I think differently about this, because of two reasons: 1) I've always (and only) been involved in bootstrapped startups; and 2) I've been lucky that those startups grew organically and fast (enough) which minimized our need on marketing spend. Instead of deciding on a specific budget for this, I would instead look at your current priorities (in terms of budgeting and re-investment into your team): 1. Build a great team. 2. Build a great product. 3. Craft incredible customer experiences. 4. Spend money on marketing. If you've already hit all 3 top priorities and you can't reinvest any further into those, then you should start spending money on marketing. If you don't have revenues today and you are hoping to generate revenues through marketing spend, you're on slippery slope (says the bootstrapper). Whilst not wrong, this is tricky and you'd need to take a realistic look at your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and how much you can invest into acquiring new customers.

The main reason is everyone else sold or overreacted to the market and pivoted. Yammer sold for $1B+ to Microsoft but could've easily been a 30B+ market cap company. Slide had some issues and continue to react to the market trying different things - had they focused on a real problem, they might've created a Zynga type company. The rest of them (Dave @ 500 Startups, Jeremy at Yelp, etc) are still at it and the verdict isn't in. That being said, the fact that 1 company has an alumni with such success - and There's many I haven't mentioned - is only testament to the quality of the people. P.S. What's the market cap for Tesla? Elon is just getting started - I think I'll be WAY bigger than LinkedIn.

- Peter Thiel was crucial for Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) - Ray Chambers for Jack Dorsey (Twitter) - Ken Allard and investors Ben Horowitz for Dennis Crowley (Foursquare) - Paul Graham and Partovi Brothersfor Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox founders) - Adam D'Angelo for Kevin Systrom (Instagram) See more of who mentored whom at http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-mentors-behind-the-visionaries-of-tech-2012-7?op=1

There's only one answer to this question and it might sound pretentious: experience. As you go along, you might find some of your experiences remind you of certain stuff other entrepreneurs have said but you will very often find yourself going your own way even if they advise against it. You may be wrong but then again, they might be wrong also. The worst thing you could do is read or listen to too much of what others have done, in their own way, and try to mimic them, believing that the same things will work for your business as well. Take the issue of time, for example. Depending on the stage of their entrepreneurial life, some will argue you should always find time for the gym and disconnect at least a day a week. Ask a 22 year old guy who's pulling in 20K/month, in his pocket, after 2 years of absolute dedication to work and he'll say disconnecting just for the sake of disconnecting is wasted time. Then again, someone who's a master of automating his business may tell you 2 hours / day will get you to the right place in no time. Another example is sales. The world changes at a very fast pace these days. Better communication tools, better CRMs, globalization - the "rules" of who to sell to, where and how to pitch, the very traits that make your product worthy or not, they're constantly evolving. Whatever worked 2 years ago might still work today, but there could be a completely different way to sell that is faster, more cost effective and more in tune to your communication style. Waste too much time being taught about sales when doing a start-up and you'll be blind to your own instincts that may very well be revolutionary :) My advise is to develop and nurture a mindset that allows you to adapt rather than imitate. Of course, if you fell what I said is dumb and would rather be taught entrepreneurship, then that's what you should do. I don't mean that in a bad way. I really think you should follow your gut on what makes a great entrepreneur. Being successful by trying to be someone you're not will be less fun :) Here's an article I wrote about a similar topic, "how startup news is killing your startup": http://thebottomofthings.com/6-reasons-startup-news-is-killing-your-startup/ Good luck!

I am new to Clarity and wanted to ask a question and always curious what people recommend for a vitamin.

A few years back, a blog written by hackers emerged on the Romanian market. Back then, I was working as a web developer for the biggest jobs site on our market (>3M revenue). One morning, we got an email from the guy who started the hacker blog. It was a simple SQL injection that revealed a lot of sensitive data like user emails and contact data. We were instructed to fix this in 24 hours or he would go public and expose our error to the public. Nice guy, he gave us the benefit of the doubt. If we were a serious business, interested in the security of our users' data, we'd jump and fix things. If not, we deserved to be exposed. We spent the entire day going through every single script on the site and tried to secure everything we could think of. The coding had been done years before by a different team and we found a lot of security holes. The second day I went to my boss and told him the only way we're going to get them all is to hire the hackers to mess us up as badly as they could. It was a win-win for everybody. So, what I'd suggest is this: 1. Don't target startups. They have so many on their plate and so little resources, a small-to-medium security flaw won't be a huge priority. Making payday and turning a profit is top on their list. 2.Target companies with a lot to lose due to security. Go for the big guys. 3. Find one error, report it to the highest management level you can find contact details for, explain the risks and pitch your service. I'm currently running a SaaS where data security matters. We already did a crowdsourced vulnerability test and it was a pain to set up. I'm really happy to have found out about you guys! If you'd like to brainstorm a few more sales ideas, let me know, give me a few days to do some research and book a call. Either way, let's keep in touch! Matt

