I'll cut right to the chase. You need to pay to get a good person. You are not selling a product with recurring revenues or a widget that a lot of people need. You do one-off projects for very custom business needs. These needs are random, and there is a LOT of competition. The person you want to hire is someone who needs to have a great rolodex of contacts. He/She needs to be a good at networking, attending events, making connections, getting referrals, contacting people on linkedin groups etc. This is very hard work, and is not always rewarding (expecially in the begenning). It takes time to build the network that is large enough to be fruitful. You should not expect a high quality person to do this on commission only. You need to invest in helping them build the contacts. Because there are so many low quality businesses doing this, your US rep needs to stand out. He/she needs to be skilled in sales and business development. No one who is highly skilled will work for commission only. Happy to hop on a call to share ways in which you can identify great business development reps and how much to pay them.

I'm a founder, engineer, and scientist. I've been backed by prominent investors, and my work has been covered in prominent magazines and blogs, including Wired, Verge, and TechCrunch. I'll be happy to help you map out taking your idea from where it is to where you want to take it, including prototyping, finding cofounders, and getting $. In any case best of luck! Lee

I think you have a great start here - you seem to be detail oriented in both the "do's" and the "don't's" , and are genuinely trying to find a balance between task orientation and relationship orientation. In some of my work with tech teams, I have found the technique that is most illuminating is perspective taking - it leads to an uncovering of internal and external motivational factors, a better inventory of challenges and more concreteness in short and long term strategies. Give me a call and I'd love to explain how this can help your team members gain a sense of accomplishment and intrinsic/extrinsic motivation to both the project as well as the company. Happy to explain more, and good luck to you on the project! Best, Arjun Buxi, M.A.

If you are looking for data take a look at Mattermark which allows you to analyze the data on private companies and funding trends. You can get a free trial which would allow you to see all the data. Two other sites that contains a lot VC data are AngelList and Crunchbase. If you are looking more for continual curation of analysis from industry leaders then I would recommend the Mattermark Daily. It's a daily newsletter curated by Nick Frost and the Mattermark team with the day's best posts from both investors and operators. It's free and is an absolute must read. Hopefully this helps!

Hey! This should help you get started... There are various parts to your service and they should be considered as separate services: 1. Create the Wordpress website (one-time) 2. Create content for the blog (recurring) 3. Social Media Management (recurring) 4. YouTube account managment (recurring) Each of those should have its own price, for example: $3,000 dollars for the website design and setup (this will vary depending on your experience and how much it will be worth to your client). Websites range from the very low end to over $100,000 dollars depending on what they do and what they will be used for. The other three services are recurring services that should be paid in a monthly basis because it implies constantly adding content. You should practice your skills as soon as possible to start getting better at each. That way you will start seeing how much time and effort it actually takes you and eventually you'll find the correct value for your work. I hope this helps you, let me know if you have any additional questions! Cheers!

Hey! That's a great question and of course there are many answers but I'll give you my two cents based on my expertise and hope it will help you on your way... If you want to drive traffic the fastest way possible, you can use various paid methods like Facebook Ads or Google Adwords. They are both very good tools and the cost per clic is quite low compared to other traditional methods of getting "eyes". I prefer these methods when starting out because SEO can take a long time and effort, while paid advertising can get you in front of the right people. You can choose specific demographics by age, interests, behaviors, etc and show your work to people who may actually be interested. It is important to have a purpose for all that traffic: think about how you are going to convert them to customers (ideally that is what you want). Then create a way for them to convert on your site. ONLY then, pay for traffic. As far as SEO goes, it is good to do it anyway because you'll reap the benefits later. Make sure you create quality content that people actually want to consume (read, watch, listen to, etc). I hope this helps, let me know if you need additional assistance.

Unless you have a need to show a substantial equity, usually starting the corporation (assuming that's the type of entity you want) with $1,000 is ok. Then the remainder ($49k in this case) is entered as a loan. That way, once you have the cash back in the business account, you're not worried about taxes and can be repaid the loan directly.

