Create an ideal customer profile. Create some questions that will allow to you survey a potential tester to determine if they fit your profile. Design simple landing page with very clear value proposition that speaks to your ideal customer. Ask for a minimum of information up-front (email), but ask for more info after they commit by submitting the first piece of info. (KISSmetrics does a good job of this on their current website trial signup). Use the their answers to these profiling questions to put the applicants into buckets. Let in the most ideal bucket first, or split them into groups if they're big enough. Try and measure engagement the best you can. Measure qualitative and quantitative data. Schedule calls with your beta testers to find out more, especially with the ones who's user behavior seemed to indicate that they didn't get value from your product. Find out why. Make sure they are indeed your ideal customer. Pick up the phone and get to know your customers inside and out. Meet them in person if possible. Incorporate their feedback quickly and get more feedback. Rinse repeat.

I can say from experience that there is a huge need for this, as it's exactly what my company, Vayable does. We have a community of more than 5,000 local Insiders who can help advise, plan and curate experiences. You can take a look at our Insiders here: https://www.vayable.com/users/search?query=&sort_by=popularity You can search or browse by destination or interest and contact them directly, or use our in-house Concierge service for a higher touch experience. Concierge: https://www.vayable.com/custom/navigator We are a YCombinator startup based in San Francisco, launched in 2011 and backed by many of the Valley's top investors. Feel free to reach out if you want to learn more about the space.

It doesn't look like any of the answers given have actually answered the question you posed -- so I'll do my best: The best place to look is within your OWN personal networks. At the end of the day, a co-founder is very similar to having a husband or wife. Your life will be tied to this person in almost every conceivable way. In fact, you may even spend twice as much time with this person than your actual husband or wife (if you have one). For that reason, it's important that the level of trust you have in this person is second-to-none. Finding co-founders at networking events, local universities, etc is fine -- however, be sure to spend a lot of time with this person before you decide to bring them on board as a co-founder. Starting the conversation off saying "I'm looking for a co-founder" is similar to meeting a girl and saying "I'm looking for a wife." But, again, this is why your own personal networks might be the answer. It's likely that in this group of people, you'll find people you trust who will be in your startup with you throughout the good and the bad (because, yes...there will be good and bad). I hope this is helpful...

The best way to work around something like this is to map out the long-term strategy in phases. Build out a brief project map that outlines what they will receive within the 1-3 month period, the 4-7 month and the 8-12 month period. Set micro objectives for each period and this will give the client a bit more confidence in the short-term plans as well as the long. The key thing to remember here is that the client will often be worried about being tied into a contract that doesn't deliver results. As a result, you need to show why you need the time that you do. One thing that I often throw in is an extra incentive for longer contract lengths - for example, an extra PR/content campaign or some paid advertising extras. Try to assure them of some shorter term results that you can obtain as 'quick wins' and build their confidence this way - the major targets will always be longer term but if you can demonstrate that there will be progress between then they will be a lot more receptive.

This is nit-picky, but I think reframing your question will help you get the result you need. Having a mentor and figuring out how you will pay them feels like a contradiction since I've never had a mentor that ever asked to be paid for any advice they gave me. Finding a mentor is a very organic thing in my experience, and definitely worthwhile, but I think the shortest path to getting to a 7 figure revenue rate is to get a consultant that can help you improve your skills and better focus your resources. You could do this by leveraging them in a group setting, like masterminds, you could retain them monthly, or just about any other format they're open to. I've got a client right now that is in a very similar spot as you, doing $350k and just needed some guidance to get better focused on what will get them to $1MM. Our arrangement is with a weekly call and he's asked for more help, so we're moving my deliverable work under a profit-sharing agreement. I'd use Clarity to talk to a lot of different consultant's and see what you find. Just don't jump into an long-term agreements until you know they're a fit and are more interested in your success than their fee. Practice with me for free if you'd like and I can help you get your questions dialed in better for future calls: https://clarity.fm/joshualong/VIP

The art of the "cold pitch" is definitely something that needs to be worked on, and doesn't come naturally to everyone. A couple of quick tips: 1. 4 is not a big enough target group, you've got to cast a bigger net. Try pitching 20, and aim to get 3-5 responses. 2. When sending a cold email, really think about what you are offering them. Whilst you'll get the odd good egg that simply wants to help - you can't expect entrepreneurs and small biz owners to take time out of their day to answer your questions. To counter, why not tell them you're conducting research in the space, and would be happy to send the finds/reports back to them in a nice format, which could in turn help their business. 3. Don't give up, keep hustling. Try changing around the emails slightly, track which emails convert into responses, and fine tune from there. Good luck and feel free to book a call if you want to chat more. Best James.