I have a tremendous amount of experience sending emails from new domains - perhaps 2,000,000 emails per year - and the long and short of it is this: email deliverability is tremendously complex. Why? For one thing, because of the constant battle between spammers, ISPs, ESPs and other players, among other things. Also, because email still uses some very old and outdated protocols that make this all more difficult. If your business is going to rely heavily on email, I would encourage to educate yourself now so that you won't be stymied as you grow. Many of the things I learned were through trial and error - which can be excruciatingly frustrating. Just a few of the things you should immediately begin working on: proper SPF, SenderID, DKIM compliance along with solid DNS set up. Additionally, if you will use email heavily, I would start now putting the pieces in place for later white labeling aa nd possible dedicated IP sending. In terms of the actual email content itself, that is another subject you will want to investigate. I'm not saying these things to discourage you - but rather to help you avoid the mistakes we made in the past. If you need a hand getting a little grip on this I probably can steer you in the right direction pretty quickly. Wish you the best in your endeavor! Adam

That's a great question. First, congratulations for bringing a nutritional product to market and getting initial sales. That's a huge feat in itself, so well done. Second, my question would be this - why do you believe that you need to get on the shelves of UK retailers to go mainstream? And what criteria are you going to use to determine when you have realized your goal? Considering trade marketing costs (avg manufacturer spends 30% of revenues on this - aka paying to be on the shelves, etc...), your production costs and your profit margins, I would question if expanding to an instore model makes sense. How much funding do you have? What are the goals of your business? First, research competitors in your space and find out how much capital they have to play with. Chances are if you get instore distribution, it will be out-of-sight or dwarfed by larger competitors. You may face issues ramping up production rapidly to meet the number of products you need to have in their stores. And what are the payment terms? Do you have enough resources and cash flow to support production, distribution and wait potentially 30, 60 or 90 days to be paid after a store has moved your product. Lots more off the top of my head, all pertaining to the main question - what are your goals and why do you believe you need to go instore to achieve them? Happy to chat anytime. I love marketing and eretail, tho I've never worked in the medical/vitamin products space. p.p.s. As a piece of homework, research other vitamin or food products companies who have exclusive online distribution. You may be surprised what you find. Best of luck!

Think big. Start small. You should always think of the bigger picture (i.e. Facebook for everyone in the world), because you want to make sure that you enable yourself to grow towards that point. Using Steve Jobs' analogy, it's about anticipating where the dots will be. Or as Wayne Gretzky puts it: skate to where you expect the puck will be, not where it is at the moment. Having this bigger vision in mind, will help you move forward. That said, always start small. If you can make your product or service valuable for a small group of people (that are also representative of a bigger population), you can definitely figure out ways to reach those people. The initial challenge though is to make those first 10 / 100 / 1000 people really use your product or service (and preferably pay for it).

They met a need for lots of people. Their values lead to long term success, but their short term growth was due to meeting a need in the marketplace and doing really well.

Everything you do (in life and as an entrepreneur) should start with an underlying passion. If you aren't pursuing the things you're most passionate about, you're doing it wrong (or just for the wrong reasons). IMHO. So in that regard, I'd highly recommend reading Simon Sinek's "Start With Why". If you're not up to reading a book, just Google his TED talk as a start.

Read the book What Would Google Do?! Their business models peaked at the right times and their brand is sticky because the technologies work. They make the complicated world of information on internet simple to navigate. Like the Apple products, it is a tool that anyone can use and feel good about. As long as you listen to your customers and the results continue to be positive, it is hard for anyone to take your market share... even Yahoo!

Without an insider's perspective, my guess is that Facebook did a Series A because it made the most sense for the business at the time. In 2005 a Series A was very different than one now, and you could make the argument that today it would be called another seed round. That said, Facebook at the time was seeing engagement metrics that blew away expectations. Zuck also had a concrete growth strategy and early backing from serious Valley insiders, so the proverbial rocket ship was launching. Raising money is equally about cash and value-add, and back then Valley institutional money was both a validation point and significant competitive advantage. People forget that Facebook was entering a hugely competitive market, and winning meant securing healthy resources to grow as fast as possible and to attract the best talent. Don't consider your A vs Angel decision in the context of Facebook. Consider your fundraising in the context of where your business is and what resources it'll take to win market position. Institutional investment is best evaluated in light of the value they can bring to scaling a company that's scalable. Their connections, insight, and operating expertise can take an exciting company from startup to "game changer", if that company is truly a game changer. In many cases that company may not be a game changer, but if it's a real business (which many startups aren't, in the VC definition of the word - $100 million+) than the VC industry is where you'll find experts. Up until your business is surely that kind of business, it might make sense to otherwise finance.