It always comes down to taxes. What is your goal? Save on taxes? if it is then profit sharing is a must. Making the company employee owned gives a huge tax break, while giving out equity forces to you and your employees to submit that as assets at the end of each year, while corporate team has submit an evaluation form to the IRS for any adjustments, issues, or stock hikes or drops. Equity keeps employees for longer, but so do 'bonuses' so answer should be based off tax benefits.

If you're prepared to hire a professional, then I'd be happy to help locate or create a brand name for your service. However, it seems presumptuous to pick a title for a book I have neither written nor read. Since I don't know your project or your audience, should I really be urging you to live with some brand identity for the next decade – a name I'd just be pulling out of thin air during 20 seconds of thought? I take naming seriously. Seriously enough to want to familiarize myself with the project being named. That should be the bare minimum, right? Brainstorming, research, consultation, and procurement usually span at least a couple of weeks. Here at Clarity.fm, I find that phone calls are too short for such a task. But a Clarity.fm call can be useful. I find 15 minutes is usually enough time to offer feedback on a caller's own name ideas, suggest new directions for brainstorming, give advice on purchasing the domain, etc. If I can help, let me know.

This product is very interesting. I would love to learn more. I am Arizona based Strategy professional, as in I am an actual graduated strategy professional, not just a self touting one. I honestly, don't see any difference in what you are selling whether is white label or not. I know there is a fundamental difference in use, but when it comes to selling this companies the white label is a huge plus, seems like you just need a good sales team. I would love to help you get a foot in the U.S. starting with Arizona, since this is where I live. Give me a call or email and I will gladly follow up. Lead generation is relatively easy, is capturing good leads that are easily closed is different, the beauty of b2b is that you can call, visit, email, schedule...

I specialize in handling digital marketing with small businesses in Toronto. Most of the small business owners have a limited budget and they are overwhelmed by the fact as to how they can compete with the bigger players out there. The solution is to use a combination of inbound & paid marketing strategy to amplify your efforts. You can start by contacting bloggers to write about the cereals. You need to create some sort of an offer to promote the product and generate new customers. When choosing online advertising you need to target long tail keywords and avoid spending your money on broad search terms. If you want to discuss further please send me a message or call me here and I will be happy to help you.

A lot of people see still see diversity as a Nice to Have, rather than something that affects their bottomline. Although most coverage and research have been done primarily by niche market groups, even McKinsey early in 2015 put out this big report, touting real data: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/why_diversity_matters. If you'd like to discuss diversity hiring practices through various stages, shoot me a call!

yes. Many jurisdictions have rights in a mark that arise simply from use. That said, it is not the same as the rights flowing from registration and in some jurisdictions, it is not available. A quick call to a trademark lawyer should allow you to clear up if the rights you get through use are sufficient for your purposes. Note: Branding and brand strategy is the most overlooked aspect to starting a business and a little expense now can save you a whole lot of problems later on.

neither. Your name is too broad and has no catch. Try writing a user profile. who she or he is, what are they doing in the morning? where do they live? are they married? financial status... type of hurdle, what are they seeking? what's most valuable to them - advice or step by step... based on questions like these you can find a catchy psychological name that triggers your audience interests like - clarity.fm people here are looking for advice in other words clarity.

I was just speaking with a colleague about this as we are both starting new startups and were reflecting on our previous projects together. In hindsight we recognize that one of the main challenges was proper expectation setting around adoption and engagement. If someone else is setting those expectations for you, it can be challenging to live up to them unless that person is familiar tech startup analytics. Not every business is a unicorn. You have to learn how to survive and grow when things don't go viral. Once you set expectations accordingly you're able to focus on what really matters and hone in on the user experience to identify what is sticky. You may have a long roadmap of features on your wish list, but it may not be what people want or need. Be open to pivoting and listen to your users. One of my favorite quotes is actually by LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman, "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late." Being in tech B2B and product development for almost 9 years now, I completely agree with this statement. There is so much you can learn from getting your product out into the world and in people's hands; invaluable lessons that you can't learn coding in a silo. Here's a great book for user engagement analytics: Lean Analytics. Also, happy to share my experiences on this topic.

