Start up ideas cannot be fabricated like that. The best start ups ideas come from the "why" and solve a problem that the person is passionate about. It's not just coming up with an idea, it's about whether the idea is solving a problem along with its acceptance and sustainability. As far as being the CEO, it doesn't matter what the person calls him/her self. Plenty of "founders" or "visionaries" hire or partner with a qualified CEO to run their business once viability is determined.

It depends on what you're looking to monetize it with. One recommendation is affiliate marketing, because it happens under the table, in a sense. For example, get the plugin provided at the bottom of this answer. Browse amazon for products particular to your audience. If you're running a Facebook page and Twitter account for music-lovers, go to Amazon mp3s and get affiliate links for popular albums. Post an engaging status/tweet ("You have to check these guys out:") followed by the affiliate link. You get money for each purchase. Another option is fiverr.com (and other websites like it - microcommerce sites) where you can sell services for $5. It is common for people to buy tweets/posts from people with large social network accounts. For example: "I will Tweet your message to my 50,000 music-loving fans for $5". There are many other ways to monetize, including partnerships with sites trying to promote content that your fans will enjoy, but these are two of the simplest. They don't require anyone else for you to get started. Hope that helps! I'd love to talk more. Thanks, Evan https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCwQFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fchrome.google.com%2Fwebstore%2Fdetail%2Famazon-affliate-link%2Fpngekjpmhnigmkdojiplphdjpgbknpik%3Fhl%3Den-US&ei=06JEUr-UN6WdigKT64HQAw&usg=AFQjCNHbC7-bYE21Z3yccgWj48dcCWVPAg&sig2=y7u7v_1GqqkekkNArcF1UQ&bvm=bv.53217764,d.cGE&cad=rja

Shopify is best use case for $0 to $1M ish, depending on product line, how many transactions that makes up, and if their are some custom things that are not possible on Shopify that realistically lead to huge gains that would cover more costs of a custom solution with something like magento. I recommend Shopify to everyone starting out. That's what we used at Diamond Candles up until about a $5M run rate. We were/are growing quickly so we hit a point where payoff of customizing checkout flow, add of social sign on, etc. that could not be done because of Shopify, would cover and surpass costs of a more custom option. Best to think about this simplistic example. View the ecom platform market in about 3 buckets. 1. Starting out: $0-$1M ish 2. Wow looks like you have a business: $1M-$20 or 50ish 3. You are/could be publicly traded: $50M+ Take a look at usage #'s for market share size from independent third party analytics tools from Builtwith: http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/Shopify/Market-Share http://trends.builtwith.com/shop http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/hosted-solution Just because something is found on the web more isn't the full picture. Ie. I could make a blogging platform and have a bunch of scripts and bots install it on millions of domains and I would have majority of the market for blogging platforms (ya that would take a while and isn't a realistic scenario but you can get the point). Providers dominating the different categories by companies in those areas actually doing volume and being succsessful? 1. Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, Magento GO, 2. Magento (varying editions), Yahoo Stores, Symphony Commerce 3. Demand Ware, GSI Commerce, Magento (varying editions) At the end of the day a good illustration goes like this. A truck and a moped are two different things. A truck is not trying to out 'moped' a moped and a moped not trying to out 'truck' a truck. They are both perfectly suited to different applications, situations, needs, and circumstances. The same goes with who you choose to handle your ecom platform. For 2-3 search for internet retailers first 500 and second 500 lists. Pull off all ecommerce companies doing between $10-$50M as an example. Use the builtwith.com chrome toolbar to tell you what platform they are using. Hire someone for $2 an hour via odesk to make a spreadsheet of everything and the make a pretty little pie chart. Now you know what each revenue volume level chooses as 1, 2, 3 preferred platforms. Option 3 as a side note but very important one, is primarily a platform and commerce as a service model with companies like Demand Ware and GSI Commerce leading the market with platform and services including but not limited to customer service for the brand, fulfillment, marketing services, website product photography etc. Their pricing models are based on gross revenue share. ie. SportsAuthority.com does $100M online this year, GSI takes 30% of that to cover everything. (I am not sure who Sports Authority uses, just an example) You can almost pick any traditional brick and mortar retailer and if they have a website where they sell things, they all do, GSI or DW are the people behind the scenes running the call centers, shipping etc. Diamond Candles, my company, who started on Shopify decided to not go with a the market dominating option of Magento for a few reasons. One of which being upfront cost for an agency or on staff magento CTO type. We decided to partner with a newer entrant, Symphony Commerce, which blends the 3rd category model of platform plus service. Rev. cut is significantly smaller than providers in category 3, but still get benefits of volume savings on shipping volume, scalable customer support that can handle rapid growth and occasional spikes without us having to worry about scaling or implementing best practices, and a fully customizable platform as a service so to speak that doesn't require us to have in house tech but where we are essentially renting part time ecommerce engineers from with resumes that list Google, FB, Twitter, Magento, Amazon, etc. So in summary. If you are <$1M in revenue just roll with Shopify. Greater than that but less than $50M ish then I would recommend looking into Symphony. If Symphony is interested in letting you in then you won't have to incur the upfront costs of an agency or implementation and you will have an ongoing partner equally incentivized i your long term success financially which I prefer as opposed to an agency model which economically is incentivized to offer a one time finished product and their revenue is not tied to my financial success. It is the closest thing to an equity partner while returning our full equity.