Here's an evernote file of things I've found and liked around the internet re: 2 sided marketplaces. All digital, although not sure exactly how "successful" they are - but more for reference. Quality / Copywriting https://www.yourmechanic.com/works#mechanics https://www.airbnb.ca/?locale=en http://powhow.com/ Community Engagement http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks https://www.healthtap.com/ https://www.airbnb.ca/wishlists/popular https://www.wello.com/class/set/Yoga/ Categories / Search http://www.etsy.com/ http://fiverr.com/ https://www.airbnb.ca/s/moncton?source=hdr http://takelessons.com/search?q=4gq30T Deliver of Service www.hotelstonight.com www.uber.com https://www.medicast.co/ www.wello.com www.takelessons.com www.taskrabbit.com How it works https://www.taskrabbit.com/how-it-works https://www.zaarly.com/howzaarlyworks http://takelessons.com/students/how-it-works https://www.wello.com/how-it-works/ https://www.medicast.co/how-it-works https://www.healthtap.com/#how_it_works https://www.wello.com/how-it-works/ https://www.odesk.com/info/howitworks/client/ http://www.guru.com/emp/takeTour.aspx The Why http://nest.com/smoke-co-alarm/why-we-made-it/#nobody-ever-looks-up Supply Side https://www.elance.com/q/find-work http://www.guru.com/pro/index.aspx https://www.odesk.com/info/howitworks/contractor/ http://takelessons.com/teachers https://www.zaarly.com/selling http://www.skillshare.com/teach https://www.udemy.com/teach/ www.powhow.com/open-your-own-studio https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/new Conversions http://www.justanswer.com/ http://www.skillshare.com/ Referals http://www.powhow.com/open-your-own-studio uber.com/invite/rjif2 Subscriptions http://www.powhow.com/open-your-own-studio http://premium.docstoc.com/subscribe/plans http://www.rocketlawyer.com/plans-pricing.rl Help Center http://help.zaarly.com/ https://www.airbnb.ca/help Pricing http://www.rocketlawyer.com/plans-pricing.rl http://www.powhow.com/open-your-own-studio http://premium.docstoc.com/ http://mixergy.com/premium/ http://wistia.com/pricing https://teamtreehouse.com/subscribe/plans

"Every contractor we talk to tells us its a great idea and they would pay for leads, but we have yet to have anyone actually purchase a subscription to our site." This seems like an obvious question, but have you explicitly asked them to give you money for the service? If not, then that is 100% the first place to start, bar none. If they say no, then there are a few things you can do to help your cause. One is called reversing risk, which more or less means structuring your 'ask' in such a way that you are taking on a risk rather than the customer. In your case, the concept might be mean asking for a refundable 3 month service deposit. Sales and marketing is where most of my experience lies, specifically in helping startups to find product market fit. Honestly, that is likely where you are having problems. I would like to talk with you, so I will give you a clarity $20 promo credit to get us started and see if there is a good fit. If you are interested, send me a message.

It would certainly be viable, particularly if you create events that appeal to particular groups of people. Be sure to appeal to both sides of each group: providers (businesses) and customers. For example, get a local restaurant to sponsor and provide samples of their food and do a presentation on how customers of restaurants can benefit from joining the restaurants list so the restaurant can send them special offers (such as what they're doing for Mother's Day or Thanksgiving) or a kids eat free night. Do a night for organizations on how they can use social media to keep in touch with their members, collaborate with others, grow their group, and manage projects. Encourage authors and local bands to use your center to meet with their fans. Explain how the artists can share their schedules with fans so they create a stronger fan base. Bill these as "fan appreciation events" and hold them before a major performance to get more fans to the event or before a new book or record comes out to increase sales. A major benefit of your center could be teaching people to use LinkedIn and job boards to find employment. Provide assistance with resume creation, LinkedIn profile optimization, and how to search for jobs that are the best fit. There are limitless ideas for how you can get sponsors to support your efforts and people through the door. These can get you started. Feel free to ask if you would like more.

