Great question! I believe that Hootsuite might be one of your best solutions. It is a free tool and you can publish through several social media platforms at once. For a free account, however, they limit you to 3 accounts I believe: https://hootsuite.com/plans/free There is also Buffer as well which I believe has similar functionality: https://buffer.com Here are some additional helpful resources for you: https://blog.capterra.com/top-free-social-media-management-software/ https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/5-social-media-management-tools-to-save-time/

Great question! 1) You can use "pre-selling" to offer an upcoming service or product to existing customers which they will effectively fund by paying for it (while you create it) so that they are also buy it as your customer: https://thefoundation.com/podcast/episode21 https://thefoundation.com/podcast/episode61 2) You can use a crowd funding platform like Kickstarter or IndieGogo. 3) You can ask customers if they'd like to become an investor in your business and offer them to become more like a partner with benefits and compelling reasons to join you. 4) You can ask customers directly what it would take or would interest them in becoming your investor. Hope that helps! Tom

This is really a question for you NC tax preparer + NC attorney. There may be NC tax implications. Likely no legal implications. Only your local professionals will likely be up to complete speed about all this. Also I'd suggest you stick with H&R Block for your taxes, as they have an intense training program all their preparers must continually go through. Many years, they must go through multiple times. This will be essential with the new tax bill being floated, as answers to your questions today, may change after new tax bill goes through.

Making sales and figuring out what potential customers want. Really, everything else can be done after you've proven that there really is a business opportunity. www.DavidCBarnett.com

Cost of customer acquisition will depend a lot on what type of course you're looking to sell and your target audience. No one will be able to give you a straight up answer here. If you're able to provide more details, I could give some more nuanced advice :)

Before you consider selling your patented product, here are some questions you should consider. 1. Do I have a viable market? 2. Do I have sales/orders that show this demand 3. What sort of competitive advantage do I explicitly have over my competitors. It's important to get as much leverage as possible over whoever you plan to sell your product too. The best way to do this is to get hard data you can use to back up your claims and to find clear distinct competitive advantages which will cement a strong market position for years to come. If you have any further questions, drop me a message and I'll be more than happy to answer them :)

Next time, get this stuff figured out at the start and written down in your Operating Agreement. The OA tells everyone what the agreements are on how things like this will be done. You may be able to do that now, but it's going to be more challenging to get to consensus today. You're pretty much guaranteed someone is going to be unhappy with the results and that's going to cause trouble. Minority shareholders have rights. Learn what those are. You need to talk to an attorney and an accountant now and get their "professional advice." I am neither of those and this is not "professional advice."

Your question is very general. I'd suggest you locate people in Clarify which seem to provide useful advice + book calls with several of them. How you approach Marketing depends on many factors. Whether you're an introvert or extrovert, to me, is the most important starting point, because if you're an introvert + try to do extrovert-esque marketing, you'll fail. Extroverts trying to do introvert-esque marketing will also fail. Also targeting results, to me, is next on the list. For example, I'm an introvert, able to masquerade as an extrovert for short periods. So I bootstrap all my new projects using platform speaking at Meetup groups + conferences. I target acquiring my first 100+ clients for a project via nose-to-nose selling... well... very soft selling... Having these core users, I then train them... again, so softly, they never notice... to send me referrals. 100 clients will to pay anything, to me, is worth far more than 1,000,000 of random people on email lists. I'll take profit over numbers of people, any day.

Depends on the state. Some states are known to be more business friendly than others. Better protections, etc. You need to your research to see which states are better for the industry you're in.

Did either landlords or tenants ask you for it? Did they say they had a problem this solution can fix? Are they willing to pay for it--or is someone willing to pay for it? Possibly a third party advertiser? Have you figured out your business model? How do you protect the app from being "gamed" with fake reviews, positive and negative?

Purely from a blogging perspective, there is no question WP has the better CMS and overall controls/backend for non-programmers. Shopify is recommended more for expanding your ecommerce options with plugins, promo offers etc. Obviously would need more context here as far as feature scope and what your site needs were, but I'd lean more towards WP just based on what you've described. there are a checklist of factors you can go through in order to figure out which open source platform would be most advisable. Happy to connect and offer any insights or guidance I can to get you on the right platform.