Drip marketing (aka. drip emails, or lead nurturing) is often used by modern marketers to nurture their leads through the sales funnel. As others have mentioned the idea is to gain brand awareness and influence buyers through a regular series of targeted and relevant content or offers. Typically for top of the funnel activities you might offer something like a general whitepaper or something which describes the overall business problems that your prospects might be feeling. From there you can use a marketing automation tool to send through additional material or reminders periodically depending on how your prospects engage with you. The idea at the end of the day is to reduce that amount of direct time that a sales rep spends closing any deal by ensuring that leads have shown sufficient buying signals and are ready to purchase.

Use marketing as a means to gather more data and test. Marketing is one of the most underrated and undervalued skills in startups. Startups don't struggle with competition but getting attention. Marketing drives more data into the product, thus you can validate your theories. Pre-product market fit marketing should drive acquisition and customer development.

Number of clicks, time among each and most importantly offers to opt in. I find people delete apps easily and if you connect through email / other channels faster w/ offers you have the ability to stay in front of the user.

I don't think I would add anything to Sean's pyramid but I do have my own approach to things that essentially breaks it down a bit more to a granular approach. 1. Find users who've had success If you're lucky to have 100-1000 users, I'm hoping you can identify 5-20 of them that love your product or had success. If so, then study them. I always suggest trying to understand what "path" they took when signing up for your product, in what order, and see if there's commonalities. Find them, then change the way you introduce (onboarding) your product to new users so they all experience the "a ha" moment those users discovered. 2. Test the size of the market The biggest challenge I see with startups is that they spend 99% of their time iterating around the product, and 1% thinking about the market. It's called product / market fit - so spend time understanding if you're product actually addresses the needs of the market. If not, maybe try a different market and see if it sticks. Many times it's not the product, it's the market you're trying to serve that doesn't have a real "must have" desire. 3. Identify your growth engine. Eric Ries described it best in his book The Lean Startup, but Lars does a good job recapping it here: http://larslofgren.com/marketingbasics/the-three-engines-of-growth-with-eric-ries ... don't fool yourself in believing that you have some new / unique distribution approach. Find the growth engine that describes you, and start iterating around those user flows. ---- So in summary, not that I would add anything, but I would elaborate more on the mechanics of growth hacking then just talk high level at 30,000 feet.

Groupon made a billion dollar business out of email marketing. I don't think it is underrated by people who are good at growth. Most startups do think email is boring and rather invest in third-party platforms. This is a mistake as email is the true social network and reflects the raw habits and beliefs of users. It is hard to do email well because there is so much noise and crap users see. I open notification emails all of the time if they are valuable to me (ergo. answer this question). Just use the golden rule: would I want to open an email like this?

Retention - if you build something people want/use AND come back and use often, then you can usually figure out a business model to make it work (if there's a big enough market).

I use any resource at my disposal, but I think it comes down to a little formula that takes in these two data points: 1) what am I trying to build? 2) what are my strengths? Here's how it works. I basically calculate a "success probability outcome score" based on these two factors. Here are some examples: Let's say I'm creating sophisticated SaaS solution with a complex data structure and backend. I'm strong in the product side (features, UX, architecture, etc.) but weak in the tech side so outsourcing with oDesk could be a challenge. In a separate case, if I've got a really basic dynamic website with half a dozen tables and basic CRUD operations, oDesk might be a great source for me b/c the project is pretty straightforward and I can project manage all aspects pretty easily given my strengths. In general I use oDesk, Elance and the like for more basic and straightforward -- they have a wide range of services there including: coding, graphic design, copywriting, task management, voiceover, etc. For this stuff, it's a no brainer. If the project starts to get out of the scope of my expertise and it's generally complicated tech, I tend to stay away from these services.

Grass roots marketing is always best (and cheapest). If you are near schools, "partner" with the schools and offer incentives for the school - for example, 15% of sales this Tuesday will go to John Smith Elementary, just come in and tell us you are with JSE. Get the school's buy-in and they will promote it for you. Provide them with stickers to give the kids that remind their parents. Another great proven way is to employ college kids to promote your business in exchange for free food. Also, Fiverr.com has a lot of VERY inexpensive options for local marketing.

