Inbound marketing is currently the greatest ROI method of generating demand for your offering. This really boils down to putting out high authority content through Search and Social channels so you can start to engage with prospects and steer them inwards to your automation system. From there lead nurturing takes over to heighten their trust and knowledge to create sales ready leads. Cold calling is a low ROI method and really only works well with highly targeted segments from our experience. LinkedIn is good for B2B and strategic B2C. Partner Marketing can help to create ongoing lead flow of high quality if done right. You may call me if you want specifics on your situation. More detail from you will allow for a more relevant answer.

The most important thing is to make sure that your immediate network (Husband, family and friends) are able to support you. I have a 15 mth old and a 4.5 mth old and launched my company 1.5 years ago. It was busy, but it worked because I had people in place to help me (with the kids). The ultimate question is to ask yourself - your gut - if this is a f*ck yeah decision. Does it excite you? Are you motivated to pick away at this business when your baby is sleeping at night, napping or otherwise content? Remember what it was like to hold your new baby in your arms; the joy, excitement and nervousness of what you're supposed to do? Well, starting a new business is the same. It's exciting and challenging, but there are resources (like Clarity) to help! Now IS the right time. Good luck!

Just scale up your PPC campaign to get more users. If your PPC campaign isn't pulling a profit for you, then you are doing it wrong.

I'm not a .COM purist. In fact I own quite a few .ME domains and have sold half a dozen of them or so. However, building a business or brand on a non-.COM extension like .ME requires some additional analysis. It's impossible to advise you on which name / domain to choose in the absence of the name itself. As for the strategy of partnering with someone else just because you want their name ... that sounds excessively complicated, prone to misunderstanding, potentially expensive, and (since you haven't even approached them) a bit pie-in-the-sky. Trademark overlaps might also invite litigation. I think you could use some professional advice. Let's schedule a call.

I know that on Facebook and Twitter you can schedule ads and posts so that question should be answered. I know in Facebook you can target users by whether they're using a mobile or desktop device and also by which operating system they're using i.g. iOS or Android You can also target by interests like 'Running' or 'marathons' based on their profile and activity or you can use partner categories to target people who spent money on fitness/running equipment or possibly even registered for a marathon.

There are many strategies that work for new sales people using LinkedIn, one of my favorite is active lead gen. For high ticket sales, new hires do well to talk to the sales manager about who the company's best clients are. Armed with this knowledge, the sales person can profile the common traits of the company's best clients, and use LinkedIn's powerful search engine to find more people and companies that fit the demographic. Once good targets are found, there are several ways to reach out. My favorite is to find groups that the person is active in. Search the group for the person's name, and from the search results, click on "see activity". This will tell you what activity this person has contributed to the group in the form of discussions and comments. The next step is to find a conversation you feel you could contribute to intelligently. You might even message the member (prospect) and start a personal conversation on the topic that they showed an interest in. This is where the relationship of common interest begins. I've used this technique very effectively to locate people who I wanted to do business with, people I wanted to engage... What if you need a larger quantity of people because you don't have a high ticket item, or your quota requires filling your funnel with more prospects? Use the demographic you have created (see above) to find groups that you'll find existing clients or people like them. Use the group member search with keywords to find people to send messages - not hard sales messages because no one likes to be sold. The best results come from softer messages offering a service to solve a specific pain point, asking for referrals within their network or who to speak with at their company about what you offer, etc. Both methods are effective when approached with the mindset that you are operating in a networking environment. People don't want to be sold, but they love to be the hero in finding a solution for their company's problems. You can't really fully automate LinkedIn. The platform would lose much of its power and their environment of trust if you could. However, once a viable demographic and target is found, a practical solution is to assign an inside rep or sales assistant to the task to generate leads for the account executives. To find more solutions for your sales answers, you can register for free online on-demand training at http://RockLinkedIn.com or reach out to me via LinkedIn and I'll direct you to the most appropriate resource. Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva CEO, Integrated Alliances LinkedIn Training for Sales, Business Development, Marketing and Executives.

