Keep it so simple that anyone at your company can understand the process and the steps for using the CRM. If there's no accountability or confusion with the company's process, you'll be one of those companies that says their CRM sucks when it's more a testament of your own internal controls that suck. Here's a sample process: 1. Not everyone you ever talk to is a prospect or worth being in your CRM. Decide with your team the one question you can ask anyone that determines if they're a qualified prospect. This question should speak to the pain point you're solving. For example, if I was trying to sell Expensify to someone I might ask "Do you guys spend alot of time managing expense reports?". If they say "yes" then add them as a prospect and add data on how large the deal might be and if they have a budget to make a purchase. If they say no then add them to a Mailchimp newsletter if they are interested in getting updates. Make sure there's a call to action in the newsletter that would allow you to know if they ever become a prospect. 2. The next step is getting them appropriate information and/or including scheduling a demo to get them interested in using your product. The goal is to get them to a free trial if it's an individual or a small pilot. 3. After a pilot phase you'd want to convert them to a paying customer. The activities at this stage will be more building the relationship and supporting any issues or concerns they have with the pilot. 4. Once a paying customer you want to turn them into evangelists or testimonials or referrals you can use for your site or for press releases. This is an often missed step and significant opportunity. Continual engagement with an already paying customer helps to improve the product but an evangelist for your company is the most valuable asset you have: More customers from referrals without any cost. In conclusion, you're looking to identify where each prospect is in the funnel and know what the next steps are at any given time to move them across the funnel. Prospect > Pilot > Customer > Evangelist (A good service for this in the early stages of your company is StrideApp.com) Creating a follow up task at each stage and with each interaction is critical. Your day should be divided among getting new prospects in the funnel and following up with existing prospects.

Make a list of all the con's of making a decision. For each con, answer: 1) What's the worst thing this could mean to me? 2) If this did happen, how could I fix it? If you do this, you quickly realize that the "potential" downside is actually not that bad, and if you're successful - the upside could be life changing. If you had to ask this question, then you should've made the decision yesterday. Don't wait, you don't get today back. Here's a quote that helps me "reset" my priorities, goals and mission in life. "Ask not if you are worthy of your goals, ask instead are your goals worthy of your life" John Asaraf Hope that helps.

Very little. At the angel/seed stage, they're investing in the founders, so there's no expectation of patents, etc... They might check that you're incorporated in good standing, and ensure you have a solid startup/corporate lawyer, and have good employment and IP ownership agreements with your staff and contractors, and that's about it.

The fastest way would be: 1) Ask on Clarity! :) 2) https://angel.co/canada/investors 3) Contact the incubators and ask if they have a list they'd be willing to share. 4) Email entrepreneurs who recently raised and ask them for 2 names each. 5) Contact Series A/B investors and ask them who they've co-invested with in seed investments. Hope that helps.

At Clarity, we chose to do things a bit differently knowing that we wanted to have an optimal experience for mobile devices. I would say that there's no one framework that specifically allows us to do that and that it's more about the mindset than the frameworks. With that said, your question was specifically for frameworks, so here's a few. Even though we don't necessarily use all of these at Clarity, we probably should given some of the things that we've learned over time: * http://getbootstrap.com/ - Great CSS library to build responsive websites. * To handle the complexity of the client side application, a good MVC framework is in order ** We use http://spinejs.com/ here at Clarity. ** I've also heard a lot of good things about http://emberjs.com/ and http://angularjs.org/ ** I find that for smaller projects, http://backbonejs.org/ is a good choice as well. * One thing that you'll notice on mobile browsers is the delay in click events being triggered. Google has a great article describing the problem: https://developers.google.com/mobile/articles/fast_buttons, and https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick seems to be a popular implementation to solve this problem.

I advised a local UX agency owner here in Austin to charge a lot more for her personal time. In this case, $500/hr. She balked, and I pointed out that if it didn't make sense for a certain meeting or certain customer, she could always just discount it on the invoice. That way the baseline is still established and now the customer believes they were given a gift! Even better. But the larger customers -- or just the ones you don't want to spend that time with -- will have to pay for that. The high price tag wards away a lot of time -- good! -- and the time that remains is extremely profitable and more likely to actually be needed. Another thing you could do is have a true partner in the agency, so that you share that title and hopefully share the trust of your customers. Of course that's another can of worms. If your customers are *wrong* that they need the face-time with you, it's incumbent on you to figure out why they're not trusting your own employees, and whether that mistrust is misplaced. If they're *right*, you need to ask yourself why you're not employing people who are ask good -- or in fact better -- at their individual jobs than you are (including account management), so that your time can scale. P.S. The UX consultant make an extra $250k in profit this past 12 months due to this technique.

