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.

You can start by personally emailing them and saying thanks. Doing something public without their permission isn’t cool. I send Direct Messages on Twitter, emails, all day thanking people.

Listen, don’t tell. Conduct it on their computer. Fix the issues after each test .. iterate like mad, especially when you’re small / trying to figure it out.