You will always be your best PR agency. Because if you can't sell yourself, then no one will be able to sell / market you. In my experience, when I start something with money as the focus I fail. However when I work to create something amazing for others, I win and win big. My advice is to focus on creating value (amazing value) and then the money, exclusivity and $300 /hourly rate will flow to you. Imagine for a moment a PR firm getting you XYZ celebrity / billionaire client. If you can't deliver on creating value for that client you will never retain them as a customer. Use price as a strategy to position you (the brand) and then never stop creating more and more value for others. I hope this helps.

If you're asking about how to *start* spreading the word, my fear for you is that you haven't done sufficient customer development to validate the need for your app and inform your core product thesis. Failure to do so will almost always end-up in product failure. If this is the case, you might want to slow down on your product building process and refocus on customer development. Building and launching a mobile app that achieves critical mass is one of the hardest challenges one can take-on. Happy to talk to you in a brief call to outline the customer development process.

Choosing the right domain is what I do for a living. If you'd like to schedule a call, I'll give the matter some thought ahead of time. We should be able to figure things out by phone in 15 minutes or less.

I'll first answer this from a product and development perspective: This answer is written assuming you have done everything right to launch a product that has already established product/market fit. First, you want to fix the "leaky buckets." Brett Martin wrote a post-mortem of his startup and wrote: "Removing friction from existing user behaviors (e.g. checkins) almost always has a higher ROI than building castles in the sky (e.g. hypothesizing about your API). Find all the dead ends/local maxima in your current products before building new ones!" source: https://medium.com/p/72c6f8bec7df Once you've done that, you'll be making prioritizing new features, metrics movers and customer delight. Adam Nash has a great post on product planning process here: http://blog.adamnash.com/2009/07/22/guide-to-product-planning-three-feature-buckets/ From a business perspective, your primary job is to be constantly talking to your actual users. As Brett explains in his post-mortem, one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is optimizing for people who aren't their customer. I believe strongly that the CEO of any startup should be heavily involved in customer support and, if the business is an enterprise business, in sales. There is just nothing as powerful as hearing from real customers. Also, if you're selling anything, you want to be constantly tweaking the dials and experimenting with everything from pricing to conversion optimization. And regardless of selling anything, conversion optimization is a daily activity, experimenting with new ways to fill the top of the funnel and bring them into the actions required to build your business. Hope this helps. If you're asking because you're prepping for a launch or just launched, happy to do a call with you to provide more specific context.

I like the name "Melissa" — but I wouldn't use a website URL like www.melissahome.com because it just doesn't feel "natural" — I would choose something that implies what Melissa means to us... For example: "Ask Melissa" or something like that. Good luck!

Network with people you trust. Sell them your excess leads for a percentage of what they'll derive. Choose other freelancers, whom you might consider bringing on board if an agency emerges. This way you have only enough collaboration initially. In other words, you're not compromising your own position by taking on added responsibility. But you retain the option to expand along more formal lines if things go well.

I help B2B companies find their most profitable customers. This a tough spot with no cut and dry answers. I would ask the following: - There's a lot of things I could do, why did I choose to do this? Think of this as a gut-check to gauge whether you want to push through or not. - Define 'no traction' with customers. What was the reason they originally bought from you? What problem are you solving for them today? You can find this out by calling and asking. - Can I be cashflow positive just providing them what is of value? If you're getting positive answers to each of these questions, keep going. Not every products needs, or can have, a hockey stick-like growth chart with customers. Finally, I would pretend the $150k investment didn't exist and I still had the customers and product I have today. What would I do with the product? The more you invest in something (emotionally and financially) that harder it becomes to abandon it. This is known as the 'sunk cost fallacy.' Stepping away from it can provide much needed prospective. Feel free to give me a call if you'd like to chat more about your specific situation.