The core underlying factor for this is that platforms and behaviors took hold which did two crucial things for commerce, communication, and entertainment driven companies. The first was provide a graph to leverage for quick scale, Zynga on Facebook being the best example. Many others were able to leverage the social graph to quickly grow and you could include Pinterest as a benefactor here, as their core group of early users were already custom to Facebook (and other large niche networks like Etsy). The second was that the social and mobile web on-boarded a huge swath of new users who were increasingly comfortable doing things online that they previously did offline. Purchases, communication, and self-expression really began to hit a stride because Facebook, Tumblr, and eventually Twitter attracted large audiences that you might consider "mainstream", and the companies that served those markets benefited greatly. As an example, GroupOn delivered deals via email at a time when nearly everyone had moved to web-based email solutions (and had personal emails - not just one for work). Ebay and Amazon had gotten people comfortable with purchasing online, and Groupon pitched them discounts and ease of redemption. The big, big successes are usually about timing, catching trends that are inevitable. Twitter's an example of nailing both mobile-first and the media's inevitable transition to the web - celebrities, athletes, and big brands were the first core success stories that showed the platforms true potential. It was a product built for right now, launched seven years ago. For new entrepreneurs, the real win is that not only are more platforms available today than ever before, but more "building blocks" exist today than ever before. You don't have to reinvent the wheel for a lot of the moving parts of a new business, and you have an almost overwhelming number of choices when it comes to finding new ways to reach an interested market. Anyone interested in thinking about how to reach their intended market is more than welcome to reach out to me on Clarity.

Mine. :-) Seriously: The two mistakes I see with people and blogs is (a) spending too much time reading instead of doing, and (b) reading blogs which don't align with their own business, and therefore the advice therein isn't necessarily good FOR THEM (even if awesome for others!), and therefore is perhaps even worse than a waste of time. Now you can tell I'm being honest because (a) implies you shouldn't read my blog after all! Here's how you can attack (b). Decide on some fundamental characteristics of your business such as: Bootstrapping or Funding? Wanting to run forever or wanting to sell someday? Wanting to grow large and be the CEO of a 1000-person company or wanting to stay small or even stay single-person? Business model (SaaS, installed, hardware, marketplace, freemium, etc). Now find bloggers who tend to give advice to the particular type of business you have. This can be difficult sometimes, but at least you have a lens or filter. Some of it is easy, e.g. 37signals and Joel Spolsky is about bootstrapping and staying small but profitable, whereas Ben Horowitz and Paul Graham are about getting huge with funding on online high-margin tech businesses. And my blog? Well, you'll just have to read a few hundred articles to figure that out. :-)

You have to offer something different, and specialization is a great way to build mass. Friendster and MySpace were open to anyone from the start. It's harder to manage growth of a community in that way. Facebook, by restricting its use to college students first, then to graduates with alumni email addresses, built a close system of people who were less wary about sharing personal details. By the time they opened to everyone, they already had a very strong user base that liked what they got out of it, but were moving into the "real world" and liked the idea of connecting with other people in their lives. The lesson to be learned is that doing one thing and doing it well, or doing something for one small subset of people and doing it well, is a great way to develop a strong network effect. The network was built slowly but surely. The other networks took anyone and everyone and became somewhat of a mess.