Definitely traction (marketing, sales, customer acquisition, retention) and not infrastructure. You don't have a scalable business, you're "seeking" one. So seek it first, then worry about scaling. Put it this way: If there's two otherwise-identical businesses, and P has "good infrastructure" with a few customers and Q has piss-poor infrastructure but great customer growth, Q will be funded instead of P every time. The reason is that infrastructure can be solved at any time, with application of money and process. Acquiring and retaining customers is much more difficult -- more out of your control, not possible to solve with money and talent alone. One proves you have a business, the other proves you can build systems. We're all pretty sure you can build systems, so it's not valuable to "prove" that.

As your question is a little open-ended, I’ll avoid going too in-depth, but I’ll try to give an overview based on my own experience running E-commerce stores with multiple dropship and non-dropship suppliers. The first question you need to ask yourself are your reasons for wanting multiple suppliers rather than just one. This will give you an overall criteria to assess whether or not you need a particular supplier in your network, because more relationships = more time and resource to manage which inevitably equals more cost. The main reasons are 1) Availability of new Products New suppliers will allow you to broaden your product offering. I would tend to avoid any suppliers that carry a very narrow range of SKUs (product lines). The exception is suppliers that sell a unique product that will sell significant units at a volume, or an average amount of units at high margins. 2) Redundancy In the event a supplier of a key product runs out of stock, increases their prices or fails to maintain the service quality you’ve agreed upon, it’s useful to have alternative options. If anything, it gives you confidence to negotiate on price without fear of losing everything if it all goes wrong. 3) Cross country / state routing Having multiple suppliers set up in all of your key countries will greatly reduce shipping costs and time-to-customer, which in turn increases customer loyalty. Finding Suppliers and Original Products From experience, the best dropship suppliers are those that don’t advertise the fact they dropship. In fact, the suppliers who will usually put the phone down on anyone who asks that question will usually mean you’re onto something, as the barriers to entry for that particular niche are likely to be high. Also, original products don’t have to be products that aren’t sold anywhere else, just products that aren’t widely available to resellers. This means getting to know your niche, finding out what’s in demand, and making contacts amongst sellers. Here are a few places I’ve found successful: - Trade Shows and Exhibitions. As well as being a tax deductible business trip (the kind of ‘business trip’ where the nights are more important than the days!), Exhibitions and Trade Shows are packed with new product ideas, and manufacturers and retailers keen to make more sales. Try to find overseas exhibitions; as well as the benefit of seeing a new country under the guise of work, you’re also likely to find products that currently aren’t being sold in your home-territory, giving you a significant head start. Frankfurt in Germany is the exhibition capital in Europe and well worth visiting if you’re based in the US and there’s a relevant exhibition taking place. - Niche / Industry Print Magazines. Assuming the newspaper and print magazine industry still exists when you read this, the classifieds at the back of these publications usually feature small independent manufacturers with good products and poor marketing skills. - Private Advertisers on related blogs and forums. Use a tool like Whatrunswhere or Adbeat to find advertisers in your niche who produce a product. Many will already have an affiliate program in place, but will often also consider a dropship arrangement if you speak to the right person. Technology There are platforms such as Hybris or Saleswarp that can do clever things with supplier management and inventory load balancing, but I’m assuming you’re looking for an overview at this stage and nothing too in-depth. Personally, I’ve always started with a one size fits all solution (basic supplier chain management built into the ecommerce platform) and as the business grows I’d usually move to something more custom to manage things like - Location based order routing - Inventory on hand management - Delivery tracking and reporting - Supplier Payments The cost to have something similar developed will be relatively expensive, so it’s worth starting lean and using something off the shelf in the early days. Agreements I could talk about SLAs and aiming to establish exclusivity or territory rights, but apart from being expensive to setup, it wouldn’t be realistic to expect this until you have some reputation in your industry. In the early days, it’s simply a matter of selling in volume, paying for your goods on time and not being a jerk when you need something done. Taking your supplier’s sales rep out to lunch once in a while never did any harm either!

The best lead gen is either paid or inbound. Paid: - Google Adwords - Facebook - Email Newsletters (Local) - Retargetting Inbound - Create videos on youtube for relevant search terms - Blog about the things your customers are searching for - Create interesting infographics relevant to your target customer / geography All traffic should be pushed to a landing page and optimized for conversion to email.

I have quite a bit of experience with this. My advice is to create a plug in tool that can be licensed not just in the entertainment vertical but other similar verticals. That's one key way to develop clients that will never leave you because it will be part of their business. Then as a business you can focus on product enhancements and cross promotions to new verticals.