So two things. 1) Growth Hacks only work if there not over used, so it's in no ones best interest to share them until they are saturated (ex: Emailing listings on Craigslist a la AirBNB). 2) The best growth opportunities come from the product, and after product market fix. So, with those 2 things said - here are some that I've used. 1) Find a way you can have your users share something in the app. Ex: Confirm investments on Angel List, Embed code on YouTube. At Timely we allowed you to invite team members to share tweets. Clarity we allow experts to use their VIP link to give free consulting to friends via Twitter & Email. 2) Prompt users to share their experience. We've done this in many ways but some of the most obvious are: a) Prompting user post call to share b) Providing a way for users to earn call credits by inviting their friends. (both members win = $ credit) c) Prompt to share their profile on social media As for the stuff that's having great success, well as I mentioned above, if I told you, then it would get saturated too fast .. hence the "hack" part of growth hacking. A hack is a 0 day exploit. After 14 days it's usually no longer an exploit cause it's been patched. So yeah, it's not about marketing, it's about creative approach to making your product grow on it's own, then find communities to exploit.

I say to pitch the idea or 'outline' first. Have someone (on the payroll) responsible for sourcing opportunities, then ask your bloggers to pitch ideas. (For consistency's sake - consider bringing them together at a daily or weekly meeting?) From there, pitch the ideas to the brands or agencies and paid the bloggers per post to flush out their ideas. Pay-per-post is only successful / economical when the strategy is already developed.

We ALL like to pay as little as possible but we're happy to pay $4 for a latte from Starbucks because a, caffeinated beverage is worth more than that at that time and to that person. Prove the value. Prove that your software is worth (either saving them money or making them money) 2X or 5X or 10X what it costs. If the value is clear, you change the discussion on price. If you're doing mostly online sales and have enough traffic, then A-B testing could be useful. A-B test different pricing along with different value propositions.

Advantages: 1. speed to grow faster than your competitors and gain a dominant position and marketshare (assuming you'll be able to translate funding into growth of your team and your customers). 2. In certain businesses, the right investors can make introductions that help accelerate your growth. Pitfalls: 1. depending on how much you raise, from whom, terms, etc., you'll give up some equity and some level of control (likely a board seat). 2. if you raise VC, you just essentially sold your company. Most VC's are not interested in entrepreneurs who want to successfully but slowly grow a profitable, bootstrapped company. They want (and need - see: portfolio theory) a 25X, 50X or 100X+ return. They don't want to see you make $1M profit on $5M in revenue. If that's interesting to you, stay bootstrapped and profitable. VC funding is rocket fuel that will either send you to the moon or send you crashing in the ocean. If you want to continue along a profitable, fun, road-trip that you're in control of, I wouldn't raise a round.

Depending on what classifies the transactions as fraudulent will determine next steps. If the fraudulent transactions were due to the cardholder having their card stolen and then being used to make fraudulent purchases you should work with your merchant services provider. Within your gateway or shopping cart you have settings that allow you to request AVS, CVV, CID, Address Match, etc. and you can determine the velocity settings and how strict you want to be for each transaction. Some gateways also have country blockers to eliminate transactions that are coming from known organized crime or hackers specific to fraudulent transactions. You should always report any suspected fraud to your merchant services provider, gateway or shopping cart provider along with the authorities in your local jurisdiction. Setting your filters and tolerances really low will allow transactions to go through and generate revenue but when you do not validate AVS, CVV, CID or address match, etc. then you risk the chance of fraudulent transactions. If you collect all the above information and it still ends up being a fraudulent transaction then it should be the responsibility of the card issuer and not the merchant or merchant services provider.

