We both know that hosting is very application specific, and that quality of service varies drastically between providers, yet you'll always find individuals who treat it as a mere commodity. The true value of the host isn't predicated just on their performance characteristics, but also their accessibility, knowledge, adherence to SLA, responsiveness, etc, especially when things go wrong - and things will always go wrong. And when your reputation is on the line, you want to make sure you're partnered with someone that shares your sense of urgency, and acknowledges the value of your reputation, especially as a service provider. This is no different than an attorney. Is your car mechanic a commodity just because you can find the manual online? Of course not. Are developers a commodity just because there are plenty of tutorials, example code and stackoverflow questions on the internet? Of course not. The commoditization of legal services is a common mistake of neophytes, because they fundamentally misunderstand the value proposition of attorneys. Legal representation is more akin to a consultancy than bookkeeping, and you should bear that in mind when finding a partner to help you navigate the legal waters. With that said, I am not suggesting that you go and find the highest priced attorney you can find. You need to find an attorney whose acumen reflects the sophistication of your venture, as well as your ambitions. For example, if you are planning on taking VC funding you'll need an attorney that has navigated those waters before, as there are both transactional and strategic considerations, especially at the formation level. Another important consideration is industry. Certain industries have a strong regulatory apparatus, and as such, you'll require an attorney that is well versed in that arena. For example, HIPAA if you're in the medical industry. In my practice, a vast majority of my clients took it upon themselves to handle their own formation. Many did this because of lack of resources, but most did this because they received the advice from others that legal services were just a formality, and that you could find form documents online that could be augmented to suit your purpose. Most of the issues that these clients now face could have been avoided if they had been properly advised to begin with and the liability the firm is now exposed to dwarfs the previous cost of proper representation. This is especially true in regulation heavy industries; you do not want to be on the receiving in of a cease and desist letter sent by the Attorney General. When you hire an attorney, hire them for the long term. Don't hire them for this specific transaction. You want a representative that has grown with your company, speaks your language, and understands the challenges you face. As well, given the fact that you're a SaaS venture, finding an attorney that has technical proficiency can help greatly. The most important documents your attorney will help you draft aren't the formation docs, but rather those related to the operational integrity, and thus risk exposure, of your core service offering - client agreements, SLAs, IP protection, etc. The importance of your formation docs rests solely on the nature of your corporate structure: will you have investors? will you have different classes of stock? are you in need of any creative securities devices? what does your asset portfolio look like? will you be segmenting business units to try to insulate risk and liability? will you need to generate transfer costs between the business units? what kind of tax considerations are applicable? are there any ancillary considerations of formation (such as qualification as a HUB)? The number of variables involved just with formation is almost boundless. The attorney's job is to act as a facilitator and intermediary between you and the law, mitigate your risk, lower your exposure and create a framework by which to handle unanticipated legal and operational issues. Most startup attorneys advise just as much on business issues as legal issues - these aren't mutually exclusive concepts. I know you were probably asking for something more concrete, but I don't think you'd be well served being provided any definitive numbers without knowing your industry, what your short and long terms goals are, what your vision for your company is, and the risks associated with your venture. If equity supply is limited, and you're in an extremely straight forward industry with little exposure, then you could probably find an attorney willing to draft all of these for <$2,000 - however, if you're in a specialized industry, with more regulatory considerations, and want an attorney that will even help define your operational policies, you might pay well over >$20,000 and it'd likely pay solid dividends. Look at an attorney as an investment - judge them by their ROI, no different than any other consultant. As far as hourlies go - transactional attorneys typically charge more than litigators, especially if they have specialized experience. As well, it completely depends on your market. An attorney in NYC is going to be 2-3x that of a one located in Oklahoma City. Without knowing the market, it's hard for me to give you any kind of accurate estimate. Furthermore, a "big firm" attorney is going to cost more than a solo practitioner or boutique firm, but has advantages of their own. And don't forget: you should quantify your coefficient of risk, and include it in your discount rate when doing any valuation or due diligence work. Let me know if you have any further questions. Note: I'm a programmer and transactional attorney licensed in TX, NY and NJ who specializes in tech startups. I'm not trying to solicit a call with you. In fact, I urge you to find someone local, or at least someone within the jurisdiction where you'll be forming your company. I'm just trying to provide some perspective on the actual value of an attorney and what you should look for.

