willing to join a paid community when there are so many free communities already available to them. In order to get people to join and stay they must know what value you can bring that they can't get elsewhere without paying. It is difficult to keep people active even in free communities. Charging them for the privilege is a tougher challenge. Either way, it is typically the leader(s) who keep things going. In every group I've ever joined or started when I stopped driving the bus the groups faded and died. You may be, hire, or partner with strong leaders who become a major attraction. Freelancing is very broad, so unless you bring on other experts you might consider narrowing your focus to a specific type of freelancing skill or at least start out in a particular industry.

Just because two people are connected to each other on LinkedIn, doesn't mean that these two people have a strong connection to one another. So first, ask your Mentor directly whether (s)he knows this person well enough to make an introduction. Also, I'd suggest that instead of asking that the introduction be made via LinkedIn, that the introduction be made directly via email. The way this best happens is to email your mentor with a two paragraph email explaining why it is that you want an introduction to this person and explaining why you think this person would want to meet with you. Then your mentor can forward this email directly to this person with a request for an introduction. If the person replies to your mentor, your mentor will then connect you two directly. If the investor is interested enough to accept an intro, then you'll likely get a 30 minute to 1 hour in-person meeting or call scheduled. In terms of what that investor will be looking for, I've written a lot of answers to questions around seed-stage financing that I encourage you to review. I'm happy to schedule a quick call to give you some specific feedback on where you're at and how investors might perceive your progress to date. Best of luck with this connection!

This is a good question and always pops up in many projects. We always try to look at the customer life time value as the long term KPI. In most businesses 20 % of your valuable customers account for 80 % of the overall sales. It helps to identify those customers, by setting up a clear funnel analytics over a longer period of time and measure each conversion step. : from visit to registration, to sales, to repurchase and so forth. Also take into account the value of each sale. A customer that had to register to purchase, has shown a bigger commitment and might become more valuable in the long run. Many times it is quite easy to get registrations, what counts is the sales. On the other hand with registrations you have a valuable database you can retarget potential customers. I guess you should try, analyse the results and continuously optimize. Moreover this also depends on your kind of product and the traction you want pursue.

Not sure there is a definitive, one-size-fits-all answer, but I can give you my experience. I've had much better success with multiple touch points than the single blast. I would specifically target folks who opened, but didn't click the first email, and send them a second email with a modified message. If you have any more details, I can probably dive a bit deeper.

One of my favorite issues! My company builds community tools for gamers & game developers. I end up thinking about and dealing with these issues a lot. Mobile communities are a completely new frontier. Frankly most of the technology is poor. The vast majority of mobile communities have been ported over from long standing web technologies. In terms of moderation there has really been a paradigm shift away from handling it through volunteers or employees toward hiring professionals. Many firms have sprouted up to fill this void. You'll see publishers, marketing firms, PR firms, and agencies offering community management/moderation as part of their suite. There are also firms that exclusively handle this. I could dig into this issue more with some more details. Community management is a giant topic that has really exploded recently. I'll recommend lighthouse.io which is a community about communities!

Your question indicates that you actually have more than one issue: 1) Feeling guilty when you're not working. 2) Being unable to scale yourself. You must give yourself permission to take time away or you will feel burnt out. While a strong work ethic is essential to success, working constantly is counter-productive. Schedule time off on your calendar and take it. You will find you get just as much done because you will be more focused when you're working. Service businesses can be scaled by collaborating with others who can take some of the workload. Plug into our collaboration so you can meet other entrepreneurs who can take on work you aren't as qualified to do or cover for you so you can take time off or in emergencies. We share workloads to smooth out the feast or famine issues that come from being a small freelancer. Working with others will free up time so that you can implement the excellent advice offered by Laura Lee Rose. If you're already working too much you will need to prioritize and delegate (or turn away work that is not a good fit) so that you can create ways to increase your income in fewer hours. If you would like to see our collaboration and find out how it works feel free to contact me.

B2B or B2C, at the end of the day.... you're dealing with "P2P" People to People. If your message is relevant within the context, you will get a high rate of response. Based on our experience, we start by doing research into the demo and where they live. And create highly targeted video campaigns that: 1) Brand your company and what they do 2) Act as drivers back to your site, to create a funnel. This accomplishes two things. First you build awareness and have people asking for your product by name. Second, the video message would be highly-relevant as we would have placed contextually, relevant to the things they were reading. Feel free to reach out for more information.

- Underestimate the hours - Fail to set expectations - Do not communicate well and on a regular basis - Avoid face to face even if they can take out the time

If you haven't fully tested your app with the 100 individual accounts Apple allows you to test via TestFlight or Hockey, then I'd suggest you should test thoroughly with your email list before launching to the app store. Things to look for at this early-stage: Activation and Breakage Points: From app download to user onboarding, where are people getting lost? Your goal is not only to have them download the app, but complete whatever steps for them to become your user. Optimizing the flow to ensure maximum conversion is a key first step. Engagement: How often are they completing the tasks you deem most important based on your business model? How can you increase this number? User Understanding: How clear is the app's UI and messaging? Where are they getting lost? Virality: While true virality is hard to measure at this stage (given the constraints of pre-launch testing), you can evaluate the potential effectiveness of any distribution tactics you might employ (contacts, OAuth's etc) in terms of user opt-in and conversion issues. Real analytical data is easier to interpret than user interviews but there is a such a treasure trove of good customer development intel from customer interviews. Those first 100 people who download the app should be personally interviewed about their experience, what they like, how much it solves their problem, how much of a problem that is for them in the first place and so on. Before you go live in the app store, I highly recommend you max out your installs in a private testing environment. I'm happy to talk this through with you in more detail in a call.

