Strong and bold branding. Make it a prduct to flaunt.

This is a tuff one! As an entrepreneur, you will never be truly happy working for someone else. Not to say there is anything wrong with working for another company, it is just that entrepreneurs have a drive to innovate the process and shake up the market that just does not jive well with working for another person. Reading through your question, I would first suggest that you really think over the question at hand and make sure that your recent set back in business is not the driving factor to work for someone else. I have now started 9 businesses from scratch and of those nine, one of them was a failure. The failure gave me pause before I started another business, 6 months to be exact, I began to second guess myself. Once I moved though that by recognizing the driving factor, I was able to jump back out to my natural abilities again. With this said, I will say that I learned many of the skills of consulting and business through my 2.5 years working for a consulting firm owned by someone else before I started my life as an entrepreneur. There is safety in learning while being paid! The other benefit to working under another developer is to gain access to His network of individuals and vendors while gaining the creditability that he holds. While working for him, you will be building your own credibility in the field so that when you step out, you will have instant credibility for your own business. Please let me know if I can be of more help, I would welcome the opportunity to talk by phone with you to let you know how I was able to keep an open communication about my intentions of going out on my own while working for my soon-to-be competitors.

Hi! First of all I recommend to make a pitch deck for yourself that completely describes your product, user needs, market and theirs validation and lay down money after you will be confident with that document on proof of concept (it will cost you much less then creating MVP). I'd be happy to talk further with you about the difference between MVP and proof of concept stages and help you to set correct KPI to each of them regarding your product

I host 100s of high traffic, high speed, WordPress sites. If a client asked me this question... I'd say... This type of spaghetti setup is okay for a hobby site. Not for a real + money generating + pay your bills type of project. For real (money generating) projects. Keep tech simple. I run straight up Apache + FPM PHP + sites I host load test at roughly 1.1M request/minute throughput. You read that right. There's all sorts of myths about what's required for fast sites. My guess, 99.999% of everything written about fast sites is written by people who've never run a high traffic site or don't understand how to setup sites to isolation + fix slow points. Do yourself a favor + hire someone smart to host your site. In the long run, you'll save a truckload of money.

Hi! First of all i recommend to pitch your product to a community that represents your market , then give them free access to basic features that will complete most common scenarios and create premium features that will convert happy customers to paid users. I'd be happy to talk further with you about setting up market adoption of your product if you'd like to give me a call sometime

Wow, sounds like you have an amazing profit margin. The key is GROWTH. Continuous and stable, with the ability to predict future growth. Therefore, your market niche is very important, to feed the growth curve within an order of magnitude and can't be too vague. As others have mentioned, investors look for a $100-200 million valuation potential, as well as the ability to morph or expand as needed. Contact me if you want to discuss more.

I believe in MVP (Maximum Validated Product). The more you get customer/user validation, the more robust and complete the product becomes. It's smart to begin testing immediately to collect data that can help road mapping for the next product build improvements. Launch early with a few lighthouse customers to get the following (but not exhaustive) information: • Validate improvement over previous product iterations • Validate visual fit as a lightweight QA process • Supplement quantitative A/B testing to investigate user preference from a qualitative perspective • Identify missed usability issues or awkward product flows • Show use cases of a product in multiple environments (Desktop vs. Mobile) • Collect user feedback and hear their opinions, suggestions, and desired features lists

In general no effect... and... Be aware all content in subfolders + subhosts is now considered part of domain, so make sure you stick with some sort of common theme across all your content... to maximize your SEO. Also, there's no real way to do what you describe... short of using sshfs or something similar to mount your WordPress site into your EC2 instance, so technically you'll have challenges. Likely best you talk with a Server Savant about what you're targeting to accomplish, before you get to far down your implementation track. Also, you'll have far more flexibility if you dump your .net tech + go with strait up LAMP... Linux + Apache + MariaDB + PHP + WordPress. With .net you'll end up spending considerable time trying to fix technical issues that are unfixable or take many times the hours + dollars required to fix with a Lamp Stack.

Great Question! As I'm sure many other SEO's here have mentioned.. you should absolutely be leveraging the sub-folder as opposed to the sub-domain as Google and Bing associate sub domains as separate entities with their own value metrics outside of the primary root. The only real time I would recommend a sub-domain over a sub-directory would be due to platform restrictions (Shopify, Wix, etc) where you don't have access to build an infrastructure to support nested content from multiple hosts. Definitely worth chatting about, however you shouldn't have any problems using the sub folder with any other host you'd like.