I originally answered this question in Quora. Here's my interpretation: Very tough to sleep most nights of the week. Weekends don't mean anything to you anymore. Closing a round of financing is not a relief. It means more people are depending on you to turn their investment into 20 times what they gave you. It's very difficult to "turn it off". But at the same time, television, movies and vacations become so boring to you when your company's future might be sitting in your inbox or in the results of a new A/B test you decide to run. You feel guilty when you're doing something you like doing outside of the company. Only through years of wrestling with this internal fight do you recognize how the word "balance" is an art that is just as important as any other skill set you could ever hope to have. You begin to see how valuable creativity is and that you must think differently not only to win, but to see the biggest opportunity. You recognize you get your best ideas when you're not staring at a screen. You see immediate returns on healthy distractions. You start to respect the Duck. Paddle like hell under the water and be smooth and calm on top where everyone can see you. You learn the hard way that if you lose your cool you lose. You always ask yourself if I am changing the World in a good way? Are people's lives better for having known me? You are creative and when you have an idea it has no filter before it becomes a reality. This feeling is why you can't do anything else. You start to see that the word "entrepreneur" is a personality. It's difficult to talk to your friends that are not risking the same things you are because they are content with not pushing themselves or putting it all out there in the public with the likelihood of failure staring at you everyday. You start to turn a lot of your conversations with relatives into how they might exploit opportunities for profit. Those close to you will view your focus as something completely different because they don't understand. You don't blame them. They can't understand if they haven't done it themselves. It's why you will gravitate towards other entrepreneurs. You will find reward in helping other entrepreneurs. This is my email: paul@ecquire.com. Let me know if I can help you with anything. Your job is to create a vision, a culture, to get the right people on the bus and to inspire. When you look around at a team that believes in the vision as much as you do and trusts you will do the right thing all the time, it's a feeling that can't be explained. The exponential productivity from great people will always amaze you. It's why finding the right team is the most difficult thing you will do but the most important. This learning will affect your life significantly. You will not settle for things anymore because you will see what is possible when you hold out for the best and push to find people that are the best. You don't have a problem anymore being honest with people about not cutting it. You start to see that you're a leader and you have to lead or you can't be involved with it at all. You turn down acquisition offers because you need to run the show and you feel like your team is the best in the World and you can do anything with hard work. Quitting is not an option. You have to be willing to sleep in your car and laugh about it. You have to be able to laugh at many things because when you think of the worse things in the World that could happen to your company, they will happen. Imagine working for something for two years and then have to throw it out completely because you see in one day that it's wrong. You realize that if your team is having fun and can always laugh that you won't die, and in fact, the opposite will happen: you will learn to love the journey and look forward to what you do everyday even at the lowest times. You'll hear not to get too low when things are bad and not to get too high when things are good and you'll even give that advice. But you'll never take it because being in the middle all the time isn't exciting and an even keel is never worth missing out on something worth celebrating. You'll become addicted to finding the hardest challenges because there's a direct relationship between how difficult something is and the euphoria of a feeling when you do the impossible. You realize that it's much more fun when you didn't have money and that money might be the worse thing you could have as a personal goal. If you're lucky enough to genuinely feel this way, it is a surreal feeling that is the closest thing to peace because you realize it's the challenges and the work that you love. Your currencies are freedom, autonomy, responsibility and recognition. Those happen to be the same currencies of the people you want around you. You feel like a parent to your customers in that they will never realize how much you love them and it is they who validate you are not crazy. You want to hug every one of them. They mean the World to you. You learn the most about yourself more than any other vocation as an entrepreneur. You learn what you do when you get punched in the face many many times. You learn what you do when no one is looking and when no one would find out. You learn that you are bad at many things, lucky if you're good at a handful of things and the only thing you can ever be great at is being yourself which is why you can never compromise it. You learn how power and recognition can be addicting and see how it could corrupt so many. You become incredibly grateful for the times that things were going as bad as they possibly could. Most people won't get to see this in any other calling. When things are really bad, there are people that come running to help and don't think twice about it. Tal Raviv, Gary Smith, Joe Reyes, Toan Dang, Vincent Cheung, Eric Elinow, Abe Marciano are some of them. I will forever be in their debt and I could never repay them nor would they want or expect to be repaid. You begin to realize that in life, the luckiest people in the World only get one shot at being a part of something great. Knowing this helps you make sense of your commitment. Of all the things said though, it's exciting. Every day is different and so exciting. Even when it's bad it's exciting. Knowing that your decisions will not only affect you but many others is a weight that I would rather have any day than the weight of not controlling my future. That's why I could not do anything else.

Any time I've done work in a resort area, our success has always depended upon string relationships with the actual resorts. Have you begun any sort of grass roots work at this point? Started to form relationships with those resorts without significant food and beverage outlets? Feel free to arrange for a call if you'd like to discuss more details.

It also greatly depends on "why" do you want the publicity. There are tools to become visible for investors, there are networks to attract board members etc At last but not least - there are networks and tools to get partners and buyers/licensees. Happy to discuss.

I think this is a great thing. As with any industry, sometimes something major needs to happen to weed out the riff-raff. Keywords should not be the focus, and for real agencies they haven't been for a while now. While SEOs used to promote 'more traffic to your website', what they really should have been doing is promoting 'more TARGETED traffic to your website'. Look, anyone can get traffic, but targeted traffic takes work. And that's the traffic that turns into conversions. Agencies that are focusing on keywords aren't serving their clients' end goal - more revenue. Want more revenue and less crappy traffic? Give me a shout.

