For pure B2B, nothing beats the free and fee offerings at http://www.marketingprofs.com/

Starting crowdfunding while in beta is good - you already passed part of the way. So for backers it is less risky to support you. When I've started my project - the only real option was KickStarter. Now it is the same because only KickStarter has "blockbuster" effect - huge paying audience. On KickStarter you'll collect at least ten times more if to compare to #2 IndieGoGo. Sure if your project will pass KickStarter moderation. But it is worth trying. Giveaways, in my opinion, is always better: you test your production chain & keep full control over your business. Also the product is the core of your business and improving your product will lead to higher valuation. If you have community - try to make it bigger & tell your followers about your crowdfunding plans so they prepare to back you when funding starts. If there is no community - start to build one. Also prepair press kits & at least 10 updates (when 30-50-75-100-150-200% of goal reached, explaining functions of your product etc.), make spreadsheet with press (also include communities related to your project) contact details, check your project category on the selected crowdfunding platform for projects related with yours (for future cross promotion). Hiring expert is pretty useless, I think. Calls on clarity.fm will work better as you not tied to one person and may get more opinions, probably, for the same price. And it is not so much information in the net about crowdfunding to lost in it. All you need (considering you already have great product) is: 1. good project page (which means video + photos + text) 2. good work with press (not so much may be done: press kit + send it over the contacts you have - the result is related to kit quality and amount of contacts) 3. some ways to utilize KickStarter organic traffic (that's "30% rule" & crosspromotion - these ways generally don't cost a penny and both work great for me and 2 more projects I've mentored). Call me for details - I'll be happy to help.

Good question - digital B2B is definitely a particular challenge. One factor that determines the approach is the nature of your potential buyers' online habits. For example, if a significant percentage of your potential buyers use X social network, it makes sense to develop strategic marketing on X social network. This means the first step in the process is defining your digital target market. You may have a good idea what your target market is offline, but you've got to hop inside their heads when they get online, either on a desktop or mobile. It's true that there are myriad other ways to find your target market online beyond social media, but the value of social media lies in how most users declare who they are (and what their buying habits are) on their social networks (bio keywords, friends, hashtags, and other content they interact with). In order to define your target market online, I recommend three different strategies: 1. Manageflitter (manageflitter.com) and Followerwonk. These tools are for Twitter only, but that's ok because Twitter is amazing. ;) Using the "Bio keyword search" or "account search", type in words your potential buyers might use to describe themselves. (You can also narrow it by location, which sounds valuable to your South Africa specification). For example, your buyers might place "CEO" or "Owner" in their bio. (I have no idea, just giving an example). You will be able to view, classify, and interact with all the accounts on Twitter who match your specifications. 2. The other tool that aids greatly in target market definition online is Facebook Graph Search. It is a newer function of Facebook. Here's how you can take advantage of it: a. Find a very popular Facebook Page of a competitor or industry partner (or your own Facebook Page, if it has 500+ Likes). Let's say the page is named "Industry Partner" b. Type in the search bar: "Magazines people who like Industry Partner like" or "Websites people who like Industry Partner like" or even "Restaurants people who like Industry Partner like". With a large enough data pool, Facebook Graph Search provides an incredible amount of marketing insight: where your potential buyers eat, what they read, what websites they visit. Repeat this process on as many relevant pages as possible. If you find 3 websites they tend to like (ones that keep popping up), consider advertising via Google Adsense on those sites. Reach out to the admins of the sites (you may be able to find them by searching the site name on Twitter via Manageflitter or Followerwonk) and see if they are open to advertising or partnership opportunities -- perhaps a guest blog about how YOU are singlehandedly revolutionizing the industry. There are more ways to accomplish what you are looking for, but I hope these help. I guarantee they're highly valuable for how much time they take. Let me know if you would like more information. Thanks, Evan

What's the name of the app so we can look at it?