Most technologies that drive entrepreneurship usually come from hobbies .. so with that, here's my list of opportunities / technologies driving entrepreneurship: 3D printers. Sure today they look like toys, but they already have industrial strength ones that are used to create metal objects, and some for building houses. So lots of opportunity. Bitcoin. No one denies that the current fiat based currency is flowed, and that crypto currencies will have a place in our economy. It's super early days, but a lot of value will be created here... very disruptive. Wearables. People want technology to disappear and when you start embedding them in clothing, that's when the magic happens. Hardware + programming languages continue to get easier to work with, and it'll just mean so many new "projects" that could turn into successful Kickstarters or funded companies. Drones. Maybe it's the kid in me, but I just love the opportunity here, especially if you consider doing things that don't require human beings and leverages GPS, etc. There's a lot of regulation required to make this a wide spread adoption thing, but there's still ways to create value - might just be in other countries. Those are my favorites.

The perfect strategy is to show your client what their benefit and return on investment would be on this specific advertisement. This is what they are looking for from your pitch. It is great if you show them a positive benefit that they will receive from the advertisement. An example would be a return of a certain amount of money that is more then they invested. Sometimes they will have a certain budget that they must spend wisely. You must ask what the client needs for their benefit. It could be an increase towards their image or recognition. After you find out what they need you will be able to sell them the right advertisement.

I haven't personally used one, but try searching for affiliate job board widget. Monster has one at http://publisher.monster.com/Widgets/ for their affiliate publishers. See these links: http://publisher.monster.com/ http://publisher.monster.com/Widgets/Job-Board-Widget.aspx There are others. Either search for affiliate on major job boards, or do the search I suggested. You can also see these widgets that came up for a search on widgetbox for jobs: http://www.widgetbox.com/search?q=jobs The key thing to know is that you want an affiliate plugin or widget provided by a major job board that has many listings. It would make sense for LinkedIn to have an affiliate offering for their jobs listings; however, I haven't found information on it yet. If I don't find it fast enough I won't be able to edit this answer to include it. You can contact me for more details on these. If you find one you like or need additional information I can ask our Blogger Mastermind group if anyone has used any of these or can recommend others. We have 100+ serious bloggers who are likely to have more suggestions.

Advice will vary depending on market and the service you are providing repair service in. If this is B2B service then I'd recommend you purchase a call list in your area from a reputable source and get yourself on the phone. Learn to sell your service so you can train your sales people. I'd recommend an auto dialer like Five9 as you grow but it doesn't hurt even if you are the only sales person. If this is B2C then you need to get on Yelp and work up your existing book of business to leave reviews. I worked with a professional service company in the midwest that opened for business in 2013 and did over $1.5M in sales their first 10 months thanks to Yelp reviews alone.

Yes, duplicate content is a big issue. Search engines consider it a form of spam and will penalize your sites in terms of ranking, which diminishes your traffic and can be difficult to recover from. Content is naturally duplicated when shared by people who refer to and comment upon one another. So duplication in this form is legitimate; indeed, it arises spontaneously. Yet it would be unwise to attempt to fake such things by linking to yourself excessively. It's a bit incestuous. And by now so many "black hat" SEOs have attempted such shenanigans that Google is on the alert. That's all "Thou shalt not" advice. For more positive recommendations, I (or anyone else) would need some details to sink our teeth into.

I encourage you to read some answers of mine to similar questions asked on Clarity below. The value of Direct Outreach: https://clarity.fm/a/2149 Understanding your customer acquisition costs: https://clarity.fm/a/611 Using Twitter for early outreach: https://clarity.fm/a/438 The most important thing to do is to qualify your users to ensure that they really are the people that really feel the pain for the problem you are solving. Offering them early access in exchange for a quick survey is a tactic I've used with pretty good conversion. Happy to help talk through the specifics of your path forward in a quick call.

you should rather put this question on stackoverflow.com, catch the error message, paste your code so experts can understand what's going wrong. Example : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2532478/how-to-upload-images-from-iphone-app-developed-using-titanium

I'm a single founder who was raised angel and venture capital. If your business is compelling enough, you could raise angel funding. But there is little chance you can raise venture funding without a team in-place. It's a negative signal to institutional investors that you haven't been able to lock down a committed team. That said, depending on the nature of your product and traction, it sounds like you might be past the stage of recruiting a cofounder and more into hiring a great team of employees. The differentiation being less title and more the amount of equity. It sounds like you are selling a physical product so the question is whether you have built the capacity to scale. If not, the importance of having someone on your team who has done that at scale, even at the angel level of funding, could be helpful if not required. Happy to do a quick call and give you more contextual advice.

