I would bootstrap as long as possible. As long as you're able to engage engineering resources for continual product enhancement; the customer support team to ensure customers are churn-proof happy; the marketing team to generate awareness, leads, and optimize the sales process; and the sales team to close business, keep going on your path. Where things get tricky is in terms of competition. If you're bootstrapped, it's harder to compete against a well-funded adversary (or adversaries) because they can do much more in terms of generating awareness. Their marketing team can attend many conferences. If your sales cycle is aided by in-person contact, conference and trade shows could be important. They are not cheap. Your marketing needs may also require a huge amount of demand generation. This can become really costly. (See the Fan Duel sports betting marketing campaign in Q3/4 2015. Mega expensive!). Depending on your product category, investment can also play a role in how prospective customers perceive you. If you're selling to the enterprise, having Blue Chip backing from Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia will impress those who look for this external validation. (You've surely heard of the “No one ever got fired for buying IBM” statement?). VC funding also helps with publicity, and media coverage if you care about that and need TechCrunch clips. There are many successful startups that never took any money. The vast majority or startups, in fact, don't. Based on your description above, though, it doesn't seem as if my thoughts apply to you. If you already have partnerships that are working for you, global customers you can leverage in those regions, a product that is clearly providing value to your customers, and you can fund growth from cash flow or other options (debt financing, perhaps), I'd keep to your path. The larger and more successful you become, the better the terms you can negotiate if and when you decide you can't live without outside investment.

I am a corporate attorney and have advised clients of protection of the intellectual property integral to their operations. In the intellectual property world, there are three types of federal registration you can pursue - patent, trademark, and copyright. Patents secure ideas, trademarks secure brands, and copyrights secure written product. If you are looking to protect your idea, you may think about filing for a patent. The first step is securing a provisional patent that sort of holds a spot for your idea while your actual patent application is pending or your idea goes into development. The patent process is complicated and lengthy, so I would recommend getting the advice of a patent attorney if that is something you want to explore. Not all ideas are able to be patented, and you may find that a patent is not an option for you. The other option is to maintain your idea as a trade secret. This essentially means that you are careful about who you share it with, and when you do share it with anyone, you have an Non-Disclosure Agreement in place that prohibits them from disclosing your idea to anyone else or misappropriating it for themselves. If you had a company built around the idea, you would establish an in-depth trade secret program designed to prevent disclosure of your idea outside of the company. (e.g. Coca Cola has a trade secret program built around the recipe for Coke.) As an individual, you would just need to be careful and, to be extra thorough, get people with whom you share your idea to sign NDAs. There is no federal registration process involved in maintaining a trade secret, just common sense and consistency with your protective practices.

If you're looking to build a service like Xero that imports users bank transactions and balances, you've got a few options. Xero uses Yodlee on the back end to power their bank feeds. As I understand it, it's rather old school and often errors out, but supports a huge range of banks through scrapers, private APIs, and all kinds of proprietary technology. You can also check out Plaid - you can think of them as the modern version of Yodlee. They support a more limited number of banks, but have an excellent API and SDK, and I believe are much more affordably priced than Yodlee.

As you may suspect, there really isn't a hard and fast answer. You can review averages to see that a CEO typically becomes a major shareholder in a startup, but your role and renumeration will be based on the perceived value you bring to the organization. You value someone's contribution through equity when you think that they will be able to add long-term benefits, you would prefer that they don't move company part way through the process, and to keep them from being enticed by a better salary (a reason for equity tied to a vesting arrangement). Another reason is when the company doesn't have salary money available but the potential is very strong. In this situation you should be especially diligent in your analysis because you will realize that even the best laid plans sometimes fall completely short. So to get the best mix, you have to be very real about the company's long-term growth potential, your role in achieving it, and the current liquidity necessary to run the operations. It should also be realized that equity needs to be distributed. You cannot distribute 110% and having your cap table recalculated such that your 5% turns into 1% in order to make room for the newly hired head of technology is rather demotivating for the team. Equity should be used to entice a valuable person to join, stay, and contribute. It should not be used in leu of salary that allows an employee to pay their bills. So, like a lot of questions, the answer is really, it depends. Analyzing the true picture of your long-term potential will allow you to more easily determine the correct mix.

