The decision to raise equity capital would be made based on these criteria: (a) Size of your market: Is it a big market, meaning you have a chance to hit $100M in revenue in 5-8 years? (b) What is your YoY growth rate? (c) Will infusion of equity capital help you greatly accelerate your YoY growth rate? Happy to discuss further if you'd like to.

Apple specifically precludes anything that can't be delivered via the app from using in-app purchases. So you're free to tie a credit-card to services and real-world fees (think Uber) without paying Apple any transaction fees. Here's Apple's documentation on what they support (and don't allow) for in-app purchases. https://developer.apple.com/in-app-purchase/In-App-Purchase-Guidelines.pdf Happy to help in any way I can. I run a mobile-based startup myself.

Ticket Tailor is an online ticketing platform with no per-ticket fees. Instead it's a monthly fee from just $25 (or £15) / month (and I'm the founder). It's really easy to use, you can embed your box office in to your website, and it works with PayPal and/or Stripe for taking payments so you get paid directly. Check it out: http://www.tickettailor.com/rf=clfm

I wouldn't get into the game of charging per word/hour. You don't want to commoditize yourself. I suggest looking into value-based fees. Here's a good place to start. http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2013/06/12/breakingthetimebarrier/

I specialize in investment real estate; more specifically short sales and flipping houses. However I have friends in the industry that do specialize in storage units. I could point you in the right direction for sure. Are you only considering storage units?

Taskrabbit and oDesk. Though over time the most common requests are usually standardized into products to reduce complexity for the buyer. For most buyers the open ended nature of a bounty system is intimidating.

I've attended this class in-person and the video version of Michael Dearing's class on pricing is great. You can see it here: http://vimeopro.com/harrisonmetalshorts/pricing If you haven't already done so, I'd carefully study the effectiveness and uptake of "premium" services already offered by conventional shipping and package delivery companies. That might help understand how and when consumers are willing to pay premiums on top of an expected level of service. How many shipping companies have you spoken to to confirm that they feel the pain around the "wasted time and money" associated with customer care? Have you asked them or worked with them to actually try and quantify the cost associated per customer? That would give you great insight onto how to potentially price the service. I'd be happy to talk to you about this in more detail via a call.

CTA based tests are always some of the most interesting, but also provide big gains. One of the most surprising tests was when the button CTA on a form, which was aligned to the CTA on the form itself, lost with statistically significant data to just plain 'submit' and this was after several rounds of prior tests. If you're interested in learning more, check out our site at dragonsearchmarketing.com.

I built Canada's first (and one of the world's first) crowdfunding websites that attracted over 115,000 members without any paid customer acquisition and distributed over $3m to charities so I can certainly attest to the fact that sites that focus on creating positive outcomes are attractive to many people. There are however, several challenges to executing your idea well. Some of them are: Can it be truly helpful? Just like this site (Clarity), the challenge is for the answers to be genuinely helpful to the person in need. Giving bad advice or allowing negative commentary could be incredibly damaging to the psyche and overall well-being of your community. The potential cost associated with vetting the people able to provide help could be a significant barrier. Anonymity: I have built several applications that allow for anonymous messaging and have learned that people are reluctant to trust the promise of anonymity, so there are product challenges to getting the people to post sensitive information. These can be overcome but they are not without significant challenges. Peer Support is challenging: Providing users an open-ended mechanism who are going through something the ability to offer suggestions to others *sounds* like a good idea, but again, can be very damaging. Extensive moderation would likely be required. The best (i.e. potentially most helpful) service I've seen so far is a text-messaging based service for teens in crisis. Here's an article to it: http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/health-headlines/crisis-hotline-operators-reaching-out-to-teens-1-text-at-a-time-1.1217225 I think if you're going to build something, it should be mobile and figure out a way to sustain the business or service that supports paid staff or at the very least trained and vetted staff to be primarily responsible for helping individuals in need. Happy to talk this through with you if you are (or when you become) serious about pursuing this idea.