Please don't share your message on Facebook like this. It is spam. Contribute the the conversation and you won't have to worry about getting blocked.

The answer really depends on who you are targeting. I am assuming here that it is primarily SMEs in which case I would probably focus on sales and productivity tools. There are a number of tools like Pipedrive (Sales CRM) and Trello (List organizer) that I cannot live without. Whatever you develop I think it is key also to focus on plug-ins and integrations with other tools, that can increase stickiness as well as attract users of existing tools.

Unless an e-commerce company is transparent in sharing their sales details (this is probably very rare or unusual), you won't know the metrics needed in order to calculate it. I would think that the 2nd best thing is to hire a scraper or data entry person to collect the average item prices to try to build an idea for it. Sorry, that is the best idea or help that I can offer. Perhaps this is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to build this. :)

Enterprise companies approach sales for B2B a little different. There's a (1) structure and there's (2) talent. They can scale just because they can but they are also very wary of focusing their resources to the right people. On the other hand, companies who are at SME stage may need more effort in tapping into different audiences to get a higher chance of closed deals. However, ABM (account-based marketing) is a good way for both enterprise companies and SMEs to tackle the balance of resources and lead generation. If you need more help in structuring this for your company, you can book a call with me here on Clarify.

Hi - we have worked with a number of subscription box services. I have over 15 years helping startups in various industries and spaces. In terms of best channels it depends on the company. How long have you been in business? I would need more detail to give a proper answer but here are some avenues that might work. 1) I would do a big launch announcement and use a key influencer in the space to host it 2) I would send the launch news to the top tier media outlets in your market and in national markets 3) Put resources towards a great short shareable video that explains what the UVP of your service is 4) Find a journalists or writer friend and take them for coffee and brainstorm 20 different press angles for your business -- earned media is one of the best ways to acquire customers 5) Put effort into your content marketing strategy and specifically instagram -that's a great place to market to women. In short you need a combo of: 1)Earned media 2) Owned media (social channels) 3) Paid media - sponsored posts, boosting FB ads,etc If you're limited on resources focus on the first two as they don't cost you anything but your time. If you have the money consider bringing on a consultant or agency to help manage and execute some of your strategies. There are no 'best' channels - every service, ecomm and business is different so requires a different approach Good luck and if you want more info I'm happy to hop on a call.

I have to ask: Did you already develop your product? The best advice, which I love, is from Seth Godin. He said something along the lines of "Don't find customers for your product, find products for your customers." Always start with a customer you want to be in service to, and look to solve their problems.

Easy starting point. Run Adsense on your site for a month. After a month, find top 3 pages (most traffic + on page time). For each page, visit the page + hit reload 10 times, recording the Ad Google runs on these pages. Then once you have the most prevalent Ad for each page, trace the Ad back to the originating site. The replace Adsense on each page with the native Ad, which will pay you far more than Adsense. Check your numbers for a month + if your numbers (income/Ad) begins to drop, this means the Ad has saturated. At this point, turn on Adsense again + let it run for 30 days, then repeat the process. This is a dirt simple way to monetize your content at optimal levels. Be sure not to click on the Ad on your site, as this breaks the Adsense TOS + will get you banned from Google's Ad networks.

You can do whatever you wish with shares as long as the parties agree. If you have voting and non-voting classes of shares you can issue these for the cash investment. The question is... why would he? Normally non-voting shares have certain other characteristics like fixed rates of return or preference in the case of company dissolution. Other things you may consider would be issuing a debenture for the new money. This is a debt instrument so there would be no shares sold. You could issue a convertible debenture whereby the debt becomes equity at a certain share price in certain events, such as the sale of the company. It's up to your imagination as long as the other party agrees. Here are two videos I made that touch on this topic, one about how to use shares in deal making and another about using shares to raise capital. https://youtu.be/1EjKjSAd1F8 https://youtu.be/5h_ouZ-sUoU Just arrange a call if you'd like to discuss your specific situation. dave

I developed and published mobile apps as an individual for several years, and only formed a corporation later as things grew and it made sense. As far as Apple's App Store and Google Play are concerned, you can register as an individual developer without having a corporation. I'd be happy to help further over a call if you have any additional questions. Best of luck with your mobile app!