Start here: http://www.ehospitalitytimes.com/?p=82548

Contact both the customer and BBB to clarify the complaint and confirm it was intended for you. You can delight both parties by accepting responsibility and expressing empathy, even if you are not at fault. There is a long-told customer service story about Nordstrom accepting an faulty car tire because the customer claimed she bought it here. Turns out, the site used to house a tire shop prior to Nordstom moving in. To your success, -Shaun

License them the idea. Retain ownership. Did they flat out SAY "Yes, we want this; if only we or someone else would develop it?" You can hire support teams, you know. I wonder if you are letting a few shadow issues stand in the way of a good order.

I can answer generally because I'm not sure which NLP algorithms you are analyzing (metadata, etc). First, you must identify the target audience for your possible new offering. You may already have this. If you do, then the best way to find out what the market wants is simply to ask. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see the mention of a particular vertical or target audience in this post, so I'll make up an example. Let's say you are targeting criminal lawyers who want to have real time information on crimes and crime statistics using the model you describe above. Develop 10 questions you would ask this group - then ask them. You can do this online, through social media or some people are comfortable picking up the phone and asking the questions "old fashioned" style. Once you have identified this audience and gotten some feedback, you can then begin to understand if there is a "gap" not only which the industry might be facing, but for which they will pay to close. Hope that helps. Stephanie

Your Main Problem: Lack of credibility in the US market. Nobody knows you. They doubt you'll stick around. They're afraid they'll send you money and you'll disappear. This is *after* they manage to notice you exist! So you have a double challenge: first to reach your target market, then to assure them you're legitimate. No one is going to hand you orders. Either you need to partner with an existing US firm so you can gain the North American toe-hold you require, or you must qualify exclusively for companies that consistently hire off-continent outsourcers. ASAP, get your marketing to include stories of helping people in North America. Be ready to jump on a plane if necessary. Face to face gives a lot of credibility. Work on what differentiates you from the zillions of other Russian devs out there. Why should someone hire you instead of...say...the next Russian dev? And finally, learn how to sell. People are not going to come knocking, even if you do have the better mousetrap. If you're interested in learning more about what you can do to mitigate these issues and go on the offensive, book a call with me.

I've found that the most important thing to do is get a relationship with a business banker. We use Wells Fargo, and maybe I just got lucky, but I managed to find a business banker who I connected with really well and he was able to coach me through everything. Also their phone support has been very good, so on the whole I can recommend Wells Fargo. Getting the bank account actually set up is very easy, and the business banker will recommend the right plan for you based on your needs as a startup. It only took an hour or so to actually get the account set up, and that part was easy. The hard part used to be getting a merchant account, and then finding a payment gateway, and then connecting that with a billing system etc, but now that problem has been solved thanks to Stripe. I recently launched a startup that had a full subscription system built upon Stripe and was able to take payments within just a couple of days thanks to Stripe's amazing portal, documentation, and the many open source libraries that connect you to their API. I hope that helps.

Who do you have the better relationship with? If you know the marketing director, then by all means go for it directly. If you go through the agency, just make sure they have buy in and will be a champion of the idea. If not, then they may not be able to push it through anyway.