Ask the team. What do they think is a good use of their time? No one likes to sit idle. If they were on a heavy schedule to meet the product launch, some downtime is useful to regenerate creativity, energy and focus. Have they documented all the processes used? Have you conducted a post-project review of what worked and what didn't and what could be improved next time? These are some things for a temporary lull, however, the bigger question is how to engage your team when there isn't work to do. Can the team handle more projects? Good luck!

Are you already submitting your content to social bookmarking sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon? Those sites are great for gaining early traction. As soon as possible, start making a serious effort to convert visitors to subscribers so that you can rely less on social bookmarking sites. Make a list of the 20 most influential writers in the space and reach out to them. At the very least, they might share one of your posts. They might even agree to trading guest posts. Write posts that maximize outreach potential. The more people you can tell about your content authentically (e.g. "I mentioned you in my latest post."), the more pageviews you'll see.

An automated system could easily accomplish this. Human call centers would be slow and costly for something like this, if I understand correctly. I can think of a way of testing this idea without building any technology. You can setup a toll free number with extensions for each driver's cell phone. After placing an order the customer will receive the extension for their driver should they need to be in touch. Actually, in Europe drivers delivering packages are frequently in touch with customers to determine their current location and hand over the package. There they simply use cell phones without any real backend infrastructure. That said, what is the pain point here that you would be solving? If the customer feels they need to contact the driver, that would likely mean that the driver is either late and/or potentially lost. Both of those things would be better fixed at the root of the problem by getting a better driver/GPS. Happy to discuss further if you'd like.

I have implemented a number of different solutions for similar models and found that Stripe is best (http://www.stripe.com)

We do have those people on Clarity. Jason comes to mind https://clarity.fm/asmartbear That being said, anyone on this list (who have software background) would be great https://clarity.fm/search/entrepreneurship

You can try setting up a ACE (adwords campaign experiment) where you take your 'tried and true' exact/phrase match terms and then triple the bid. See what happens to your ROI. https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/1399246?hl=en Honestly though, if the campaigns were running well and ROI only improved by cutting...you're projection is really an imaginative narrative. Also - I'd try to find your cost per new customer, provided you're single channel and have a good working customer definition. best, Jeff

Well, I haven't had much luck but here's one. There's expertfile.com (although I've never received a speaking lead through there.) Let me know if there are others you end up finding.

A 7 day retention rate may not be the right cycle by which to measure, depending on the natural usage patterns of your users. And besides which, this is probably not the one metric that matters to you, right now. For example, are the core social components working well but there's little evidence of any purchase conversion? Or is it flipped? People are reacting to certain purchase opportunities but not contributing too much to the social community you're trying to build? To be clear, retention matters *a lot* to the long term viability of your business, but it's not something to overly optimize before getting the core of your product tuned to what people want. So focus first on measuring the extent to which the actions you want your users to do are getting done before looking at overall user retention would be my suggestion. Happy to talk through this in more detail with you.

To answer this, you need to have a working model for your customer LTV (Life Time Value). Most startups can't accurately estimate their LTV, so if you don't have good enough data, then building your CAC based on assumed LTV numbers can be fatal. In this case, it's better to evaluate your CAC costs based on the months of revenue it takes to recover the cost to acquire the customer, and ultimately this calculation should be net of any costs associated with providing the service on a monthly basis and, even more conservatively allow for a healthy degree of churn. Keep in mind that this calculation doesn't evaluate your true profitability only the capital efficiency of your customer acquisition spend. Hope this helps. Happy to talk this through in more detail and with more specifics to your business.

Take a look at the core of what you need to know here: http://startupfashion.com/fashion-ecommerce-website I answered these questions for those starting their own eCommerce store, and that is a great resource for you to get going! Feel free to reach out to me directly for more tips, we can set up a call.