Well, when you have viral marketing, then it helps to spread the word about your business like wildfire on it's own. It's a self-perpetuating loop. So rather than you paying for advertisements, people will share your content or tool or something else because it's so cool or does something valuable for them. Imagine if Nike creates a Facebook video about some cool new sneakers they just released. If 10,000 people share that Facebook video on their newsfeed, then their friends will see it. It may be said to have effectively "gone viral" -- and can drive Nike's sales, leading to business expansion. In other words, if 1,000 people buys those shoes that wouldn't have otherwise, then this viral marketing just led to "business expansion" for Nike because they are making more sales that they would not have otherwise.

The way I use to do this in Austin Texas... 1) Pull the property tax records for your county. Usually you can purchase a physical CD with data for a few $100. I use to purchase these every quarter, as #2 will change each time a property sells (tax data changes). 2) Lookup turnover threshold for your area. Last time I did this in Austin, 3.2 years was normal threshold where people moved. After the Houston flooding, it's anyone's guess how this number might work. Likely you'll have to come up with some other way to analyze data + I'll continue on about how I did this in Austin. 3) Start sending monthly letters to people who's tax bill address + property address are the same (owner occupants) providing them tips for staging their house for sale + providing coupons for local people to do staging work, like repairs + landscaping. Also include a coupon for using your site at a discount to list their property. Keep sending to these people, until they use your service (numbered coupon, so you can track them) or the property sells (property tax data changes). 4) There are many other strategies you can use with this data also. For example, properties with common tax bill addresses are rental properties. You can stripe these (organize them into buckets) like between 2-5 properties or 6-10 properties. Each bucket has a different marketing approach. All sorts of imaginative ways to market to these people. 5) I share this technique with every realtor I meet. So far no one has every used this technique, that I've told. You're welcome to call me to talk more about this, if required. I'm way out of Real Estate, so happy to share anything about this your like.

It will depend upon your relationship with the investor. If the investor have trust upon you, then you may pitch anytime, however, if you don't know the investor for long, then you have to follow a process. You may setup a call to discuss more.

This starts before you even hire your team. Know what your business culture and work ethic is, and then hire people who match that ethic. Technical skills application, product knowledge, operational steps: most of this can be taught on the job. Sharing your company's priorities can not. Once you have hired people who will fit with your culture, the rest becomes easier. Be clear form the start on how people will be assessed. Tell them how they, in their roles, can bring value to the company and the give continuous feedback, especially in the first 6-12 months. Also build a strong on-boarding plan (if you have employees already but never did an official on-boarding, you can start now an call it training instead). Train your team on: - the client base - the problem you are solving - solutions to the problem - why your solution is the best - your product - your team - your growth expectations. Doing all of this you will be developing partner relationships with your employees, making it easy to share both good and constructive feedback.

I guess it depends on what you're trying to do on LinkedIn. I meet people there with whom I do business. People follow me there because they have an interest in buying, selling and managing businesses and I publish a new article every week. I sometimes prospect for opportunities. I'll be in Tanzania next September and I was able to find a few people in my network from Tanzania and South Africa. I'm hoping to schedule some seminars while I'm in that part of the world. Back when I was working for a bank, I would load up my profile with information to make me more credible. I found that sometimes when I left messages for prospects, they'd look me up on LinkedIn to check me out before returning my call. It's a great tool and I've made money with LinkedIn. What I don't recommend though is making a bunch of connections and then spamming people once they become connected to you. I mean, who on Earth would like that? Arrange a call if you'd like to talk about your goals and maybe some of my experience on LinkedIn could help you out. Check out my profile here: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davidbarnettmoncton Dave