Start by educating your prospects through content. Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. It is an ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing strategy, and it focuses on owning media, not renting it. This generation of customers are taking drastic steps to avoid marketing messages. As consumers, we use DVRs to skip television ads, pay internet radio subscription fees to avoid commercials, mentally block out — or use plug-ins to avoid — internet click ads, and gloss over road-side billboards, rendering them useless and ineffective. So how are marketers supposed to combat this shift? Education. Consumers are still buying and making purchases, but the way they go about making a decision has changed. With all of the world’s information at their finger tips, savvy consumers are doing enormous amounts of learning and self-education before stepping into a showroom or talking to a salesperson. Knowing this is a huge opportunity for brands. If you know consumers are looking for information, be the source of that information. Not with sales-y content that puts your priorities before theirs, but information that the buyer really wants and needs. Content marketing closes this gap by using brand-created educational content to satisfy the prospective buyer while helping the sales team convert anonymous visitors into buyers. Thought leaders and marketing experts from around the world, including the likes of Seth Godin and hundreds of the leading thinkers in marketing have concluded that content marketing isn’t just the future, it’s the present (see the video below on the history of content marketing). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OHgMMpGLzk The key ingredient to using content to attract new customers is in the advanced planning. The strategy. What is a Content Marketing Strategy A content marketing strategy is a roadmap; a “User’s Guide” to how your brand will do the following: - Meet the customer at their specific point within their buying cycle - Align the customer’s needs with your knowledge and expertise - Use your brand’s assets to meet these objectives Business-to-Business marketers who have a documented content marketing strategy are 66% more likely to consider themselves effective compared to only 11% of those without a documented strategy. A content marketing plan helps you see the end-game before you have even started. Further, it gives a clear, articulable vision for your entire team and keeps you on track throughout the campaign. Just like New Years resolutions often fade into a foggy memory, our intentions are good – but we allow resolutions to fail. To be successful in any strategy, we need to be intentional. For proper sales and marketing alignment, and for the success of your bottom line, you must have a plan in place. How to Start Your Content Strategy The framework of a content marketing strategy is fairly straight forward: - Who are you targeting? What are their needs? - How are you going to reach them? (Attract new and nurture existing) - What content do you have now to get started? - What is your plan to develop and share more - How will you measure your efforts 1. Personas Take some time to consider who you are targeting. Are they male or female? Does it matter? Do they have a career? Children? Are they affluent? Coupon cutters? What are their goals? What happens if they do not reach them? Is their a monetary penalty for them? Will meeting this goal further their career? Will it make them happy? Clearly defining your targeted personas will save you a lot of time, energy, and money as you continue your business. With this person in mind, your content marketing strategy will begin to fall into place and you will feel that you are having a conversation with this “person”, rather than blindly throwing stuff out there. 2. Outreach Content marketing and social media are often used synonymously. This is a mistake. Content marketing is a broad method of marketing whereas social media is a tool that complements getting your content seen. "Content is fire, and social media is gasoline." Jay Baer, Convince & Convert Imagine your website as your online hub, where all of your brand-controlled content resides, your social media profiles are spokes that lead back to your home base. Social media has the power to reach incredible numbers of potential customers, influencers, existing customers, and even the opportunity to convert customers from competitors. Social media, in and of itself, is not content marketing. It is one of your outreach tools. 3. Available Content Next, take stock of materials you have on hand already. Many of us sit in offices filled with brochures, flyers, handouts, manuals, and documents loaded with helpful information, but we do little to extend that information to potential customers on the web. Make a list of the content available to you immediately and start identifying which persona is most aligned, where they are within their sales process, and what pain point they are currently facing. Getting started, you can use what you have on hand. But I recommend expecting this low-hanging fruit to run out. You should plan on developing your own, unique content. For a number of reasons, search engines reward fresh, unique content. Further, your prospective customers will be looking for information that is not available everywhere. Your unique perspective and “voice” (the tone in which you talk, the way you communicate, and what you share) may be the first experience a prospective customer has with you. This is the beginning of a long business relationship. 4. Schedule and Share Your Content After you have compiled your educational materials, grab a calendar. I recommend looking out 3-4 months to start. Mark holidays, special events, and milestones. Working backwards, prepare your marketing message for these campaigns. For example, one client of ours hosts 4-5 annual sales. They all surround major US holidays (New Years, President’s Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving/Black Friday). By knowing this, it is easy for us to prepare everything from banner ads, Pinterest images, blog posts, Facebook Status, videos, and even newspaper ads (don’t shoot the messenger). Once you have those events marked, consider a “theme” of the week for those 3-4 months. With that theme, and your personas in mind, write out the following for each week: - 2 Blog Posts - 8-10 Facebook updates - 20-30 Twitter updates - 4-5 product photos for Pinterest - 3-4 Instagram ideas - 1 Video By no means is this list all-inclusive. It is a starting point to get you thinking about how to plan content. To get a specific content marketing plan designed for your brand, I need to interview you and understand your goals, personas, and timeline. 5. Analytics Finally, how are you going to measure your work? Remember when we set up our goals earlier? Were you specific in identifying how many leads you want to generate? “Get more leads” is a horrible strategy, better is “Gain 50 new leads by September 1st” or “increase from 6% conversion rate to 12% conversion rate” These types of goals are easily measured and tracked. Do you have a mechanism in place to measure, monitor, and gauge your efforts? Further, do you have the right people on your team to help you know what is working and what is not? Can you explain why certain marketing dollars are generating a return on your investment while others fall flat? I can already think of many ways you can do this with your self-sufficient students. Let's book a call and we can discuss further. -Shaun