All of the factors you mentioned are important but if you asked me to rank them. 1. Traction: as it proves that you know who to build something people want. 2. Team: as it's the constant that matters most as the business evolves. 3. Vision: as it'll help tell the story as to why you have the potential to build a $100M company in 7 years. If you want comparables, just look at the top trending startups on Angel List ( http://angel.co ) and you can see what kind of team, traction and vision they have. The more of those factors you have, the faster and higher quality of investors you will be able to get involved. There's always exceptions to the rules, but normally this is how it works. P.S. No one talks about relationships, but that's probably #1. Your ability to communicate and connect with people who can help with introductions to investors is a big part of fundraising.

A co-founder is a long-term relationships that should be built on trust, and passion, and time... time to fight, time to recover, time to build rapport. Ultimately, your co-founder shouldn't be based on *any* specific idea, because the two (or three?) of you could work on anything you are all passionate about, and either experience wild success or learn some great lessons along the way. An MVP doesn't require a co-founder get built. In fact, the less technical code required the better. You should be able to validate most ideas with some very basic tools: WordPress site, Email list, a set of google forms, and a little love. I think the most important question to ask yourself is, "Am I willing to have my idea change for the right person? Or am I just trying to find the best person to execute on my idea?" For what it's worth, I've seen much more success with the former than the latter.

So the real issue isn't whether a marketing person should come from sales - it's whether the marketing person understands that their job is to actually help sell things. My definition of marketing is "profitably solving customer problems" so - baked in there - is understanding the customer and getting paid. The worst marketing people are those who feel very removed from the fact of the sale. Said another way, the best marketing people are those who understand their customers, do everything to deliver a product, package, price and promotion designed around them - and feel great driving revenue. Someone saying yes by buying is the ultimate validation of good marketing. Marketing isn't simply an activity. It is part of driving to an outcome and that outcome is a sale.

The most innovative ways, might also actually be the least innovative ways: * Send them hand written thank you notes for their business. * Interview them about their successes, and highlight them in your blog/on your site. * Where appropriate, send them business from other customers * With their permission, talk about them in your PR and interviews even more than you talk about your product * Tell them whenever someone signed up because of their personal referral * Actually answer the phone

With all respect to Dan, I'm not seeing anything like that. You said "pre-revenue." If it's pre-revenue and enterprise, you don't have anything proven yet. You would have to have an insanely interesting story with a group of founders and execs on board with ridiculous competitive advantage built in. I have seen a few of those companies. It's more like $3m-$5m pre. Now, post-revenue is different. I've seen enterprise plays with $500k-$1m revenue/yr, still very early (because in the enterprise space that's not a lot of customers yet), getting $8m-$15m post in an A-round. I do agree there's no "average." Finally, you will hit the Series A Crunch issue, which is that for every company like yours with "cutting edge tech" as-yet-unproven, there's 10 which also have cutting edge tech except they have customers, revenue, etc.. So in this case, it's not a matter of valuation, but a matter of getting funded at all!

"Right action, right time" Eric Ries The key is to invest in the parts of the product that need that attention. In the early parts of a startup (MVP) then it's all about building something to put in front of users. As that scales, then you can spend some time paying down the technical debt by getting good Unit Test coverage, and eventually building automated deployments and an integration server. I would spend more time trying to get to some level of Product/Market fit first before spending too much time on development processes that might not matter if you fail to build anything someone wants. You'll usually feel the impact of what's missing as users report more bugs, or the # of defects your dealing with weekly outweight the # of features. Right time, right action. Start simple. (If you want something more concrete, just do 80/20 - 80% on user facing / value creating stories, 20% of paying down code debt / automation).

Short answer, when you know it will pay off. Long answer, PR gets the word out people to your site/app. If you haven't proven (on at least a small scale) that you can convert these people to users/customers, then you're wasting your money on a PR agency, and worse, you might be doing harm to your brand. My advice is to build your first sets of users by hand, one by one, listen to them and adapt your product until you sense they have become emotionally connected to it. Then amp up your marketing mix, PR being the first (in my opinion). An initial contract could be $5k per month, with the sole purpose to position the company to publications that achieve a specific goal (fund raising, user growth, brand credibility, etc). Contracts will ramp up to $15k-$25k per month after you've proven the value.