I use Google Search. You can write your own scraper (if you're very smart), or purchase one off the shelf.

Asking for a link back to their blog is different than re-posting their content -- and there are SEO considerations for both. A link is one of the most powerful signals Google uses to decide who is a credible source and who is not. The more links, the more credible you must be (so goes the thinking). So website owners are working hard to get a lot of links from a lot of sources. Google has not been shy about touting the benefits of both linking to others AND receiving links. There is issue with Site A linking to Site B, and Site B linking back to Site A. In general, if someone asks you link to them, they may promise to link back, but that link will disappear pretty quickly through automated management. Sharing the same content is not going to do you any favors. Google is quick to recognize duplicate content and penalize the copy-cats. There are ways around that (with a rel=canonical element), but it is a little more technical than I think you're looking for, right now. Copying other people's content is done, and sometimes the copier gets more traffic and success than the original poster. There is a good write up of how BuzzFeed does this here: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/science-behind-buzzfeeds-viral-content In short, there are reasons to both link to another site and quote their content. For optimal performance, this is measured and balanced with your own content and links coming to you. I hope this helps, if you have other questions or want more help. Send me a message or schedule a call. All the best, -Shaun

Re-posting someone else's blog post, word for word, will likely not help you at all. Getting requests to link out to these other sites also doesn't help you--at least not near as much as it helps the sites you're linking to.

You'll need to provide more details/context for your question. How long is a piece of string? How big is a house? It all depends on how much time, money, and/or effort you're willing to spend generating those leads.

I have used this https://canvanizer.com/ for my venture as well as for other clients. Feel free to contact in case you need to get more details.

"...may not see the value of our platform yet or that they already have an existing older system." This is where you want to focus your energies. Why don't they see the value of what you're offering? What roadblocks exist here and how can you remove them? Have you spoken with existing clients to see how they are using your service and what they feel is missing? What was their feedback and have you implemented it into your system? What is it about their old system that they feel is better than yours / or that yours fails to overcome a certain shortcoming and is not worth the hassle of migration? I think some digging into your clients is in order. A better picture needs to be painted about their needs and how they perceive that value that you offer.

It depends. Do you have a documented view of your prospective customer journey?. If not, this is a thing you should do You must have heard this before. Any product or service could be a vitamin (good to have), pain killer(temporary relief) or a pain reliever (long term relief). What kind of product you have decides the kind of Marketing Strategy. You go to a super market for vitamins, a drug store for pain killer and a hospital for pain relief. Juxtapose this with your channels for marketing. We can have a call if you wish to discuss more. I am quite affordable. Call Me.

If you sell the whole business, then the email list or 'prospect list' naturally comes with this purchase. The challenge in selling just the list is that you actually sell the list such that you're not really just selling a copy. For example, if you sell a copy, then you may fall afoul of spam laws because those people didn't give permission for their names to go to another user in addition to you. What you may wish to do to make it easier is to sell the list along with your account access to the mail provider, ie your Mailchimp access or whomever you use. This way you are truly selling a business asset and not just selling someone a 'copy' of your list. Hope that helps. For over 250 videos and blog posts about buying and selling businesses visit www.DavidCBarnett.com or arrange a call to discuss your specific case. Dave

Likely you won't like my thoughts about this. When I give talks about business bootstrapping, I suggest people only work ideas which meet my "Sunset Rule". Sunset Rule - You should be able to go from idea to first sale, before sunset, or best consider other ideas. This also relates to your MVP. If you can't dream up an MVP + sell it before the sun goes down, best consider other ideas. Years ago, I was at an Internet Marketing Party mixer in Austin, TX + sat to visit with a friend. She was down because she was starting a new business + had spent months working on a business plan + determined she required $80K to bootstrap her business + then had spent another several months looking for investors. A buddy of mine + I sat with her for 15mins + slightly retooled her idea. She launched the next day for a one time investment of $144/year (cost of a Meetup.com account) + was generating some significant profit in a few days. Chunk down your MVP, so you can manually make sales by the end of the day... for $0 investment + you'll know for sure you have a profitable business. If you can't sell one unit, by the end of the day... best consider some other idea...