First off, I have several people I could introduce. I'd also like to know the industry you're operating in, what the data looks like, where it comes from, and how much it needs to be cleaned up if putting into a relational database, or if the better solution would be a distributed file system like MongoDB where you don't necessarily need to normalize the data. Also, if you're a startup, or if the company is well established with many existing customers and if this is for a new initiative. Assuming you're working with a relational database, which it sounds like you are, you will want to implement something like Tableau or build out a custom dashboard using Google Charts, HighCharts, D3Js, or any number of other potential dashboarding/visualization solutions, which usually involves some programming/scripting in JavaScript. There are paid solutions like Tableau (which is amazingly powerful), and then there are free/open source options. I'd be happy to talk about possible ways to architect the solution, and discover who you would need once I understand the variables more. If you're building a web application, then you will likely need someone who is also a full stack developer, meaning they can handle building the back end and the front end in addition to the data requirements. Many early startups choose Ruby on Rails (because there is a ton of open source code out there for it) with Twitter Bootstrap (modified) and in order to visualize the data, they will need to work with JavaScript. It makes sense to have this person act as initial product and to derive the insights out of the data. They're pretty much the only person who can do this anyways, because they're the ones on the data. If you're in an early stage startup, I would recommend the strongest business owner (usually the early stage startup's CEO) be directly involved with this person on communicating what value your solution brings to clients, and what they pay you for, and in brainstorming on potential features and reports. Once the solution becomes established, and many customers start using it directly, there should be a different product person interfacing to those customers over time, gathering feature requests from customers and bringing it back to the Data Scientist/Analyst who spends their time working on the data. Depending on whether the solutions are SQL or NoSQL or hybrid, there are different types of Data Science professionals you should consider: 1. Data Scientist 2. Data Engineer 3. Data Modeler/Analyst 1. The Data Scientist handles experimenting with the data, and is able to prove statistically significant events and statistically valid arguments. Normally, this person would have modeling skills with Matlab, R, or perhaps SAS, and they should also have some programming/scripting skills with C++ or Python. It really depends on your whole environment and the flow of data. In my experience, Data Scientists that exclusively use SAS are sometimes extremely skilled PhD level statisticians and focused exclusively on the accuracy of the models (which is okay), but often not sufficiently skilled to fit within an early startup's big data environment in today's world and handle all of the responsibilities you'd like them to handle described in your question. I'm am not bad mouthing SAS people as they are often the MOST talented mathematicians and I have a great deal of respect for their minds, but if they do not have the programming skills, they become isolated within a group without a Data Engineer helping them along. Often a SAS user trying to fit into this environment will force you to use a stack of technologies that a skilled Data Architect would not recommend using. It takes programming in some object oriented language to fit into today's big data environments, and the better Data Scientists are using hybrid functional and OOP programming languages like Scala. Extremely hard to find Data Scientist can also work with graph databases like Neo4j, Titan, or Apache Giraph. 2. The Data Engineer, if you're dealing with a firehose of data like Twitter and capturing it into a NoSQL architecture, this is the person who would prepare the data for the Data Scientist to analyze. They often are capable of using machine learning libraries like WEKA to transform data, or techniques like MapReduce on Hadoop. 3. The Data Modeler/Analyst is someone who can use a tool like SAS, SPSS, Matlab, or even R, probably a very strong advanced Excel user, but likely won't be a strong programmer, although perhaps they will have a computer science degree and have some academic programming experience. The most important thing to watch out for is someone who is too academic, and has not been proven to deliver a solution in the real world. This will really screw you up if you're a startup, and could be the reason you fail. Often, the startup will run out of money due to the time it takes to deliver a complete solution or in the startup's case, a minimally viable product. Ask for examples of their work, and specifically dig into what it is that they did for that solution. I've tried to cover a pretty broad range of possibilities here, but it's best to talk in specifics. I'd be happy to discuss this with you in detail. To answer your question, is it perfectly reasonable for someone to handle all of the responsibilities described in your question, if you find the right type of person with the appropriate skills, and a history of success.

The most powerful element of your brand in the early-stage of your startup is your reputation. Every interaction you have can positively build (or negatively impact) your brand. This can't be bought, but can be easily lost. Common ways I've seen start-ups lose their reputation early: 1) Not listening: Startup CEO asks a customer to participate in customer development and spends the entire time trying to convince the customer they are wrong, don't understand the problem the way the CEO does, or spends time trying to sell the potential customer instead of learning and listening to the customer's needs. The same goes with investors and advisers. Over-promise / under-deliver: This can be fatal and if not, at least set you back several steps and takes many shapes (product functionality and experience, milestones, projections, etc) Unresponsive or uncaring: Coming across as lacking concern, empathy and/or humility is perhaps the most "viral" way to ruin or lose brand value. It seem as though every week there is a story getting shared via Twitter of a CEO, founder or key team member who is bringing down their brand in this category. Failing to make customers love you: While all of the above things can negatively impact your brand, if you don't turn people who experience your product or service into true fans (not a like button), you won't build a lasting brand. Keep your brand focused on your reputation in the early days. Stay laser-focused on this kind of brand-building. It is the surest way to build real brand equity. Happy to talk through any and all of these points in more detail with you on a call.

I used to work in advertising and saw how colleagues would manipulate analytics to give the client what they wanted. I am extremely weary of paying for advertising with Uberpong. Regarding PR, it is very difficult to measure ROI so I prefer to reach out personally and let media outlets know I can be reached directly (this is rare for CEOs). As a result, I have been contacted for opportunities (Austin American-Statesman, Austin Monthly and US Table Tennis Association). Feel free to contact me at http://clarity.fm/davidlowe if you had any further questions I can help answer.