I would create the best geo-targeted group blog for a specific large metro. (And then roll them out across the country or even around the world.) What most businesses need is a way to reach their local target audience. When you create the very best local site that can be grown organically offline and on, you can deliver that target audience. (Think of an expanded version of the "what's happening" column local newspapers used to run on Fridays.) Develop a curriculum to have students (high school, college, even junior high) create unique content. For example, have each one write about their favorite thing to do in town, add a photo and contact info. Or their favorite restaurant and what they eat there. Again, all you need are a couple paragraphs, a photo and contact info. Have the car happy go find their dream auto, take a photo, write up the specs, add a photo and contact info. When their fellow students read what they've written, they'll get together to go out to eat, or for entertainment. Students can create jobs for themselves. The local car lots and dealerships they feature will want ad space to swap in their latest deal or the next car they want to feature. Create ad space right on the page where the new content appears and let them manage it. (The ideal way to let ad buyers manage their own ads exists today, but they are threatening to shut it down. Someone really needs to buy it and keep it running.) Many will not want to manage their own ads so they can pay the students to do it. When the site makes money, the best students can stay - having created their own paying work. Don't make the mistake that local papers are making that makes them obsolete. They want to get paid and THEN they'll cover you. You want to cover the best small businesses up front. Use students managed by an experienced blogger (or team of bloggers) to create interesting content. Get locals interacting on the site. Deliver the audience businesses want and they will be willing to spend money to advertise with you. Do this in one metro and then roll it out in additional metros using one or more experienced blog managers local to each location you add. When you grow your business locally, you don't have to worry about the next Google Panda, Penguin or other black and white end to your traffic. It won't even matter if the lights go out or the Internet as we know it ceases to exist. You will have a community business that can continue online or off. The cost to do this is minimal. The expertise is widely available. 80+ experienced bloggers are already connected in our Blogger Mastermind group and at least one of them is a college educator. She and I have been planning this for years, but the third partner who had the ability to host and do the programming became unavailable. I have additional information written up on this, but I don't know if links work in answers here or not. Contact me for links or additional information. I would love to see this idea take off.

Unless they are in some way related ie seo clients are weight loss focused you should keep two.

Yes. Use the "Link Text" in your facebook ads to A/B test various domain names. To do this, simply launch a few identical ads, and only change the link text to say the variation of the domain name you are considering. The ad with the highest CTR (not conversion rate or other KPI) will be the one that sparks the most interest in your target audience. Note: one domain may have a high relevance to one audience, but low relevance with another. So this tactic should only be used if you have a very specific demo you are targeting.

You could start with LinkedIn (Profiles and Groups). Search for Marketing Executives and join the relevant groups. For example, this group http://linkd.in/1a8zR3c

I like to approach these things with big wins. One, ask yourself who your message would help? Who would find this really valuable? It may not be people you'd typically think. Look outside of your industry. Find where those people hangout online. Where are they on Facebook? What are they reading? etc. Then brainstorm ways that you can show up on those channels. For example: let's say your peeps love Forbes. Have you pitched Forbes yet? Or let's say that mommy bloggers would go crazy for your idea (so you think). You hit up some of them via email and tell them you'd love to share this free content. You'd think it'd be valuable. Content creators are always in the biz of finding more great content. So, when you can provide it and it makes sense (your job is to show why it makes sense) then people are happy to promote. The scariest part about this is pitching it because it can feel vain. The key is thinking about those you're helping, removing yourself from the equation and releasing the outcome. Then see what happens :) Happy to discuss in detail how you can find potential partners to promote your work, formulate the pitch and even create some email templates for you to send out on a call. Shoot me a message if you want to set up a call.

If your product relies heavily on a successful growth-loop through social sharing, you simply *must* run the social component "live in the stream." The value of the data you will collect far outweighs any concerns over someone guessing what you're doing by the social shares. See my answer about what makes a great technology product here on Clarity about the importance of a great growth loop. The ultimate thing you'll be able to learn via the public test is the effective of your messaging and a general click through rate. You can bring them to a page that playfully says that the link was generated by an app in private-beta and if they want to learn more, they can sign-up. That in fact, would be another great data point. The point is that just by making your social stream messaging and link public doesn't make your product in any way public. And by the way, the more effective your social share is at generating click-throughs or full-blown conversions (a click on the landing page of any kind), then the higher and stronger signal you have to the fact that you're on to something. In a call, I'd be happy to share my experiences in building MVP's with contract labor and testing growth loops via social streams.

I've done a lot of customer development in this market. Here's what's worked for me well. Find your potential customer (actual decision maker) on Linkedin. Send them a "friend" connection request with something like: "I acknowledge we don't know each other yet but I am the Founder of a new company solving <insert problem>. I'm not trying to sell you anything just would like to ask a few questions to determine if we're on the right path. Would that be ok?" That might be a bit too verbose for LinkedIn's character count but you get the gist. In the times I've used this approach, I've received about a 35% success rate. I've done a lot of ideation around SMB-based ideas so happy to talk in a call about how to get the most out of your early conversations and experiments.

As former CMO of Expedia I can tell you that being focused will trump any theoretical upside of having different names. To this day there's a struggle to build daylight in meaning between Hotels.com and Expedia's core hotel business - and there have literally been billions spent on trying to do that over the years. Get clear on who you're for, the problem you solve, what insight you are building against and your positioning against that. There's enough work there on its' own - believe me. Good luck.