Considering you already have a large following, your best option would be to fund your shows via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/). Many shows on Youtube, and many musicians and other artists with a following make a considerable amount of money from their fans through Patreon, some over $20k / month. You can set it up to be either a per-month, or per-content payment, and you set up benefits to each level of donation, just like in Kickstarter. Patreon is not very searchable, so success on their platform relies entirely on you already having a substantial audience that you can ask to get on board (e.g. at the end of each of your podcasts, and in emails, your website, etc.). If you'd like to discuss how to best break down your funding/benefit options give me a call, best of luck, Lee

While this can seem a logical extension of a business, it’s important to know that operating and investing are completely different pursuits and require very different skill sets. To get started, try to define the mandate of the department. It’s useful to understand whether the investment process you envision is designed to broaden your current business or to better use existing capital. Investing in business lines related to your primary business can often inform buy vs. build decisions, can help define product extensions by better understanding costs and market dynamics, and can also bring your firm closer to suppliers, distribution or product innovation. If this is the goal, target investment opportunities can be filtered through the lens of vertical or horizontal extensions to the existing business. The best investments are ones where there is a natural asymmetry in marketplace information, where the opportunity is informed by your existing business knowledge. However, investing can also be incredibly distracting for the core business, and rather than diversify the firm’s risks, can often concentrate them. Having defined the purpose of the investment program, it can be helpful to know in advance which resources you would use to make investment decisions, and more importantly which would be deployed to solve problems should a portfolio company run into trouble. You want to avoid the scenario where you have your best talent working to solve problems in a small investment instead of running your primary business. Finally, it’s important to have a clear and shared view of how and when to exit investments. It’s easy to get behind great people; but if they turn out to be unproductive or your business is better off deploying capital in a more productive venture, having pre-determined rules of disengagement can be as important as understanding why you’re initially setting up the department.

No. But here are my two cents. Look only for a company who does not rely heavily in one other products besides what would be yours. Also, don't select a distributor who has a similar product as yours. You put them in a bind, even if they say they won't be affected in their decision making of who to put in a shelve. Shelves are very very valuable real estate and chances are you will struggle to get yours in a shelve if your distributor has a similar product established with them or a brand that vendors see now as synonymous of their distributor label. Maybe even consider picking up a starting company or individual and build as your own extension..requires more capital upfront but you control the distribution rights and operational expenses which benefit the long run.