If you have a self-hosted Wordpress blog, there is a great free plugin called "Tweet Old Posts" which will promote older posts on a schedule you set. http://wordpress.org/plugins/tweet-old-post/ It works really well and is simple to setup. Cheers, Hani

The disadvantage(s) are: These answers address the question assuming the large corporation is the largest shareholder in the investment round or at least 40% of the investment offering. Public perception: You raised the issue in your question. How many of your potential customers would perceive this negatively? You might actually consider doing some basic market research here with existing or potential customers. Deal-structure and negative signal concerns: Often these investments come with terms that can weaken their appetite for investing. Also, if they decline to invest further, this will often be perceived as a negative signal (i.e. management didn't live up to its promise/expectations). Influence in your business: Regardless of percentage interest, board control, etc., there will expect to wield influence in your product or service offering, and potentially (and most damagingly) make it difficult for you to sell to companies who they perceive as a threat, even if such terms aren't part of the deal. No value-add: Often, these deals end-up creating little to no value, and this is most frustrating to a company when you made specific concessions and have had to deal with concerns I've raised above only to find the only thing they were good for was their money. A great way to ensure you get the most value out of a corporate investor is for you to make the deal competitive and possibly bring in another corporate investor, or better yet, bring in great value-added investors whose total investment value makes the corporation's investment a small part of the round. Happy to talk through the specifics of your concerns and ways to manage or address them in a call.

We have some success with it, but I recommend you check with Hiten Shah at KISSmetrics. I believe he told me that most of their sales can be tracked back to their content marketing efforts.

I second invision for showing quick online prototypes, but for something more versatile, i use AxureRP (www.axure.com) . The ability to build a sketchy wireframe or a pixel perfect app is amazing. I love it. Great for mobile gestures and animations. Go check it out - they offer a free trial. Contact me if you want more info but they have awesome tutorials on the site. I taught myself everything.

The best way to launch a product is to start promoting it before you release it on the market. Your strategy also should depend of how are you going to sell the product: online or in store. Lead all of your marketing activities must lead to your website. Here are some of the things you can do: Make a good video explanation of the product. Show to people how it works and focus on the problems that it solves for them. Build a buyer persona focused website. That is extremely important especially if you're selling online. It will skyrock your conversion rate. Start building a community on the social media. Focus on building relationships with people, ask for their feedback. Build a PR buzz around your brand. A great service you can use for that is MuckRack. There you can find journalist that are looking to write a story for exatly what you're looking to sell. Make a keyword research and run some tests with Google Adwords. Make A/B testing with different landing pages to see what works better. Focus on SEO and content marketing to bring visitors to your website. If you tell me more, I will be able to help you better with a more concrete advice. I'm open for a free consultation. I'm sending you a VIP key for a free call. https://clarity.fm/martinzhel/inbound

I've worked with several business partners and some were Great, while others not so much. The great ones were referred through my network of trusted individuals. Reaching out to people you know and trust and letting them know what you are doing and looking for is the best way to find a partner. The next step is to make sure you have shared values. Which means, you need to write down what your values are and then ask the potential business partner if they match with what his/hers are. That's the best approach I've found from my own experience.

I thought I would send a response based on my experience in international trade, manufacturing, importing and sale of products based on niche markets and gaps in the market. It would depend on a couple of things... Are you going to make something? Outsourcing to a country that has the experience in the foundation of the idea e.g. you want to make a certain type of teak wooden chair with legs that rock and a drink holder with an mp3 player in the arm rest. Is it a technology or service idea you need help with the actual information needed? Research with similar companies and competitors on the internet... nationally and internationally Is it a brand new idea? or has it been done before? If it a brand new idea then you could research similar industries and get information on their sources. You would then look for similar supplier companies you can test to your specifications and needs. If it has been done before, then research on competitors in your local, national and international product markets. Hope the above helps you in the right direction. I would be happy to discuss this in more detail or if you have any other questions you may have. Nicholas Lord