Hi, My entire practice is built around helping people buy and sell their own business. I've been working in this field since 2008. If you come over to www.DavidCBarnett.com you'll find over 300 blog posts on buying, selling, financing and managing SMEs with links to playlists which now have over 250 FREE videos on these subjects. Also, dozens of links to interviews on podcasts that I've done on these subjects. To learn more about buying a business, I recommend my online course at www.BusinessBuyerAdvantage.com . To learn about selling, visit www.HowToSellMyOwnBusiness.com where you'll also find an online course as well as a free download and links to my best-selling book called 'How To Sell My Own Business.' To learn about improving a business to make it more valuable, visit www.EasySmallBizSystems.com Right now I've got 7 books on Amazon along these topics as well. And if you ever want to discuss a particular opportunity that you find, just arrange a call. Cheers David C Barnett

I'm going to make 2 assumptions in my reply 1. You're selling these to companies 2. These are rather expensive systems. Basically for such a situation, what you have right now is a first mover advantage. That basically means you have the opportunity to gain quick traction and find early adopters for your systems. If you act fast enough and manage to get companies to buy them from you, this gives you a huge advantage on your competitors. Why? This is because you have the opportunity to forge close relationships with customers and get testimonials. In the future, your competitors might be able to beat you pricewise, but that is never a substitute for trust in your company and the relationships you've been able to forge. So I would suggest spending a lot of time on 2 things 1. Creating a holistic experience for the customer from the installation of the software to the deployment. You want to be there at every step of the way when needed. If necessary, set it up for them, do some free repairs(If it doesn't cost you much). At this point you're building the relationship between you and your customers so going the extra mile counts. 2. You also want to start getting some form of testimonial to build trust and confidence in your product. This is important because word-of-mouth is more influential than advertising when selling a product. Without further information, this is all that I can come up with for now. If you're keen, I could discuss more specific strategies with you for your business and cover key actionable steps you could take to accelerate your growth and sales. :)

Ask friends, families, and previous co-workers to refer you.

Most live chat tools are encapsulated in a Javascript snippet to add to your site. WordPress, for example, may provide a plugin + if you look at the plugin code, usually the code simply injects the Javascript snippet. This said, all you really require... choose how you'd like the live chat icon/window/widget to display + likely the live chat provider will have a library of code to display their live chat window in different ways.

Depending on the specs of your boxes, there are many different great options out there for custom printed boxes, at reasonable prices. From my experience working with online retailers, here's some of the best that I've come across: https://packlane.com/ https://pakible.com/ https://www.boxup.com/ https://packhelp.com/ https://www.companybox.com/ http://brandincolor.com/ Some specialty suppliers: https://www.ecoenclose.com/ - eco-friendly http://www.instabox.com/ - Canada http://www.glbc.com/ - Canada + US https://www.packqueen.com.au/ - Australia Hope that helps and gives you some options to consider! Custom packaging is an important part in building a great brand, so it's smart to be looking into this. If you need any advice around creating an eCommerce brand and driving online retail sales, schedule a call with me and we can dig into it!

First you have to understand what STYLE of selling you're looking for. A book for one style may be great for me, but you'll think it's weak and ineffective. Two main distinctions are the "hardcore closer" (traditional) approach versus the "consultative" (more modern) approach. One appeals to an individual while the other does not. Many people are unaware of anything under than the fast-talking, bombastic style of selling made popular by movies and television, however; it took me 10 years in the professional world to even figure out the right question to ask ("IS there another style of selling?"). Once you understand which style of selling you want to learn or expand on, then you can choose appropriate books or courses. There is little point in giving SPIN Selling to a Hopkins devotee. And The Challenger Sale will fall on deaf ears to those who are desperate to not be seen as "pushy."

You can't verify anything, unless they give you their tax returns. You can do revenue share deals, where gurus are paid a percentage of profits they generate. Tip: True Gurus (upper 'G', rather than lower 'g') are busy generating cash. You'll rarely meet them + hardly anyone knows them. To meet real Gurus, traffic places like Meetup Groups with very tight topics, which relate to what you're trying to accomplish. When you meet a real Guru, likely you'll know it by the way they talk about their area of expertise... which you'll likely have to tease out of them. Anyone making massive cash... tends to keep their techniques to themselves.