"Just" a startup? Most technical and design talent are more attracted to startup opportunities than working for big companies. So the issue is not that you're a startup, the issues are around how you make yourself the most attractive startup to the talent you're trying to recruit. The best way to do this is to be able to articulate why you're already on the path to being a very successful business. Selling top talent on your company is often the same as selling investors. The more that you can demonstrate that you already have the right ingredients for success, the higher a likelihood that you're going to close your recruiting pipeline. Obviously, depending on the cash you have in the bank and expect to have in the bank will impact what kind of offer you make, and the more that you can mitigate the "going concern" risk, the more success you'll have in getting an offer accepted, but it's ultimately about convincing the talent that joining you and your team is better than any opportunity they can take, including starting their own company. If you can't be competitive in your own backyard, I would look at hiring remote workers or look at relocating talent from less competitive markets to your own backyard and selling the lifestyle advantages of your particular city. Recruiting top talent is a significant part of any startup CEO's job. I'd be happy to talk to you about what I've learned and share some of the tactics I've used and seen others use successfully.

Totally agree with Andy's answer. But I just went to your site and I think you should really optimize your sign-up flow before spending any money or effort to acquire customers. Your current multi-step process and required information is far too cumbersome to efficiently acquire sign-ups. I would rework your sign-up process significantly before doing as Andy recommends. Andy's advice is reasonable because you really want to test your channels and validate your core offering on a relatively small scale before looking to handle a lot of customers. LinkedIn is actually very effective for you as an advertising channel and though more expensive than other CPC's, it's far more targeted for your initial customer base. Happy to talk you through what I mean about your sign-up flow in a quick call.

Forget 'self-promotion'. Stop focusing on your self and start focusing on others. Serve people you meet so powerfully that they never forget you for the rest of their life.

Scared shitless. Self-doubt. Poor sleep. Waking up with pangs of fear. Doubt I made the right choice to leave my job. Doubt. Doubt. Doubt and doubt. The ups and downs will continue...for ever. The July thing that changes (if you stick with it) is you learn to enjoy the ride.

Never get in business with people you want to buy out. Do not sign any agreement to give away such big chunk of your business unless you are 100% convinced they're the best people to work with. From your long description, it doesn't seem you believe they are trustworthy nor that they deliver the work you expect. You seem to say they go back on their words. By signing this agreement you will put yourself in an even more difficult situation because you will not have enough shares to give to any other serious investors while retaining majority stakes and decision power. Schedule a call to go through all the possible scenarios, the different options, how to talk to the agency that has done this work for you and plan your next steps.

Vehemently disagree with Noam that you should spend anytime on a business plan. You should be spending *all* of your time getting your product to market. The likelihood of any investor investing at the pre-product level is low. While it does happen, it is almost always when investing in a proven entrepreneur or team that is very experienced. Once your product is in market, you will craft a deck that outlines the usage data in the best possible light to tell the story of how your product can grow into a viable business. At the time you have your product in the market, you can talk to me or a number of great Clarity advisers on what a good deck looks like, but at the moment, you are best served by spending all your energy getting the product shipped and getting some early traction. Any investor that wants to judge an internet business based on it's business plan is really not an investor an entrepreneur should want investing in their Company. It's a sign of significant inexperience.