It all depends on what one decides to be a definition of a "success story." For some entrepreneurs, it might be getting acqui-hired, for some -- a $10M exit, for some -- a $200M exit, and for others -- an IPO. Based on the numbers I have anecdotally heard in conversations over the last decade or so, VCs fund about 1 in 350 ventures they see, and of all of these funded ventures, only about 1 in 10 become really successful (i.e. have a big exit or a successful IPO.) So you are looking at a 1 in 3500 chance of eventual venture success among all of the companies that try to get VC funding. (To put this number in perspective, US VCs invest in about 3000-3500 companies every year.) In addition, there might be a few others (say, maybe another 1-2 in every 10 companies that get VC investments) that get "decent" exits along the way, and hence could be categorized as somewhat successful depending on, again, how one chooses to define what qualifies as a "success story." Finally, there might also be companies that may never need or get around to seeking VC funding. One can, of course, find holes in the simplifying assumptions I have made here, but it doesn't really matter if that number instead is 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000. The basic point being made here is just that the odds are heavily stacked against new ventures being successful. But that's also one of the distinguishing characteristics of entrepreneurs -- to go ahead and try to bring their idea to life despite the heavy odds. Sources of some of the numbers: http://www.nvca.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ven... https://www.pwcmoneytree.com/MTP... http://paulgraham.com/future.html Here are others' calculations of the odds that lead to a similar conclusion: 1.Dear Entrepreneurs: Here's How Bad Your Odds Of Success Are http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-odds-of-success-2013-5 2.Why 99.997% Of Entrepreneurs May Want To Postpone Or Avoid VC -- Even If You Can Get It http://www.forbes.com/sites/dileeprao/2013/07/29/why-99-997-of-entrepreneurs-may-want-to-postpone-or-avoid-vc-even-if-you-can-get-it/

[Background: I started my first business at 12, 3x founder by time I was 22. Named by White House as one of the top US entrepreneurs under 30.] Young entrepreneurs can succeed, just like older ones can. Younger founders have certain pluses that older ones don't, and vice versa. One group is not inherently better than the other. Example: youth has fresher eyes to innovate, but lacks scar tissue that comes with experience. However, being young does have its advantages. Many of them have been covered in these answers. I'd boil it down to: higher risk tolerance, less preconceived notions that constrain innovation, and stubbornness. I often advise young entrepreneurs to "Be young, do stupid." I wrote a blog post about a group of aspiring young student-entrepreneurs who paid out of their own pocket to visit Silicon Valley from Singapore: http://blog.isocket.com/2010/07/be-young-do-stupid-aspiring-entrepreneurs-are-awesome/ On the flip side, being a young entrepreneur is disproportionately difficult. One of the reasons is what I call the Lemonade Stand Syndrome - where people pat you on the head and give you a quarter because they think it's cute, regardless of how well your business is doing. They treat you differently, even though most of them don't intend to. For example, our company culture is to treat people as old friends. One habit of which is in our phone calls or meetings I will often call people "man", "brother", "dude", etc. I was once criticized by a VC for being immature because I said "Take care brother!" when we were leaving our meeting. Were I 50 years old, I doubt he would have been calling me immature. (Yes, I will still call people dude when I'm 50!) Another example: In my teens I once brokered a legally-creative real estate deal. It was totally legal, but unusually crafty. I hired an attorney to close the deal. My own attorney called the other party and said "You should walk away from this, this is just a kid and there's no way this deal is kosher." Were I 50 years old, I doubt he would have thought the same way. I fired that attorney, got the deal validated elsewhere and it went through, and I netted $50k in a few weeks.

Don't ask yourself multiple questions. Ask a potential customer ONE question: "Will you give me $10 or 10 minutes to be on my early access list for a product XYZ that solves your pain ABC?" This tells you a few things: 1) Is there an identifiable customer and do you know what they look like and how to reach them? 2) Do they have a pain bad enough they know what you were referring to and cared enough to listen? 3) Did they care enough about solving that pain to do something nominal like giving you $10 to be on a special beta list (or whatever)?

The opportunity to bring your creativity and insight to your business. Calling your own shots and realizing that it is all up to you. Being an entrepreneur is an opportunity to learn everyday!

Yes, it's foolish. People can disagree about how much value there is in a MBA, but that's not the point. You've identified two targets - being an entrepreneur and building out your network. Go straight for the jugular, not some round about way through school. Want to build your network? Take half the money you would've spent on grad school and support yourself while you explore early business opportunities and network like mad. It's quite simple. Want to build your network? Spend your time, money and energy networking in the right places. Going to school for networking only is like going grocery shopping every day hoping you'll meet your future spouse in the aisles. Taking it to the extreme... take that money and throw massive parties, sponsor relevant meetups, make a $5k investment in a startup, etc. [Source: I dropped out of school with only a few courses left to found my startup that became a VC backed Silicon Valley company.]