I presume you mean "controlled foreign corporation" regulations. Many different countries have their own CFC regulations including Australia, the USA, etc. These laws essentially create a situation where the company needs to abide by the rules of multiple jurisdictions, and not just the one of incorporation. These regulations often stipulate that the "offshore" corporation may be taxed under certain situations (for Americans, an example of this would be Subpart F income) I.e. If an American sets up a company in Great Britain (or China, or Uzbekistan) and owns 100% of the shares, this would be classified by the IRS as a CFC. For Americans CFC regulations come into play when over 50% interest in a foreign corporation is owned by American taxpayers. If, however, you have over 10% interest in a foreign corporation, you should get proper tax advise and file form 5471 - Information Return of U.S. Persons With Respect to Certain Foreign Corporations. Other forms Americans may need to file include TDF 90-22.1 and form 8938. This above answer is a very broad overview, based on my own research and experience owning CFC's, it is not tax advise, and should not be used to avoid taxes.

If I understand you correctly, you're saying a customer agreed to pay you for services (product and/or support), either through posted prices and a shrink-wrapped license or through a written contract, and then you provided those services, and then they didn't pay? And you're asking whether it's "OK" that they didn't pay? Of course it's not OK! Is there any business who could operate in that fashion? The way it affects the customer relationship is you don't have a customer relationship. You have a situation where they are taking advantage of you. A relationship goes in two directions.

I have always wondered about that model when it's not vertical and anyone can sell anything Digital, Physical or Service. (Gumroad, Selify, etc) Marketplaces tend gain traction faster when they are vertical and specific. My best word of advice would be to select the vertical that's bringing in the most traffic, (Hope it's a big vertical in itself) and focus on studying the consumers of that vertical and BE THE ONE ECOM SOLUTION for that vertical beating everyone else hands down (case in point AirBnB vs Craigslist). Make the experience of the specific vertical buyer better than any other marketplace. Focus on making the experience flawless and friction-less. It'll become much easier to add other verticals later vs. trying to be everything for everyone from the get go.

I'm a small-time investor and have been working for and with startups for 13 years. The time to take seed capital is: - When you've proven demand for your product by making sales. - When you have at least one repeatable, predictable, and profitable system in place for selling your product. - When taking an equity investment would let you grow the company faster than the other means that might be at your disposal: bootstrapping, debt financing, organic growth, joint ventures, etc. There's a trade-off. You want to get the idea validated up-front and get as far as possible as you can on your own, but not spend so much time doing this with meager resources that the opportunity passes you by. You don't want to give away the whole company to your investor, but you also don't want to stunt your growth and give up huge potential profits just because you were holding out for slightly better terms. The better your sales, and sales growth, the better the valuation you'll be able to negotiate. A great idea and a proof-of-concept alone are worth basically nothing. A company with sales is worth more. A company with sales growth is worth even more. A company with month-over-month sales growth, ongoing relationships with customers who repurchase, and steady-state profitability is worth *much, much* more. (Steady-state profitability means that if the company's number of customers stays the same, the business operations turn a profit. Often, early-stage companies that have a recurring-revenue business model will spend more to acquire a new customer than they earn from the first sale; the cost of acquisition is amortized over the lifetime of the customer. This is because they want to grow their recurring-revenue base and increase future profits at the expense of short-term negative cash-flow.) All that being said, if you think you will need venture capital funding in the future, you should start looking for it long before you're going to need it. Have a "Plan B" in place, too. Don't get stuck with your back up against a wall, hoping and praying that your seed round will close before you start bouncing checks. If your investor knows you're going to go bankrupt without the investment, they have a lot of leverage for getting very favorable terms!