I'd say you're *almost* ready to talk about equity but before you do, I think it's really important to check in as a group and see who really wants "in." Startup Weekends create a lot of enthusiasm and excitement but I've seen a lot of projects originate there that end up like reality TV - a contestant drops out or is voted off the island each week. If you're really passionate about the idea and want to run with this, checking-in with each contributor and checking their level of passion is important before talking equity. Even though a vesting agreement can generally help eliminate dead equity, it still can leave significant equity in the wrong hands. You're better off trying to shake anyone who isn't fully committed and waiting until you have a really strong sense of who really wants to roll-up their sleeves. The best calculator (or guide to calculating equity) is here: http://foundrs.com/ and I'd caution in any scenario against equal splits. The bottom-line is that startups can't be run by consensus. It is best run by a single founder or a really well-established duo of co-founders and then "key hires" making inputs into one or two decision-makers. Happy to talk this through with you in a call. In 15-30 minutes, we can walk through how to identify real commitment, what do do with people who are "waffling", how to compensate fairly and reasonably and what to do next.

since most get paid upon a candidates permanent offer most of the hastle comes from finding the right person. knowing how t filter helps a recruiter incrementally over time leading to repeat customers. feel free to call one of us to help you get going or guiding you through hurdles. :)

First of all, focus on the product, rather than the technology. When it comes to product, you need to identify a real customer pain or problem that is being unaddressed. The best source of inspiration are problems that you face for which you cannot find a solution. To evaluate if this is a real problem, find others who have it. A good place to start for identifying how important a problem is to solve is with Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The needs nearer the bottom are generally easier to sell: Thus, Sex, Food and Medicine are easier to sell than lectures on morality. After you have identified a real problem and solution, it is time to validate whether there is a business you can build around the solution. Let me know if you want to walk through evaluating your idea.

Your question and your question detail are quite different. First, your question: The most important leadership trend is that the nature of leadership is changing. People want more autonomy and less oversight and direct management. Do you currently have a team? By the details you provided, it sounds like you are asking this question in hopes of being prepared to lead *when* you have a team, not asking about the team you have to date. Either way, leadership is much like parenting. Everyone has an opinion of how you should do it, but you will do what feels right to you, which is a process of much experimentation and feedback. Don't overthink the issue of leadership, especially in very small teams and companies. I'm happy to talk to you about specific issues you're dealing with or worried about to provide you very direct responses to those concerns.

That's a much more complicated question than it appears to be, as there are multiple sources which will get you some of the inventory, but nothing which will get you all of the inventory. If you look at an OTA, they are pulling from typical sources like SABRE or Amadeus, but also from what is in effect their own inventory, where hotels are either going in via an extranet or there's some kind of direct-connect to the system the hotel is operating on (which could be one of many, including none at all). In fact, some of the OTA's make that proprietary inventory available too, via an API and on a commissionable sales basis. There's just no one-size-fits-all access point - especially when you consider that worldwide the hotel business is actually very un-aggregated with something like 80% of all hotel room capacity operated independently (that is to say, not branded or part of a chain like Starwood, Accor, IHG etc.). It's a big part of why OTA's have invested so heavily in technology to manage and distribute this type of inventory. It's not easily done as the technology used in the hospitality industry is often not great and it's unconsolidated to there's value and negotiating strength to be brought from consolidating it.

The only AdWords keywords that will perform well on search are ones that directly describe your product, e.g. "document syncing." To target a segment like legal professionals, use AdWords' Contextual Targeting Tool to build ad groups to target websites that your target market would visit, e.g. anything related to law.

If you like it, go for it. Blogging takes a lot of energy and commitment, so go with a name that resonates with you first and foremost - you want it to be a place you really enjoy writing. That said, it can be helpful to 'brand' something in a way that's easy to remember - easy to spell, easy to pronounce. You can test that by simply asking people to spell it when you say it to them, or by showing them the name and asking them to say it. People may have trouble with "empiric".

Airbnb actually developed an internal competency to manage their photography process. Turned out it was/is core to their site and found they needed to own the process. So they have a team at Airbnb that manages relationships with thousands of photographers (who are independent contractors). While at Zaarly, we considered a number of options for our photography on the site but ultimately decided to go a similar route as Airbnb because the quality, look/feel and process mattered greatly to the individuals we featured on our site and it mattered to the general design and feel we wanted to provide. Good photography matters. If you want to do it well, don't underinvest or try and cut corners. You can quickly tell the difference between professional shots and stock photography.