Hello Areriel, It can be hard to know where to start at beginning. What I suggest you do it to start a blog about the things you'd like to be doing. Then start building you following on the social media. Use Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to connect and engage with industry professionals. Go to industry events and connect with people. Make business cards of your blog and give it to them. Be interested in what they do and they will become interested in what you do. If you're interested for a call, I can teach you exactly how you can connect with industry professionals online and offline. Just send me in advance the city you'd like to work in (I guess that's LA) and more info of what you'd really want to do. This is my VIP link for a free call https://clarity.fm/martinzhel/inbound I will be glad to help you out.

(Background: I founded the largest marketplace for direct ad sales. Powers sites like Microsoft, Aol, Gawker, etc) If you want to sell ads directly to advertisers... that's awesome, but recognize it takes more work than just dropping AdSense on your site. I'm glad you're thinking of it like "how can I attract advertisers (customers) to do business with me?" I personally don't think gimmicks work well in the long run. It's all about the fundamentals. You are essentially a business (the website) that sells a product (the ad space / ability to reach your audience) to customers (the advertisers). All the normal fundamentals apply - you have to attract potential customers, sell them on your product, close the business, get repeat business, etc. So while a gimmick may work to get someones attention, if their experience of doing business with you is terrible they won't buy or won't come back. We believe the best way to attract, close and keep advertisers is to make your "products" as easy to find and purchase as possible. In the direct ad space, it is way too complicated - often requiring lots of emails and manual effort. Plus they have to find you to begin with. Some actionable stuff for you to do: * Do some customer validation. If you want to sell a product (the ad space), how do you know there is a market? Have you talked to potential advertisers about this? Do you have any pre-committed deals? Do your similar competitors do direct sales successfully? * Have a .com/advertise page and promote it well. You have to let people know you're open for business. Make it easy for people to find it. * Have a system that makes it easy to place/execute/manage actual ad orders. This is what we do at www.isocket.com. There are other tools for various needs, website sizes, costs, etc.

Source: I founded a major display ad tech business. (What about Google's prediction of $100B by 2017?) I believe there are a few key things that need to change: Publishers need to wake up and stop forcing buyers to use old school hand-to-hand combat direct sales methods (where 70% of the current market $ is). Make it easier for people to buy from you, and more people will buy from you! Transactional friction must decrease. It is 10 TIMES more expensive to spend a dollar on a TV ad as it is to spend a dollar on a banner ad. (3 cents per branding dollar for TV, 30 cents for web.) We need measurement practices and attribution other than the click through rate, which was good for performance marketing but bad for branding. The big budgets want something better in order to track their spending. Engaging but unobtrusive creative formats. "When's the last time a banner made you cry?" Sight, sound, and motion on TV are still far better than banners at eliciting emotion. This needs to get figured out in order to enlarge the market.

Source: I founded www.buyads.com and www.isocket.com, which powers the direct ad sales for the web's best sites (like TechCrunch, AOL, Microsoft, etc) We hand invited the publishers that join our market because, as your question suggests, there is some threshold between who should and should not try direct sales. There are no hard rules, just guidelines. The superseding one is this: Do you have inventory (audience) an advertiser would take the time to specifically work with you for? If you open a "store" and starting selling this stuff, do people want to buy it? One measure is traffic, but that's not enough. In general we like to look for sites with 100,000 page views a month or more. But it can depend on the content and vertical. For example, we power a website that gets 25k hits a month but is the only site covering the voice over talent industry in Hollywood - so its super nichey and there is a market for those advertisers. Other examples of small but successful premium properties include some hyperlocal ones (www.queensmamas.com, www.brooklynheightsblog.com, www.brokelyn.com, etc), the largest blog for truckers, largest blog for prison wardens, etc. The conflicting examples are sites with large traffic but bad audiences/verticals. We reject a lot of "tech blog" also-rans that just copy and paste content from TechCrunch but get a lot of SEO traffic from it. Or even if it's a legit site, it can be in a bad brand-advertiser vertical like home finance / mortgages (which is mostly lead gen advertisers)

There is a difference between your product being open source versus the tech stack you use to build it being open source. You use email to conduct your business, and that's based on an open standard! Whoever told you it's "absolutely imperative" that you use Rails instead of an "open" language like PHP ... run as far away from working with that investor as possible. Just because your programming language is open source doesn't mean acquirers will value you less. The only way this would come into play is for practical matters. The largest possible one being that the acquirer is on Rails and you're on PHP, so they are less excited because they'll need to rewrite your stuff from PHP to Rails or now also have PHP in their toolkit. Another minor possible consideration is that open source stacks can sometimes be more exploitable (i.e. security risks), but that's unlikely to affect acquirers.