The following page provides quiet a useful comparison between hubspot and infusionsoft: https://www.g2crowd.com/compare/hubspot-vs-infusionsoft It provides comparison between pricing, services and customer reviews. I hope this provides you with some useful insight for your business decision. Regards Imran

You're throwing the word strategy too much I think and referring to it wrong. -Wordpress is a great platform to create websites, and is hardly a negative as far as SEO goes. Although it is a good thing that you realize the possible implications and postponed development until you have a plan in place - hence the strategy being thrown too much, it seems you are figuring things out thus you cannot have a strategy in place, I think what you might have are goals, common mistake though. -SEO is not all about keyword and their "ranking" in Google. It has a lot more to do with general search marketing, the ranking of a website or individual pages within a website are calculated based on words, backlinks, social media uploads from third parties (users), the general location of the business, the areas Google knows you cover, amount of content within a page, how many links are coming out of each page, meta tags, a lot goes into SEO. That's why professionals always say that once you get started in working on your SEO it becomes a non-stop maintenance effort. -Also creating landing pages alone won't necessarily improve your search and ranking because essentially those landing pages themselves would need to also have considerable ranking. If you use something like Instapages.com you wont have native tagging/keyword options for Google to crawl. what some us do is allocate server spaces that essentially create and generate simple websites backlinking to each other, when you open them they are very plain and ugly but the crawlers see only how they each support each other and relevant to whatever search term and how they all backlink one way or another to the main website page you want to improve. Content will always be king, so keep that in mind you want completely annexed websites linking to the pages, you want people sharing that from all regions on their blogs and on their social networks, you want retweets and clicks, you might also want ppc... Think of it as an ecosystem (SEO) with each organism (pages/links/relevance/virality,etc) depending on each other but also each organism (pages/links/relevance/virality,etc) grow from something, its own source of life (your strategy/steps,measurable actions,rejections,risk aversion/embracement,etc.) creating that larger ecosystem (SEO). Whatever you do, just keep in mind that wanting to create landing pages, improve seo, have individual products and service promotions doesn't make it a strategy. You have a set of goals. I have made a career in stepping into companies after other contractors/consultants have almost killed a business with unmeasurable effort, fluff words and high level jargon that leave business owners confused and with a halo effect on all other consultants. Strategy does not come easy and is unfortunately wrongly referenced. Once you figure out what goals you have (which you have) then you go into each goal and create a set of steps, paths, considerations, rules, expectations, rules for leadership to follow,etc. so that you can achieve those goals, know when to be risky and when not to, when resources must be allocated and how much, when to remove, reduce or add features or efforts... There is more to strategy than listing goals. You are off the the right start though, but don't consider that a strategy. From what you wrote, you just have goals. :) My name is Humberto Valle, international strategist and cross functional business developer. I have a masters in business, focus on finance and have worked with amazing companies of all sizes in many industries, if you have any further questions please feel free to reach out. Also don't fall for your own 'ego', there are many other 'experts' that just pass opinion from something they read once or heard other say or went through once themselves and now share their opinions. There are a lot of good ones here and out there, but there are also a lot of bad ones. Clarity for example allows us 'experts' to generate free VIP links with discounts, but some use it as a way to make it look like they have more paid calls than they actually d but in reality they are just free links given to friends or clients on their own business, etc. If an expert is truly an expert they should have no problem answering your basic questions for free over the messaging feature. Dig deeper in conversation prior to paying for any consultation, extend the same to your clients. :)