One of the best and most popular script used is Vbulletin. Most of the reputable forums are powered by Vbulletin. The second recommendation I'd have is phpBB. It is absolutely free and open sourced versus Vbulletin which is licence based. I have used both and had no problems with either of them. If you can fork out some money I'd suggest going with Vbulletin. Here is a list of the biggest internet forums http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_forums. You can see most of them are powered by Vbulletin and the second most popular script is phpBB. Regarding fresh look you can simply hire someone or buy a Template.

Most Startups billed their own, but you could look at Magento (OpenSource), Netsuite (Enterprise) or some kind of Wufoo.com form with Stripe.com integration (Simple).

Hello! i help organize and run several events here in Arizona and attend many more. In my opinion this is a loaded question and the best answer I can think of is that it depends in where you live and the agenda of the event. Here in Arizona there are a quite a few right at the end of summer and many more travel from out of town to the events and more as the weather begins to cool. in general you don't want to compete with other events relating to technology even if they seem to be "non-compete" because you force your potential audience to decide which can reduce your attendance..and you will also lose the opportunity of having that other host attend your event. I hope this helps a bit. Please submit more questions :)

Treyedit.com is simple and easy

I personally don't think SEO is dying it's just evolving. Before SEO was all about back link building but now social sharing takes a huge consideration in it.

On the positive: 1) Consignment stores often work on this type of loop. Bring a bunch of clothes, hope they sell, and apply the store credit to new purchases. Well-run consignment stores optimize to minimize their net cash payouts. 2) There are definitely clothes shoppers who feel they should reduce their existing inventory before purchasing new items. Challenges: It's likely though that by trying to force people into a behavior that may not satisfy their desire in that moment, that you end up creating more problems for the user and yourself. For example, you might lose a seller of great items that would sell quickly, because you're forcing them to buy something and they can't find something they love. In commerce, it should all be about reducing friction, and the more barriers you put up, the more steps required to complete an action, the less success you're likely to have. Here's an idea though: Why don't you just create a form of "loyalty point" or simple reputation system where people who keep up a minimum purchase quantity on your site become power users, where their listings are given higher priority than non power users. Who knows? You might find that sellers who won't use your site to buy other clothes see the power listing and ask to pay you directly to access that feature. Bottom line, I think you can achieve what you want to do without making it feel as forced as you initially describe. Happy to talk this through in more detail with you.

The only way that I can think of is to get a legal adviser on the management/board team and give them an equity stake in the company. Long-term, it's likely to cost you more in real terms though.

Good morning, this is a loaded question. Try breaking it down into a few more strategic questions relevant to your current development stage. Or give one of us a call, there are experts here like myself who have worked with startups on your similar market and or might know how to tackle your current hurdles through simple thought process.

Not for me so far. I have an iPhone 4 and iPad 2. It is just a great experience.

There are no real "hacks" to reaching customers. It's just a bunch of hard work -- in 4 real steps: 1. Strategy -- identify what makes you unique / how you drive unique value to that "dream client" 2. Process -- put in place the steps to email / call / connect with them 3. Tools -- use smart tools to manage your time and the comunication (do.com, infusionsoft, rapportive, streak, etc...) 4. Connections -- ask for specific help in executing your strategy There are no long term shortcuts or "hacks" to this. It's just hard work. BUT -- once you have your prospecting factory set up you drive massive results. (I'm happy to share more specifics if you are interested)

Great question! Not a lot of people know about this but is a technique used to help motivate others, particularly employees and team members for better quality, producton, etc... It pretty much harnesses the human desire for competition and makes simple management orders into a group effort through competition. Gasification I think has been used too by companies to entice greater consumer engagement like rewarding for more purchases or checkin in at different locations of the same business...

Practice makes perfect! If you have friends, family and/or mentors, practice for them and ask for constructive criticism. If you do it 100+ times and it's all positive feedback, there is no reason not to feel confident. I just went through @INcubes accelerator program - probably practiced my pitch 500+ times for over 100 different people. Everyone had little nuggets of advice that I held on to until the presentation was perfect. I'd be happy to take a call, listen to your presentation, provide some feedback and ask a couple questions to ensure your basis are covered.

It's all about how the quality of the video, the relevance of the video to what the user expects / wants to have happen as part of their experience in that moment of the app. Most of all, the video has to be as short as possible to convey it's meaning & message. Finally, it has to create the right feeling for the user. Are they happier or better educated/informed or feeling a sense of accomplishment or feeling whatever feeling they're supposed (by your promises to the user) to be feeling?