What of the following things does your startup have? > Founders who have graduated from prestigious universities / previously exited companies to known acquirers / worked for a known companies (with known being a brand-name company such as Google, Amazon, Facebook etc) > Three or more months of statistically meaningful growth (e.g. for easy sake, double digit growth of a number in the thousands) > At least one investor who is active on AngelList (defined in the ideal state by at least one investment in a company who raised their round through AngelList and ideally whose social graph is connected to "high signal" members of the AngelList network) If you have none of these things, then at least, have advisors and referrers who have a strong AngelList profile. And another option is to seek out the AngelList scouts and pitch them directly. They are more open to this than anyone else and I've seen companies with very little traction and very little social proof get featured because a scout believes in the founder and/or the story. Without any or most of the above, it will be difficult to stand out or build relationships via AngelList, in my opinion. I assume now AngelList operates on a concept similar to the LinkedIn "degrees of connection" model, whereby an entrepreneur can now send unsolicited messages to investors so long as there is a degree of connection between the investor and the company. I get a few unsolicited emails a week from companies whose advisers or investors aren't people I follow but that because of the way they determine "connection strength", these unsolicited emails still gain my attention. I assume this is the case for all investors. So the more that you can build your list of advisers and referrers, the more connections you can solicit. That said, AngelList's inbound email system is almost entirely ineffective for "cold" emails to really high-profile investors. Happy to share with you what I think to be your best options for raising profile for your company.

Hosting: Heroku: Great for small applications and getting off the ground as fast as possible. It's easy to manage and your team can focus on features instead of worrying about maintaining operations. Cloud (AWS, Rackspace, Azure): Great if you're expecting growth. You can start up instances easily and shut others down if you don't need them anymore. You still need to manage your servers, but as you grow to several servers, it'll be worth it. Inhouse: If you don't expect growth, or you have enough money to hire a few people to take care of the equipment, this is the cheapest option for computing power. I wouldn't recommend it for a new company since it takes so much maintenance. Deployment: This depends on which environment you work on. Ruby has Capistrano, Python has fabric, etc. Heroku also has their own deployment method and some other cloud providers also do. A quick google search will most likely lead you to the most popular method for your technology. Chat: My favourite is Hipchat (http://hipchat.com/). There's also Campfire (https://campfirenow.com/) and several other providers. Hipchat has a native client for each platform (even mobile) that gets really handy. Error monitoring: This is also a field with many competitors. My favourite by far would be Sentry (http://getsentry.com). There's also Airbrake (http://airbrake.io/) and HoneyBadger (https://www.honeybadger.io/). System Monitoring: This depends on what you want to monitor. The most popular in the ruby world is NewRelic (http://newrelic.com/). It monitors application and database performance. If you just want to monitor your server (cpu, memory, uptime), you can try out Server Density (http://www.serverdensity.com/).

Hi there. I am a small business strategy consultant, with loads of experience working with startups, like yours. What kind of coaching are you doing? Is it something you need to do in-person, or can it be done by coaching over the Internet or phone? The Internet is a fabulous way to do things at a low-cost. Not only to actually provide your service, but also to market it to a large audience. If your business is something you need to do in-person - then make sure you use the various low-cost options available to you online to get yourself a presence. There are tools, like wix.com, which will allow you to build a free website and give potential customers a way to find you and contact you. Also, if you are an expert in your field, make sure you are blogging and getting your information out to the public as frequently as possible. This will increase your ranking in search engines and make you appear like a true thought leader. If your coaching can be offered online, make use of free tools like Skype - and embed them within your website. You can take customer payments through Paypal and similar cheap online systems. There are many tricks to launching a low-cost business. Many depend on your specific requirements. Feel free to give me a call via this service if you want more information. Regards Simon

The best avenue for funding would likely be Kickstarter, but that presumes that the idea of a gesture-reading device is likely to have broad-enough appeal, which I'm not sure of based on the one line description. When I think about reading gestures, I think about a market primarily aimed at people with vision impairments. If that's the case, you might even want to look at foundations or organizations who might fund some of the research, but that will almost inevitably slow your pace of innovation. You might want to setup a call with Clay Hebert if you decide to go the Kickstarter route. https://clarity.fm/clayhebert Best of luck. Curious to hear more.

The answer depends primarily on two factors: 1) Do you have outside investors? 2) Do you have and/or could you obtain a legal release from the co-founder, and after this release, would the co-founder have less than 5% of the company? If you have outside investors in the existing corp and you wish to pursue the pivot, I would strongly encourage you to continue within the same corp, unless you didn't properly organize your co-founder agreement, in which case, your co-founder has "dead equity" which makes further funding much more difficult. This advice is not being provided based on a legal expertise but rather a practical perspective as both an entrepreneur and investor in early-stage companies. Happy to provide more specific advice if I understand the context better.