It is a knee jerk reaction from me to ask anyone considering raising funds; Do you really need to? Keep in mind, that question is coming from a guy who owns a funding platform and built a seven figure professional services business that helps people raise funding. I can give you plenty of perspective on what a friends and family round looks like - what the pitfalls are - what the advantages are - how to structure the deal - but the first thing I always challenge people to do is tell me why they can't do it without the funding. Generally people will initially respond with capital expenditures that MUST be made to proceed (buying a building, developing the software, manufacturing their first run of widgets, salary so they can quit their day job). However, they only MUST be made when thinking of the FINAL state of the business - and building it like a house, start to finish, in sequential stages that see ALL the framing done, and ALL the plumbing done, and ALL the finish carpentry done. While this is a perfectly good method for building a house - since you can't really reside in a partially completed one - its a flawed approach to building a business. You can start with a single small part of the business - or in cases where the final product you want to sell really does require a large capital expense to put into market, use a proxy. If we return to my housebuilding example - a proxy in that case would be also pitching a tent on the property. It isn't the dream house you want to live in - but it provides some of the benefits and will get you closer to your dream house (you can enjoy the yard!). In the case of starting a business there is nearly always a similarly useful proxy. Imagine you want to start a company that builds a software to solve accounting issues specific to farm-to-table vendors in a local market setting. You could start by raising funds and fully developing the software and then doing marketing to uncover effective channels for distribution and then developing your funnel to convert leads produced into sales... Or, you could start by creating a small consultancy to help that same niche population setup their accounting systems. Or, even smaller - a digital information product like an e-book, online course, or webinar that teaches them some specific best practices for handling their accounting. This allows you to get started working with your target population much faster, and much more cost effectively - while also forcing you to get in front of real customers and work with them to truly understand the pain that your "dream house" solution will eventually solve at scale. It will ensure that you've gotten the dream right - and avoid building something in the lab that may not stand the test of the real market needs. Not the answer you were expecting I'll assume - and the offer still stands for advice on the F&F round, but I can never in good faith give people advice about fundraising without first exploring and validating the need.

I've been writing software in the last 10+ years, mainly as a consultant/freelancer. Within those years I got some exposure to the world of software developers and had the opportunity to work with more than a dozen different developer teams from 3 different country. The answer to your question depends on what you mean by best developers, but in general you'll find most of the best developers already working for the best companies for developers. Those companies already did the research, hired the best developers, gave them interesting and challenging problems to keep them motivated and offered compensation accordingly. To find places with high density of the best developers find which office locations Google, Twitter, Amazon, etc. hires developers at. To find individual developers go to places where they hang out, sites like http://stackoverflow.com, http://quora.com, http://github.com. You can also find highly qualified freelancers at http://toptal.com and http://upwork.com. It's also worth visiting local meetups for software developers or events like Startup Weekend and meet the developers face to face (http://meetup.com). Once you have a pool of potential candidates, put them to a test and get them write a small code/application for you. That way you'll learn about their actual coding skills and will also have a sense on their other skills like communication, problem solving, etc. It's a good idea to get an experienced developer to do a code review on the sample code the candidates wrote, to make sure the code is well organized, efficient and maintainable. I hope I answered your question, if you have more, I'd be happy to help you with more details.

Here's a funding route I love for all sorts of situations: Start small, and go directly to your intended audience. Use a pre-sale campaign with a tilt mechanism (one that requires crossing a certain threshold before anyone is charged - so that you can ensure you will cover your costs and not leave anyone with unfulfilled obligations). In this way - you are raising funds and marketing in a single bound - rather than dividing your efforts in two. Ultimately, if you raise funds from an investor (not sure where Chamber Music Concert Investors are to be found outside the usual patron of the arts set, but that's a different issue) you'll then need to repay that investment from the sale of tickets, boxes, memberships, packages or however you intend to charge your end audience. Happy to expand on this notion and tie it to your specific goals - I'll just need some more details.

I was born a maker, and I've been an Entrepreneur for six years now (and a wannabe for much longer before that) and I think the worst advice I've got was from people who had never taken a step of the journey. People with academic (or other) credentials who advise you based on theory and completely miss the point of entrepreneurship. They know about the theory of sales funnels and marketing strategies and much more but they've never made a cold call. Or a sale for that matter. The best advice I received was from my godfather, who is an entrepreneur and salesman. That advice was simple, brutal and actionable: "If you can't sell it to a customer, how do you expect to sell it to a salesman ?". That made me realize that you don't stand a chance at success if you can't convince anyone. A good startup advisor understands all of the field he's advising about and knows what a startup is. He knows how to apply his knowledge to the constraints a startup faces and how to deliver that wisdom in regular words to support the startup's decision process.