I've discussed ideas with hundreds of startups, I've been involved in about a dozen startups, my business is at $1M+ revenue. The bad news is, there is no good way to protect ideas. The good news is, in the vast majority of cases you don't really need to. If you're talking to people about your idea, you could ask them to sign an NDA ("Non Disclosure Agreement"), but NDAs are notoriously hard to enforce, and a lot of experienced startup people wouldn't sign them. For example, if you asked me to sign an NDA before we discussed your Idea, I'd tell you "thanks, but no thanks". This is probably the right place though to give the FriendDA an honorable mention: http://friendda.org/. Generally, I'd like to encourage you to share your Ideas freely. Even though telling people an idea is not completely without risk, generally the rewards from open discussions greatly outweigh the risks. Most startups fail because they build something nobody wants. Talking to people early, especially people who are the intended users/customers for your idea can be a great way to protect yourself from that risk, which is considerably higher than the risk of someone taking off with your idea. Another general note, is that while ideas matter, I would generally advise you to get into startup for which you can generate a lot of value beyond the idea. One indicator for a good match between a founder and a startup is the answer to the question: "why is that founder uniquely positioned to execute the idea well". The best way to protect yourself from competition is to build a product that other people would have a hard time building, even if they had 'the idea'. These are usually startups which contain lots of hard challenges on the way from the idea to the business, and if you can convincingly explain why you can probably solve those challenges while others would have a hard time, you're on the right path. If you have any further questions, I'd be happy to set up a call. Good luck.

It's highly unlikely that you will be able to find competent full-stack mobile developers willing to work with you for equity, but if you do, "fair" compensation would be 50% or more of the equity in the Company. Approaching any developer with just an idea, diminishes your credibility as a potential co-founder. Here's why: If you're non-technical, you must show a "relentless resourcefulness" in moving your idea forward. This means finding the money necessary to get an MVP or even click-able prototype completed to show that while you might not be technical, you have the ability to raise money, and have enough product sense that you can articulate that into a prototype. If you can't raise or spend the relatively small amount of money required to successfully build a prototype, what evidence are you providing that developer that you are going to be able to create value for the business long-term? Full-stack mobile developers (although this is often quite a misnomer) are one of the most in-demand skill-sets of all Silicon Valley companies. That means that you're competing against established companies that can pay top dollar, and still provide meaningful equity incentives as well as recently funded startups who have further along the road in turning their idea into reality. I would suggest that you look at hiring contractors (I know of some great mobile dev shops that are reasonable) to build your first version. Expect to go solo at least until you have some form of early prototype. Then, you're in a much better position to attract a technical co-founder. Happy to talk you through any of this at any point.

If you are going to use Social Media Marketing. I would recommend you create a Pinterest wall of your work and back link them to your site. Try that.

As a web designer, online visibility is incredibly important when it comes to branding globally. Depending on your business, a lot of your global business goals can be achieved by setting up an online business. You should register domains in the countries you'd like to market to, such as the US, NZ, and SIngapore that you mentioned. Also establish a Business Plan and central brand that includes all of these markets. Try to avoid getting caught in a re-branding process down the road. If your brand needs tweaking in order to achieve scope, do so. I would start by registering the business in the country you mainly do business in, and provide shipping of products/services to all of your other markets if necessary to get started. Then as you establish a foothold in each territory, look into the benefits of setting up locally.

When it comes to raising money you must remember that risk is a perception. Your job is to drain the risk! Below is a link to a resource I provide my investors. The 50 questions are specific to product design/development but the 15 categories are questions that apply to any industry. If you can answer these questions about your deal you will have gone a long way to "drain the risk" for your investors and get funded. http://www.jaredjoyce.com/freetreats/50questions.pdf Once you have answered the questions for your deal schedule a call with me and I can help you integrate the answers into your investor pitch.

You are right that the range is wide. You need to figure what are good values to have for your category. Also, you can focus on the trend (is your DAU/MAU increasing vs decreasing after you make changes) even if benchmarking is tough. Unless your app is adding a huge number of users every day (which can skew DAU/MAU), you can trust the ratio as a good indication of how engaged your users are. For games, DAU/MAU of ~20-30% is considered to be pretty good. For social apps, like a messenger app, a successful one would have a DAU/MAU closer to 50%. In general most apps struggle to get to DAU/MAU of 20% or more. Make sure you have the right definition of who is an active user for your app, and get a good sense of what % of users are actually using your app every day. Happy to discuss what is a good benchmark for your specific app depending on what it does.