I am guessing you have gotten past the initial question you need to answer which is why do you want to run. If so, then the easy answer to your question is that it depends on where you are running, where you are starting from and who are you running against. You need to look at the district, and where your votes are coming from. You also need to look at where your money is going to come from. Spending will not be a problem, you will be spending everything you raise (unless you are self funding). You need to figure out your message - pick three key areas that develop your campaign around them. Don't make it too difficult, use your voice - because you will be saying these things over and over and over again. You will need (not necessarily need to hire, but simply need) a campaign manager, a finance director, a fundraiser, a communications person and a grassroots person. You might need a paid media person, but that can come later. Put a team together - your local R or D committee should have some people who would be interested in getting involved. Friends and family make great volunteers. Don't pay anyone until you have to. Raise a lot of money. Again - friends and family make great first donors. And a good barometer. If you friends and family aren't behind you, how do you expect to convince people that don't know you. If you are self-funding - know what you are willing to spend. Assume that you will need one more dollar than you have raised. Plan to raise and plan to spend - especially in your first race. National politicians are not going to matter as much as ones from the Commonwealth for votes, but can certainly help to raise dollars from grassroots groups. How you reach out to them or get their attention varies, so you need to look at them all differently. Make sure you know why you are asking them before you ask. But be prepared to knock on a lot of doors, attend a lot of small coffees and get togethers. Talk to everyone in your district at least once. Then target your most likely voters again and again and again. If you likely voters aren't going to be enough - figure out where the rest of your votes are going to come from and get in front of them as much as possible. There are some great political minds in Massachusetts. I am sure you can find someone to help you. I am happy to do a follow-up call to recommend some people or discuss any of this. Good luck!

I'm a product developer, startup veteran, and advisor to SaaS companies. Hopefully you've been already developing this new product with input from your existing customers, letting them beta test it and give feedback. (If not, my advice is to STOP immediately and get enough pilot customers involved to be sure that you're delivering something really valuable to them, that works the way they expect it to work, is easy to understand and get started with, etc.. The last thing you want is to do a big splashy launch of a product that is D.O.A. because you built what you assumed the customers wanted instead of they actually demonstrated that they wanted.) OK, so let's assume that you've got customers in the loop. Interview the heck out of them. Really understand how they use the product, why they use the product, what makes it valuable to them, what they can do with it that they couldn't do before, etc. If the product's not done enough for them to be best testing it yet and getting results, at least get some insights into how they see themselves getting results from it. How does it/will it change their lives? As you do this, be on the lookout for things that really resonate. Emotional language, for example. "It's such a relief that I don't have to worry about sending invoices manually anymore." (or whatever pain it is that your software solves) Also look for (and try to elicit) specific result statements: "This new software saves me [or is going to save me] 15 hours a week. Now I can spend that time where I really want to, with my kids ( ... my cat ... my golf buddies ... )" You're doing this for three reasons: 1) This stuff makes for phenomenal testimonials; 2) it helps you come up with great ideas for pre-launch content; and 3) it generates *PURE SOLD GOLD* you'll use in writing the copy for your launch offer. OK, launch mechanics. There are people who teach huge long expensive courses on this stuff. I'll give you the Cliff's notes. While I haven't personally run a major product launch, I have been trained in the strategy and am very familiar with it. - Plan your launch period in advance. You might want to do a pre-launch sequence that lasts 1, 2, even 3 months depending on the magnitude of your product and how much effort you're willing to put into creating content for the launch. - Create some teaser content of interest to your customers who might want to buy this product. Offer to teach them something, or offer to give them a sneak-peak behind-the-scenes of your new product. - Send an enticing offer for this content out to your list. Get people who are interested in this content to sign up for it. This creates your launch email list. - Send your launch list weekly updates: development milestones, sneak-peak screenshots, videos, educational material, interviews with/testimonials from beta users, and so on. - You're not trying to sell here yet (not hard sell at least). Drop some hints that there is going to be a special offer when the product launches, just for special loyal customers like them. - Create at least three videos on topics that are really, really interesting to your prospective customers... not necessarily about your new product itself, but teach them about what they can achieve with it, or what others have achieved with it already. As you publish these videos, send the link out to your launch list. - Also send out an offer to see these videos to your main list, to entice more people to sign up for your launch list. - As you get closer to launch time, keep sending frequent updates to the pre-launch list, and send another email out to your main list to let them know that the product is launching soon, and that if they're interested in the special one-time-only launch pricing, they need to sign up for the "early bird list" (your launch list). - Send out a 24-hour notice that the launch is going to happen soon, and the launch pricing will only be available for a limited time (potentially, to a limited number of customers ... to increase scarcity and urgency). - I recommend that even if you plan to open the product up to all your customers that at launch time you limit it to a smaller number. This makes the inevitable post-launch gremlins less painful to deal with because you have fewer customers, and it motivates people to buy because they fear that they'll lose the opportunity to do so. You can open the product up to more people later... the delay will result in pent-up demand and easier sales. - Start the launch. Tell your early-bird launch list a few hours early, then tell your main list. Direct them to a web page with a video and long-form sales copy of your launch offer. - Send out 2-day, 1-day, 12-hour, etc. notices that the launch is ending soon and reminding people what they're missing out on if they don't act now. If you're offering a limited number of spots, tell people what percentage has already sold out. Remind people that if they're "on the fence" about this, that this is the time to make a decision. - Send out an email letting people know that the launch is over and thanking them for their support and their vote of confidence. Tell the people who didn't buy (or didn't get in) that you'll let them know that the product will be opening up for new registrations some time in the future. (You may get people sending you emails begging to be let in at this point, if your product is desirable and your marketing was executed well.) And, of course, you don't just have to promote your launch content to your existing customer list ... you can post it to social media (and encourage your customers to do so) to attract brand new customers into your world. If you'd like to go into more detail about launch planning for your specific product and market, I'd be happy to jump on a call and talk about ways to make this work for you.