One of the best ways to identify real problems in a market is to be a consultant and actually get paid to help solve the problem. Many great product companies started off this way (ex: Freshbooks, Hootsuite, Shopify, etc). They solved their own problem, and then build a solution so that others could use it. If you're already a startup, and you're trying to refine and learn, then you can do more hands-on deployments for customers, where you actually go in and help them solve the problem with your software. Now, if you start to get paid by the hour to do this work, then you went to far. Either your a service company learning and getting paid, so that one day you can spin out a product, or your a venture backeable startup and doing things that don't scale initially to learn how the customer thinks. The best question I've ever heard to truly understand a customer is to ask "What do you do 3 minutes before, and after, you use our product". That's where the opportunity lies.

DO NOT hire a BD person. First, a startup with <$10m/yr revenue almost surely has nothing to offer another company that is interesting to them for BD. Not enough attention, not enough users, not enough revenue-sharing, etc.. BD only works when BOTH sides move the needle on something important to them, which usually means revenue but it can mean attention or branding or something. If you can't fulfill your end, then it's not BD. It's something else, like trying to be an affiliate. Also, people who's title in LinkedIn are BD are not the sort of folks used to moving the needle for startups. I have literally *never* seen a person with the title "BD" at a startup make a difference. Usually they're the subject of ridicule behind closed doors. Not to say there isn't the person who could. I know a CEO of a startup that currently does $20m/yr and he's the definition of the consummate BD guy. But you cannot bet yourself on finding that unicorn.

Two: (a) Top-line growth and (b) Cancellations. I like businesses where "growth" means "revenue," otherwise to me it's only an indication that people are mildly interested rather than proof that it's a *business* that is turning into a validated business model. But of course with consumer often you have to be content with "active users" or somesuch. True revenue growth I measure (early on) in $/mo of new recurring revenue, not in percentages (because those will be all over the place and large, just because the denominator is small). It's nice to see that number steadily growing, usually linearly (no, not exponential!). It's OK for it to bounce around early on, e.g. you get a big pop from good PR or a dip because it's December. Soon I like to see you follow that with increasing ARPU, because almost always your prices are too low and you need higher ARPU to drive a real, profitable business, and to allow for higher CAC which means the ability to get varied sources of new signups. But that's not for very early on -- you can do that next. Just having people sign up at all for any amount of non-zero dollars is a wonderful sign. The other is cancellation. I've seen companies where their cancellation rate is 25%/mo. That means people turn over completely in 4 months, and that means it's NOT a SaaS business! More importantly, it means that although you've gotten them in the door, and even paying, the fact is you're not delivering perceived value, and that means you don't actually have a product people want, nor a business. Note I said "perceived." Sometimes you ARE delivering value but they don't understand that, so education or a better UX or follow-up is actually what's needed. Usually you are in fact not delivering much value, and that's what needs to be addressed. If cancellations are above 5%/mo, you don't have this "fit," and there's no sense in spending time/money growing fast when the bucket is so leaky. You're just force-feeding something rotten. Actually a SaaS business needs to be more like 2%/mo in the long run, else it cannot grow large enough and without tremendous marketing/sales expense. But to me, <5%/mo *early* on is good enough that you can address that over time.

The key is to keep it simple at first and focus on rewarding the right behaviour. You can start by setting a gross revenue goal for the quarter, share with the team, and tell them if we hit that, that everyone will get a bonus. So in some sense, it's not about profit sharing at first. The reason for this is, profit can be manipulated and nothing most employees do can effect this. Also, you may not want to share profit with all your employees. So here's my suggestions for thinking through this - who's going to participate (founders, senior staff, everyone) - set a goal that you can all contribute towards. (Customer satisfaction, Gross Rebenue, etc) - Get a baseline for the current number (what was the gross Rebenue for the previous quarter) - Start simple and small and see if it impacts performance of the team. If it doesn't, then it's not working. Pro tip: Report on the goal as frequently as you can so everyone knows as soon as possible if you're on track or not. Hope that helps.

It depends on a lot of things. This is a pretty broad question with lots of pieces. Rob Walling has a great course on Udemy on The Startup's Guide to Virtual Assistants. The course costs $99 and it's more focused on VA work than straight dev / coding but it touches on both. I took it and it was worth every penny. https://www.udemy.com/startups-guide-hiring-virtual-assistant-va/

High net-worth individuals familiar with the industry or credit cards. Visa can make an amazing investor, just be sure to ask for money when you don’t need it.

A few thoughts. 1) Get a diverse group (geo + backgrounds) to use it. 2) Invite people to use your product in person (on their laptops), 3) Measure the impact using www.survey.io – iterate and fix all the user flows.