I mentor startups on the application of product management processes to help them make better decisions. Before you try to do sales analysis and forecasting, you need to find out if your potential licensees see value in using your solution. The best way to do this is to talk to some of their product managers and find out what challenges they face. Are they struggling to differentiate with their competitors? Are they getting lots of complaints or requests for improved visualizations in their product? Once you understand their situation as they view it, you can explore to see if your solution is valuable to them by solving one of their big problems. At the point where you understand the value to your potential licensees, you can start to test pricing. Let me know if you need more help here. Cheers and good luck.

How to get more customers: - By providing excellent service to your current clients so they can refer you more business. There is no better marketing than word of mouth. - Make sure business is added to Google Local Business listing. - Online Classifieds like Craigslist & Kijiji - Make sure you have a Website - Search Engine Optimization (Ranking for Keywords) - Advertising in Local Newspapers - Google Adwords targeting Keywords - Use Social Media. Example go on Search.Twitter.com and search for people looking for Massage Therapy in your city then tweet them out.

[Source: I founded isocket, a 'thought leader' ad tech startup] Allow me to try and demystify that Luma Partners graph that you linked to. It's a great graph and Terry has done a good job building it, but it strikes fear into new people like you - and sometimes, like any data source, it can be twisted or misunderstood. Many look at it and go "wow, that's such an overcrowded market!" but I like to point out that this is a $30B (domestic) industry, and that graph essentially covers all the pieces. I'm sure if you look at any other industry that big and drill down into all the vendors and OEMs and so on it would be even more crowded. Like autos - there are a few big car companies, but thousands of little vendors that make this bolt or that gasket. It's all about the two main entities, the ones that matter - advertisers and publishers. Everything else is there to help those two groups. Advertisers, like Ford, buy advertising space from the publishers, like Yahoo Autos. So there are buyers and sellers. These buyers and sellers used to get together, shake hands, and do a deal. But over time its gotten more complicated for each side, so companies pop up to start handling different pieces of it. Any time you have a market of buyers and sellers doing business (stocks, widgets, whatever), you tend to see things like: * Brokers to help connect people and do deals. * Marketplaces where buyers and sellers can find each other. * "Authority" type services that help a buyer investigate whether a seller is legit and vice versa. * Vendors/suppliers that help you execute a deal. * And so on. For example, if you want to buy a banner ad on Yahoo, you have to make a banner ad. So there are companies that help you make great banner ads. Then maybe you want to bid on the ad space on Yahoo so that you can get a competitive price, so you go to an ad exchange like Right Media (owned by Yahoo). Let's say you call up a website and want to buy a banner ad on them. Even if you do everything else by hand (like send them a check by mail, etc) - how does the banner ad actually show up on their website? That's why ad servers were born. Ad servers manage all the different ad spaces and banner ads for a website, handles rotating the banners, turning the banner on and off on specific dates, tracking clicks, etc. One of the newest buckets is "DSPs" - this is a new type of service that popped up a couple years ago when buyers wanted to do a new type of advertising (called Real Time Bidding). A customer had a need/pain, so a group of companies started to help them. So each bucket in that Luma graph is a piece of the chain to help buyers and sellers do business. Some buckets are more important and arguably more lucrative/sustainable than others, but that's how it developed.

You really don't need to do that. Most people use an "ad-exchange". See this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_exchange I've used RightMedia in the past (now part of Yahoo).

[I'm Founder of isocket, the worlds largest marketplace for "premium" ad inventory] This question assumes (perhaps wrongly) that 1) a SSP and an exchange platform are all that different and 2) publishers don't understand what SSPs do and are staying away from them due to ignorance. It may be that some do understand and chose not to go that route. More and more premium publishers are improving their strategy by reducing the amount of inventory they make available in any of the remnant spot markets. An SSP is basically an exchange of exchanges. Their job is to make the most out of your remnant inventory. An exchange has the same goal. And many of the exchanges expose your inventory through the same RTB pipes that an SSP would. But just speaking about a situation where someone is defaulting to a single exchange out of ignorance, it could be any of the normal reasons that create early adopters vs late adopters, such as comfort in the known, perceived switchover costs, tradition, internal corporate bureaucracy, turf battles, people just not giving a crap, etc etc etc. Also: Publisher's fear of channel conflict, price erosion, and data leakage are all completely valid - but sometimes publishers take this too far and make seemingly bad "ignorant" decisions based on fear and inaccurate info.