That is perfectly normal and really just fine. Creating a company, growing a company and maintaining a company are three different jobs and the best fit is rarely the same person. Now that your creation has matured, it may be time for you to hand it over to someone else who will protect your investment while you find new areas of personal growth, such as another startup for example. You probably need to find yourself an operational successor you'll be happy with, gradually hand over your responsibilities until your level of involvement matches your interest - in your case that would probably be board member / adviser only - and enjoy being a shareholder of a valuable company.

I'm working on a character line. We have copyrighted characters and multimedia featuring them...songs, videos, books. You know what else we have? Corporate sponsors. Are the wheels starting to turn? If you're a toy manufacturer, you get into the action figure business because you want to sell the toys you make. If you're not a toy manufacturer, then you get into the action figure business to license content and characters to help other organizations promote their agenda to consumers. Publishing is a tool but should not be your focus. To discover who your characters are in line with, and how to market to them, let's book a call.

People face problems – real problems they may or may not see ... problems you might help them fix. If you're not fully established yet, then you must pitch your services to people who haven't fully realized that they need you. Trouble is, people are naturally reluctant to pay for advice. And that's easy enough to understand. Consulting is often a service without tangible end product. Either the topic is unfamiliar territory, in which case gauging the value of consulting is tricky; or else it seems deceptively familiar, like something they could do themselves to some extent. Maybe they simply have no space for consulting in their budget; so while they'd appreciate your advice, they're not ready to pay for your time giving it to them or gaining expertise. Right there, you have 4 points to make: (1) Emphasize results you'd like to help a client achieve. That's a more tangible goal for them to focus on. (2) Help them estimate the value of those hypothetical results. (3) Explain why going solo, winging it without a consultant, can be risky. No scare tactics necessary. You can point to plenty of non-clients with problems. And you can ask your prospective client what difficulties (if any) they're facing. (4) Connect the dots. If you add value, then the cost of hiring you should pay for itself. Yes, it would be helpful to start out as a celebrity with an amazing track record of successful past clients. However, all that really counts is whether you can help the next person and convince them to value that help.

Without some distillation - this is a rather enormous question - as you're essentially saying, other than choosing e-commerce and a particular category - what does one need to do to start a business? So, I'll choose to focus it down to what I always think is the most important thing to do at the early stages regardless of industry, approach, business model, or geography; idea validation. TL;DR - Get off the lab bench - talk to your ideal customers - start to add value from now via a "proxy". For those of you who have come across my answers here or elsewhere - you'll notice that I often turn to this advice; there's a reason - it's solid. In your case - it's also something that you can start now - even while you are finishing up the MBA if your decide to allow that to continue to delay your entrepreneurial dreams (I'm half joking). Start by identifying who your customers would be - how they currently buy what you'd be selling - and why they'd rather buy it from you. Don't stop on the whiteboard - you'll get enough academic exercise through your MBA. Once you've developed an understanding of who you THINK your ideal customers are - talk to some of them. Find out where they live online (you'll put this to good use again later when it's time to market in earnest). Use the conversations they are having online as a way to validate the pain you'll be solving with your solution. You can do some of this through mere observation - but you're far better off to join the conversation meaningfully. You can also start to add value and build a following among the population. I spend a lot of time talking to startups and helping them determine a "proxy" for their actual business. You can often "start before you start" using something like a digital information product or a blog. I have some ideas specific to your case that I'd be happy to share. By taking these concrete steps toward validating the idea now - you'll have a solid foundation to build upon, if and when your hypotheses pan out and you decide to launch your company. Until then - avoid the tendency to think of names, logos, co-founders, company HQs, ideal tech stacks, and the other 1,000,000 things that actually have to happen between now and you retiring a happy, fulfilled, and wealthy entrepreneur. Enjoy it! It's one of the most exciting and important stages of starting any business.