Most of mine come from being eternally curious about the world around me - questioning how things are done, why things are done a certain way. Ideas tend to strike me when something happens that either makes me happy or excited (which I then want to make repeatable or shareable with the world) or when I see something that makes me sad, or angry (which I then want to make better, or eliminate or prevent). It can be difficult to sit down with the intent to "have some ideas" which you could translate into startups. The other thing to note - most of the ideas I come up with go into evernote - never to return. Why? Were they bad ideas, no not really, some are quite interesting. However, they aren't things that I have a strong interest in or a sustained passion for. No matter what you do to generate your ideas - ensure that they line up with the things in life you can't do without - the things that you'd do even if it wouldn't make you any money. Regardless of the quality of the idea - if you can't stay excited about in the face of all sorts of difficulty, adversity, and struggle - in an environment of extreme uncertainty and instability - it won't be long before you are thinking of the next idea and wishing you'd never started this one. The best ideas in my opinion, are the ones that hide among the weeds, on the foggy edges of the thing or things your mind turns to on its own, when given the chance. Opportunities are everywhere - so look near the things that interest you most - those are the most likely to be suited to you.

This may sound overly simplistic - but I'd suggest just asking a few. Assuming you want to find someone local that you can work on site with - just seek out a dozen or so and ask them. If an individual says no, ask them who else you should ask in the area. They shouldn't be hard to find. Said differently, if they are - they probably aren't busy.

The easiest way that will really hit you is, are you turning away business because you can't handle the load? If that is a yes, then you have to say, how much am I willing to pay a person to do the extra work? Lastly, the business you are turning away, is it enough for you to pay a person, and still make money or at least break even. The last one is the one that should really be the decider. If you can pay the person the salary you set in the second question, and still make money after expenses, then yes, you should hire someone. The trickier part is if you only break even. The reason it is trickier is, maybe based on your current numbers of turned away business you break even, but wit that new employee, you could see an increase in business due to word of mouth and that sort of thing. The only time you say no to hiring is when it would not make you money, or break even after you hire.

One simple way is put them all in a tool like this and ping them http://www.bulkping.com/

First off, I'm sorry to hear of your struggles. Secondly, I commend your diligence. As for which course of action to take... There is no silver bullet and while it may seem frustrating you may very well be right on the heels of success. You never know when it will take place in your life, but if you work hard, smart and long towards a clear goal you will get there. I would avoid bouncing from one opportunity to the other as it is difficult to hit a tipping point if you're spreading your activities too thin. Best of luck to you.

That depends a lot on what assets you have, and what type of business you're trying to create. Do you already have a MVP version of your product? I hope so, six months in! One option is to pre-sell your product (beta version) to your audience, which not only helps with financing but also gets them involved with improving the product you're creating. You do have an audience, right? If not, stop what you're doing or building and go back to that stage. Don't build products in a vacuum.

There are a number of pre-built social media platforms designed to allow people to quickly create their own social networks such as ning.com and Dolphin. The problem is that if your idea is truly unique, then these platforms probably won't have the tools you need to accomplish what you're looking to do. I would suggest searching for a co-founder or perhaps multiple co-founders to join your team. There are sites like https://www.cofounderslab.com/ that will allow you to network with like-minded people with specific abilities and experience. Using this platform you could search for someone with relevant coding experience looking to take on a new project. You may be able to find someone willing to help build your product in exchange for equity ownership in your company. Lastly, if you do have a truly unique idea you will want to protect it. Here is a link to a great article that walks through several steps you can take to help protect your idea/concept from employees, investors, and competitors: http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhendricks/2013/11/18/7-simple-ways-you-can-protect-your-idea-from-theft/#b883b90707ee.

Hi, I'm not in Oregon so you'll need to speak to a local tax expert to verify the details but here is how it works: When you issue points you're creating a liability. You owe something to someone. It's like a gym which sells a one-year membership, they're only supposed to recognize 1/12 of the sale in the month it was sold. 11/12 of the money actually is a liability called 'deferred revenue.' As each month goes by, they reduce their liability by 1/12 and credit that money to income because now it is 'earned.' In your case you sell points to merchants (who give them to consumers) but most of the money collected is now owed to consumers to redeem their points. This is not income, you're just holding money owed to someone else. A small portion of the money, your gross margin on points sales, would be recognized as revenue and would have to cover your overheads and give you your profit, if any. So your balance sheet will keep growing in cash and an offsetting liability. Your income statement will only recognize the small margin which is your profit from selling the points to the merchants. I hope this helps make it more clear. With this type of business you may wish to investigate whether it makes sense from a liability point of view to hold the funds owed to consumers in a trust account rather than just 'floating' the points. I could see problems arising if you ever dipped into this cash pool to cover your own expenses while trying to argue to tax authorities that you're holding the cash for someone else. If you'd like to learn more about how merchants account for their own proprietary point systems, just book a call with me. I worked in the loyalty field for a few years. Cheers Dave