Here is how I'd suggest you learn SEM: #1 - Open a Google Adwords Account (You can search for free credit / promo codes) online and play around with it. #2 - Review all of Google's training material: https://support.google.com/adwords/?hl=en&page=examstudy.cs#topic=3119071 #3 - When you finish Google's training materials, then read about Adwords on the web. Here is one good resource and you can Google for more: http://www.wordstream.com/adwords-for-dummies #4 - Sign up for an affiliate network (e.g. Commission Junction or Linkshare) and use your free credit to promote another company's offer. #5 - Once you feel comfortable with Adwords, consider building out your own Lead Gen websites or selling leads to existing affiliate networks (e.g. Motive Interactive or Integrate.com) #6 - If you'd like to learn from someone else, find an entry-level job at an agency: http://www.indeed.com/q-PPC-entry-level-jobs.html #7 - Another good way to get good at PPC if you work in an in-house marketing role is to hire someone to audit or manage your own account for a period of time so you can learn how they think and what they do. #8 - One word of caution: Google takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. Their default settings make it very easy to waste a lot of money so really make sure you know what you are doing before you spend too much money.

Do you have the product developed? Do you have a test group? Veterinary advisory board? Unfortunately your GTM strategy will be all about niche market acceptance and the only way to get that is by testing the product in a real market environment and getting buy-in from real professionals that will act as product ambassadors. What stage are you?

There is really no single "best strategy" that will guarantee success (i.e admission to one of the top accelerators). That said, over the years, a lot of lessons have been learnt about must-haves in your application to give yourself the best possible shot. For e.g. [1] http://ycuniverse.com/yc-applying-interviewees [2] http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/20/how-to-write-a-winning-y-combinator-application/

I don't think there is a role. I think you need to determine the responsibilities and motivations a person might have for sponsoring and speak to their needs related to it. In my experience, the people with these interests in a company don't reside in just one role.

You would include all those lines in your revenue. Typically this looks like: Receipts: [full cash inflows] Fees: [payouts to vendors] Gross Receipts: [subtract] This ALL does into the Revenue category, so that your stated revenue is indeed net of fees, but you can see how it breaks out to understand how money is moving. That's if the margin there is very slim. If the margin is pretty good, and if you believe you can increase that margin materially over time, you can consider putting those fees into your gross margin instead of in your income.

Assuming when you say 'vest' you actually mean exercise. It's sounds like an investor doesn't believe you will execute without the extra incentive. I'm not a fan of tranches of any form, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Also, you didn't mention the strike price, so no way to know if this is a good deal or not. My advice is to ensure you have an experienced tech lawyer, and discuss it with them. They will have the experience to tell you what is normal and acceptable.

There is quite a bit of information available online about eCommerce conversions rates. According to a ton of sources, average visitor-to-sale conversion rates vary from 1-3%. This does not mean the Furniture conversions will be the same. The bigger problem is that visitor-to-sale conversions are not a good data point to use to measure or tune your eCommerce business. All business have some unique friction factors that will affect your final conversion rate. It's very important to understand each of these factors and how to overcome them. The best way to measure and optimize is to take a conversion funnel approach. Once you have defined your funnel you can optimize each conversion rate to better the total effect. For example: Top of the funnel: - All web site visitors, 100,000 / month First conversion: View a product page, 50% of all visitors Second Conversion: Add to Cart, 10% of people who view products Final Conversion: Complete Checkout, 80% of people who put items in a cart In this example we see that only 10% of people who actually view products put them in to a cart, but 80% of those people purchase. If you can figure out why visitors are not adding items to their cart and fix the issue to increase the conversion rate, revenue should increase significantly because of the high checkout rate. You can use free tools like Google Analytics to give you a wealth of information about your site visitor and their behavior or there are some great paid tools as well.

The best way to find a mentor is to look around in your industry and see who you feel has accomplished what you're setting out to do, and that you gel with the way they did it (values, brand, etc). "Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, get money twice" ~ Pitbull If you can get a warm introduction, do that. If not, you can always cold email them with a specific issue that you want advice on .. ideally it's something super relevant to their life experience and interesting enough to get their attention. Never ask them to be a mentor. Mentorship usually develops over a couple meetings and is informal. The value to them is to give back to the next generation. As long as you listen, execute on their advice / or not, AND follow up - then they'll continue to give you some time. Mentors are best for those large life decisions that most people turn to their parents too ... those decisions are interesting for most noteable people to give you 15 minutes on a call to discuss.

I just opened a normal business account and the used Stripe.com to process all credit card transactions - only tool 5 minutes.

Think about the different pieces of the pie. 1. Amount per hour 2. Amount per project 3. Location work needs to be completed 4. Deposit 5. Payment terms 6. Time to finish the project 7. Specs and reporting All of these can help you negotiate their rate. The important part is to ask up front what they expect for each one of these, then ask of there's a part, if made more interesting can help reduce the rate (ex: 50% up front, or Net 0 vs. Net 30, etc) You just want to ensure they do make some money so their invested in your project - you don't want someone working for you who doesn't want to be there.