I would create an account with Manageflitter and/or Followerwonk - both integrate with Twitter. I know that many people feel negatively about Twitter but here's why it's great, especially for your quesiton: There are no privacy settings. Facebook and LinkedIn have tons of walls you run into while cruising around looking for potential buyers. And the other social networks are not conducive to time-effective/cost-effective networking for other reasons. With these tools (Manageflitter and Followerwonk), you can search the bios of Twitter accounts for DPC, TPA, and any other relevant keyword. You can search within your location, or throughout Twitter as a whole. From there, the tools allow you to classify (List) or interact (Follow) them. After that, I'd encourage you to engage them subtly, by favoriting and retweeting a few of their Tweets over several days. Then begin a conversation with them, ideally about a mutual interest or some random thing they specify in their bio. After a back-and-forth tweet or two, bring up your services tactfully. Ask them honestly if they need what you are offering. If they don't, maybe they know someone who is. At the very least, you'll have a relevant networking partner/friend! Another very valuable use of your time would be to post in LinkedIn groups. They are more professional than Facebook groups, and it's common for people to post jobs and other networking opportunities there, as well as pitch their own services. (See the lengthy URL at the bottom of this answer for an example). Hope that helps - I'd love to talk more; there are several other ways you could go about connecting with DPC's and TPA's online. Thanks, Evan http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1783783&trk=vsrp_groups_res_name&trkInfo=VSRPsearchId%3A1618903721380231777057%2CVSRPtargetId%3A1783783%2CVSRPcmpt%3Aprimary

If you are aiming on iOS and Android with Windows Phone 7/8 as a plus you should use C# as the language and Xamarin Studio as the IDE/Framework. You may also choose to use Visual Studio on Windows as an option. Take a look on their website: http://www.xamarin.com Even Microsoft is using Xamarin to build iOS applications and they have over 400k developers using it. Your application will be native (compiled to the platform you choose) and you are able to use all the native libraries, widgets and UI parts. You will need a cross-platform architecture to be able to reuse code among platforms and using Xamarin you may be able to reuse more than 50-60% of your C# code among platforms. This solution may render the same experience on the devices as on the website, but it enables your applications to deliver much more performance and features than any HTML5 solution. Facebook went from HTML5 to native applications due to performance and user experience limitations (gestures and other platform features are not present using HTML5).

What a great question / thanks for asking. Here's how some of the top experts are getting more calls. 1. Link Clarity on Social Profiles ( http://clarity.fm/me <- click to get your link) - Obvious: Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook - Others: Email Signature, Blog Widget https://clarity.fm/account/widget Pro Tip: Schedule Tweets, Facebook Post or LinkedIn Message every week promoting your URL (I use www.bufferapp.com to do this) 2. Engage On Clarity - Use your VIP link to offer free calls to build your reputation & ratings (+ Reviews) https://clarity.fm/account/vip-link - Answer questions on Clarity (5% of question end up in a call request) https://clarity.fm/questions/f/status=open - Promote your Clarity profile link (Views = Quality) / View above - Ensure (if you have the skills) you set your Areas of Expertise and use Keywords that people search for .. essentially anything that helps them make money (Fundraising, Marketing, Sales, Biz Dev, Legal, etc) 3. Engage Outside of Clarity - Quora: Many of our experts have migrated their questions from Quora to Clarity Answers (Copy/Paste & Answer). It's a hack, but legal and fair. These answers show up on their profile so it help build credibility. - Quora #2: Answer questions on Quora, and at the end of your answer, link your Clarity profile URL - LinkedIn: Engage in Q&A within groups and add your Clarity profile URL at the end of your post. - Guest Post (Other People Blogs) and at the end of the post, write "If you'd like to discuss further, call me on Clarity" - About.me - Add your Clarity URL - Forums: Depending on your expertise, you can find Forums to help others (answer questions) but always end with your Clarity profile URL I'm assuming you seeing a trend... The more calls you do on Clarity + Ratings you get + Answers that get voted high quality (for a Topic) the higher you'll rank within our search. That being said, 70% of my calls come from me promoting my Clarity link and I'm personally making $3-4K per month right now (and that doesn't include any #3 tactics (Yet! :).

Here are some of the ways you can do this: Start a blog on the topic of growing a business. Make a YouTube channel and record yourself talking, write an ebook (Free or paid), be active on the social media (especially LinkedIn and Twitter), guest blog post for websites that are worth it.