Without fully diagnosing the market potential of your space it's difficult to say whether to go all-in or change course. It's smart that you're not wanting to the "just another ordinary software", but you don't need to be the best per se. You simply need to be unique - which may prove challenging when providing a utility. If it were me, I would sell what you have like crazy and potentially offer the service at a lower rate to start with based on the expectation to clients that you are in the midst of integrating new improvements. This would allow you to onboard them earlier to generate cash flow, then increase the cashflow once the new features are built in. Since I don't know the full scope of what you're doing I could be off base in that clients either want it all or nothing, but if the latter is not true I would sell, sell, sell and offer unrelenting service which may prove to be part of your uniqueness. Good luck.

For the design? The downside is that you could end up with a very generic looking application/site. It's also not your (or your developer's) code so there will usually be a period of time required to get used to it in order to make any adjustments. In the end, it may not really save you that much time...Depending on what it does or doesn't do. Templates certainly aren't a bad place to start though. They can save time in many cases. Just not all cases.

Lots of different questions here. Volunteers are not considered donors in that they can't really deduct their volunteer-related expenses as donations. Nor can the entity claim them as revenue, unless the volunteers donate to the nonprofit and then the nonprofit buys their tickets. In general, the last thing we need is yet another nonprofit. Why don't you try finding an organization with a similar mission that could partner with you to see if it works? For example, you essentially become a self-contained department within that charity. You then recruit your own volunteers and donors, run everything through them, and… If you actually need to stand alone in the future… You can separate as an independent organization at that time. But this way you will not need to setup all your own systems, file your own tax documents, conduct your own audit, etc

Is impossible to give you any advice w/o any further information. Can you elaborate for me please? I'd be more than happy to help you out on this. Google me and email me if you wish.

Hello Ty, thank you for sharing this with us. I understand how vulnerable you might feel right now. My name is Humberto Valle, I have been helping entrepreneurs for over 8 years now, coaching strategic marketing and contracting for many companies at various phases in various industries across multiple continents in matters of growth, change management and innovation. Anything from evaluating opportunities, pivoting, crafting business models, improving website conversions, brand positioning and much more. I have also helped companies with your very own dilemma – here’s my quick advice for you: First thing first, you have reached 1/3 of your goal – that’s validation enough that your product has value what you might be lacking is positioning for this you should take a look at your commonalities among clients such as industry, common pain points, common budgets, common goals, or final reasons for finally hiring your services, etc. finding these commonalities and comparing them to their alternatives when they don’t hire you can give you insight into what other products to offer, what features to change or remove or improve – not necessarily pivot which is you essentially starting from scratch. Consider if you have lost interest because of the product, the stagnation, or the fact that you are a founder not a long term executive – as the business grows you become more of an admin person and fire fighter rather than a creative startup entrepreneur facing challenges and creatively figuring out how to prove the world wrong. These people exist and you might be one of them, if that’s the case your business might not be growing due lack of effort, or clarity due to you already exploring new ideas. I want to share something with you, those that succeed are those with one focus, one idea. People that think too much and have many simultaneous ideas are the ones that fail. This is a proven fact if you look into traits that successful entrepreneurs and failed startup managements have. Also consider that your model might be built to be scalable, which means that your growth could be stagnant due to lack of resources strategically invested to leverage demand and adding more offerings to your business model. Would a loan be an option if this is the case? Does your business have enough solvency to cover investment expenses for a new feature? A new market? or increase brand positioning? This leads me to my next question, as you have grown your business to over 300k in revenue has your marketing budget grown respectively?? If not why not? Stopping marketing spending to save money is like stopping a clock to save time. It doesn’t work that way. I hope this helps you a bit :) If you would like to hire me for additional consultancy feel free to google me (Humberto Valle MBA), read on me and email me at humberto@unthink.me I am available for long and short term partnerships.

I think the closest I know of to what you're describing is Influitive. Influitive is SaaS software for advocate engagement, including discussion forums. They have a widget that can extend their experience into your app or website.

Products like ZenDesk have a whole system built around help centers and tickets. Discourse and Disqus offer forum-like discussions. WordPress has several forum plugins. And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head. My assumption would be that a deeper search on Google will come up with a metric fuckton of options. This is a huge challenge, so I imagine there are tons of companies trying to fill that space. Good luck!

Hello, I might be interested. My name is Humberto Valle. Feel free to Google me and let me know if you would like to partner.