Biggest is probably the product-market fit. Is your product or service helping (enough) people solve a problem or fulfill a need? This is the biggest question a startup is trying to answer. You have to answer this question within a "finite time" and with "limited resources". So it really comes down to how focused a startup is in answering this question. If you lose focus with other stuff (co-founder issues, business cards, spending too much time making the product beautiful or whatever else) you are going to run out of time and resources and you have lost the game. I interview some of the very successful digital entrepreneurs on the web that respond to questions like this. Check out the interviews here: http://treptalks.com

In normal cases each subcontracting partner is self responsible for its accounting. Depending on the country you are and kind of business you running, you need to find out what possibilities are possible. For sure there are services you can use, check out payroll.intuit.com for example. There they offer accounting/payroll services for small businesses. Hope I could help you! If any further help needed, let me know! Regards Behzad

Of course! this is the modern day world - people don't remotely need to be in the same place so long as they are good at communicating

I'm the Founder of a VC-backed company and I'm also an investor in a handful of other companies that are venture-backed. I'll answer the meat of your question. If you're building a B2B product, you *should* do it without VC funding. The reason for this is simple: Amongst the criteria of investment decisions for VCs, the most important is the belief (supported by evidence) that the business can become a Billion dollar business. For consumer companies, revenue is currently proving to be a constraining factor in valuation. In other words, in optimizing for selling equity at the highest valuation, consumer companies are best to make no money at all. Enterprise companies are evaluated mostly on their current revenue, their pipeline, and core metrics around the business model and selling model and have a much more constrained set of valuation criteria. Consumer companies almost always require considerable funding to grow because they lack sufficient means to generate revenue until significant scale. This is not the case with B2B. I'm of the view that true B2B startups should be generating revenue from day one. Even if you intend on having a freemium model, it should only be rolled-out after you've launched to serve paying customers. A B2B business has to first have a clear credible path to $100k MRR (monthly recurring revenue) in order to attract institutional seed and Series A funding. Unless you're really on that path, you're best to avoid venture funding altogether. Reinvest your revenue into growth, stay lean and when you exhaust your own resources, raise under $1,000,000 in funding from angel investors and consider that the last equity money you ever raise until you are clearly and credibly on track to achieve $100k MRR. And by the way, achieving this incredibly difficult metric isn't the only requirement. Your Total Addressable Market has to be also significant enough to show that you can get to at least $100m ARR. By the way, once you generate $1m in annual recurring revenue, you will have access to debt facilities that can fund your growth with far less (if any) dilution. So I would posit that the vast majority of great B2B products will fail to achieve VC fundraising simply because most great B2B products don't *need* to achieve these proof-points for them to be fantastic businesses for a relatively small shareholder group. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are getting really terrible advice and being pushed to lie to themselves and others that they are capable of and even want to swing for the billion-dollar outcome. Happy to talk through this answer with you in more detail over a call. The reality of

I think they're great if you're using them for specific purposes. I find working at home almost too easy and it takes a long time for me to really get into "work mode" vs having a space somewhere I start switching gears on the way there and then feel more productive right from jump.' Benefits: Meet peers/friends/teammates. Better work/life balance. Lots of the small stuff is handled for you. A real address for meetings. Learn about other things going on in your sector. Drawbacks: Can't really tailor the details to your specific needs (volume, potted plants, artwork, etc) You incur a substantive cost on the books of your company. Potentially distracting if you're direct sharing space. Rarely do they deliver quality on any extra-stated promises (Money connections, quality events, etc) so you can really only bank on having a desk. I find the best alternative is to try and rent some space from a larger company that is growing/scaling so you get to learn a bunch, meet people who are focused, and usually you sort of join the family and get the benefits of free lunches and happy hours.

No. You're too busy doing what it sounds like you are already very competent at. I think that if you work closely with great engineering talent, you will increase your overall product sensibilities. I think that the "learn to code" movement has become over marketed and is starting to take a "7 minute abs" absurdity. While I have no doubt that it's producing people who are able to have some understanding of the languages, it's not the same as being an experienced problem-solver. Furthermore, given the rapidly changing nature of things, maintaining a competency in programming requires a constant learning cycle, one that will inevitably compete with your core competencies. Also, your reputation might suffer if instead of sourcing as you currently do, you take on these initiatives and execute at a lower degree of quality.

The less you need to sell, the more leverage you have. The fact that they approached you says that they want it. If 15k was their first offer, you can simply say no thanks. If you can do that with a straight face and resist the temptation to make the move, they are likely to come back with a better offer. The other way to move the price up is to say 15k is an asset sale "as is." You could offer a short consulting contract to provide assistance in integrating the acquisition and probably find an extra 10-15k that way. Happy to talk in more detail in a quick call.

Tehcnically speaking the only qualification is the type of development you need. However, if you referring to guideline son how to find and assess good outsourcing partners, you should keep in mind: - speed/quality of communication - previous work - payment/delivery terms satisfy your needs More details can be found here: http://giacomoballi.com/how-to-hire-a-freelancer/