Looking quickly at your website, I would bounce quickly. Here's why: The jobs posted look like things I'd find on Fiver or other low-quality, "micro-task" service marketplaces. In other words, your landing page doesn't deliver on the brand promise inherent in your name. I'd take a totally different approach to your site which would include forcing startups interested in your service into a sign-up form where they describe specifically what they are looking for, and keep the landing page focused on any social proof (ideally, happy customers) and describe the various types of services available in your marketplace. This will allow to better assess the needs of your potential customers and allow you to better direct work to the freelancers registered that you know (or think to) be good. That's just the tip of the iceberg. If that doesn't sound crazy, happy to provide more detail in a call.

1. Have very high expectations that they will be your coach, not necessarily your friend (though many of my clients have become my friends, my first responsibility is to be their coach and focus on their business growth). 2. Ask around to the people you know who have a coach, Google "business coach in (your city), or RSVP to the many coaches who have posted answers here (myself included: I offer a free strategy session to see if we're a fit, email brad@bradwarren.com) 3. Ask what their business background is, and are they a "pure" coach (who only asks you questions and never gives advice) or are they a hybrid coach (like me. I make a distinction between coaching, consulting, and training, and I do all three depending on what you the client needs). 4. Depending on whether it's by phone or in person, the frequency, their level of expertise, etc., the fees can vary from $400 to $2000 or more per month. Hope that helps. Again, email brad@bradwarren.com for a no-obligation session with me over the phone.

After shepherding 300 equity crowdfunding raises through our platform I'd say all of them have a higher valuation. Reason is it is the entrepreneur that is calling the shots. It is the entrepreneurs offer on their terms on an equity crowdfunding platform. Once you get outside investors involved shaping the deal the valuation will most certainly go down. Agreed it may then be more realistic as everyone believes their company is more valuable than it is. My advice? Treat early investors fairly. Money is the lubricant to get your idea into reality. Give them a fair share of the business and they will reinvest when need be.