Easiest way would be to use an existing A/B testing service (e.g. https://www.optimizely.com/) Or, you could do it manually by sending out (via email or whatever) different links to different people.

Besides being trained in the best keyword ranking techniques, you need to have just the right product. Easy to manufacture but not too easy to knock off. Otherwise you will find yourself ranking and then immediately getting chased by others willing to go leaner on margins. Product sourcing and design/development can be the differentiator that allows you to stay in a product category for much longer and really get a good ROI.

Cryptography: Look up the RSA encryption algorithm, it's used all over the place to protect financial transactions, etc.

I've been in your shoes. Here's how Clarity has helped me: 1. I meet new people on Clarity who call me, sometimes more than once, then migrate over to my other programs or buy online courses or products. 2. I promote my Clarity page to my existing tribe. What I find is that some people like to talk to me and make sure I'm 'real' before investing in courses or programs that they've been considering. 3. Sometimes when people want a 'quick talk' I send them to my Clarity profile simply to have Clarity take care of the billing, payment and scheduling. 4. Whenever someone asks if I can join them by phone or skype to 'pick my brain,' I respond with my Clarity page link. This derails the free-consulting seekers. Hope this helps. Check out www.InvestLocalBook.com and see how I use Clarity on both my main page and on the 'I Need David's Help' tab. If you want to chat further, just book a call. Dave

We had a similar issue. Assuming all 3 co-founders are American citizens I can think of two banks: Everbank and BofI. If your co-founders are merely living in America but not citizens, BofI is out. Everbank however will still allow you to bank with them but you might have to jump through some hoops. In our case we have people worldwide. We still don't know a good answer to that question.

As someone who's built WordPress websites for business owners for about 5 years now, I'd say start small, then scale from there. The important thing is to focus on delivering a unique service. The problem with this industry is that designers and developers always focus on what they can do for the client as opposed to what the client REALLY wants. So, when you approach businesses or organisations about your services, find out what they would like their website to do for them. I'm a lead generation strategist/consultant, and whenever a WordPress projects came up, I won't wear my "design cap" but would wear my "marketing cap" instead. I would ask this question - "what can I do to help my client generate leads and sales through their website?" If you can make your clients websites work hard for them, then you will get a lot of referrals (I'm saying this from experience; 90% of the website projects I've done came through referrals). Let me share with you how I moved from $500 websites to $2,000 and above. I decided to apply what is called "Education Based Marketing" - this means giving your clients a web strategy session, and helping them understand what you are doing or going to do for them. When you make the whole process all about them, and operate with integrity, then you are going to set yourself apart from others. And please, don't compete on price... most website designers always do this just to win a client. Let your work speak for you, If they think your fees are too high, then they are not your ideal clients. There's more to share, but I'll pause here, in order to avoid overwhelming you. Feel free to reach out if you need further help. All the best!

You can do this on your own, or you could find an organization that will help you. www.gofundme.com is one place you could try for getting funding if you want to do this all on your own, Good luck

You already have part of your answer. You know what types of foods the local workers are eating based on the food trucks. What you need to consider is how much of that type of food can you sell and at what cost in order to recoup your costs to develop the land. This is assuming that there are currently no buildings on the land that can be converted into a restaurant. Keep in mind that you are in an industrial area, how many shifts are there, how many workers buy their meals, and not bring them from home. The first step I is to find out the cost of development, while doing that make a survey and go down by those food trucks (if you can afford it hire some young people to do that for you) Count the number of customers that eat there and ask the people that buy food there if they would come to a restaurant if it was built? What kinds of food they would be looking for? How much of a break do they get for meals? Things of that nature. You may find it better to develop the land in an industrial way rather than a restaurant. The surveys will reveal the possible amount of customers you potentially have, and can give you a price point on how much they are willing to pay, and even do they have the time to come to a restaurant to eat.

I don't think you need to use a Virtual private server at this time unless you are getting so much traffic that GoDaddy is limiting you. Here is info from Wordpress about email forwarding: https://en.support.wordpress.com/email-forwarding/ Seeing as you probably bought your domain, I really suggest a Google Apps for Business account, because even though it is Gmail, your emails will come to whomever you send to as from your domain. There are a lot of other features with it as well, you can look at it from here: https://apps.google.com/intx/en_us/products/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=na-us-en-apps-bkws-gafw-trial-e&utm_term=google%20apps%20for%20work&KWID=43700007880944900 If you need any help, I can for sure help you with your email, as well as work out how to get Wordpress to do what you want. Even if you don't go with Google Apps, there are lots of other ways to get done what you need. For sure though, if the current emails are being marked as spam for your users, or not even getting delivered that is not good for your reputation.