Hi there, I've built and scaled 3 management consulting businesses to $1M+ in the past 5 years. I'm a little unsure as to what your problem is. Are you wanting to help designers with their business or are you trying to hire talented designers to complete some work? For really good designers, their desire is to do quality work, with clients they like and be compensated well for it. If you have a proven methodology or process that helps them get those types of clients you'll be off the races. But, you have to communicate clearly the specific problem you address for them. So if they are a landscape designers you can say "With my program and coaching we will get you in front of architects and seen as the go-to expert who does awesome work." Does that make sense?

I've been in a very similar situation as yourself. In our case the company split into two for better operational flow. I was the CEO of one company and was trying to figure out how to structure the other one. Unfortunately, the answer to many of your questions depends on further details. But I'll give some general feedback: 1. Depends on how much time you actual put into this new company. You sound like a CEO role but having a CEO that only spends 10hrs in the company a week would make the company look weak. You can start out as CEO and change roles later. 2. What's your exit strategy? If you plan on exiting soon, then you shouldn't; you'll make money when the company exits. But if it's more of a long-term play, then perhaps you should setup a dividend structure. I don't think it's good for company culture when someone takes a salary for not doing work. 3. Depends on growth but usually early founders become a board member. Depending on the company, they can meet as frequently as once a month, but typically a quarterly meeting is more likely. 4. This is a complex question which requires much more info. 5. This is tied in with #4.

I have worked on projects handling transfer of large image files across multiple vendors and being served on web for different targets (mobile, web etc.). I have also implemented cloud and DevOps solutions for high volume/scale of data and transactions. While I could tell you a list of technologies which can be used - the problem here is more of design and architecture. So I will start with that. Also a lot of decisions are based on more information and the use case - so I will need information on certain aspects of your application. 1) For searching an image users will enter search terms. You will have to associate the search terms/tags to actual images. While there are multiple ways to do this association - what is the link between a search term and image in your case. Do you have a separate database/service which will link given search terms to given set of images? 2) Since you are talking about handling millions of images - they will need to be partitioned logically or bucketized for optimum way to store and search. Is there a natural distribution? Do your users access all the images all over the world? 3) For any data storage related to images - we will need to go one detail further. While relational DB might serve a lot of needs, there might be use cases where considering other storages will be needed. Some questions which will lead to answers are - what kind of data per image will be stored? How frequently this data might change? How many new additions will happen on this archive? How fast would you want the updates to be visible to users/consumers? 4) What kind of traffic do you expect roughly? This will decide a lot design around auto scaling, load balancing and other aspects. 5) I am not a front end expert - but similar principles of scaling would apply to front end stack. Though I can not necessarily answer what technologies might fit your needs best.

I believe the only way to do that would be to get the download into Amazon for digital download. Otherwise, people have to email it to their kindle accounts.

Have great conversations with qualified prospects. That's the simple answer. Do this enough times and you WILL get a client. Now the hard part: How do you get great conversations with qualified prospects? 1. Find a group of people who have a serious problem *they acknowledge they have* (that's critical; it can't just be you alone saying they have it) that you can fix. 2. Get in front of them and explain their situation better than anyone else. Show them you understand where they're at. 3. Ask if they want the problem solved (this is also called "asking for the order," and it's something newbies are terrified to do.) 4. Solve the problem competently. 5. Get referrals. I have sales training programs and also coach executives on selling. If you'd like to find out more, please get in touch.

I love this question! Gets my creative mind flowing early morning. Here a few from top of my head: -Heart2Heart -Tete (tete a tete reflects a deep personal conversation between 2 people) -InterCo (for interaction & communcation) -InAccord (self explanatory) -tootalk -chatspot -lucidity (play on clarifty) Even if you don't like them, I kind of like some of these. Please feel free to google me, if you feel i can be of any help let me know. I'm one of Arizona's best commercial strategists.

Never. However look to enhance any customer reviews that embrace such differences. Revolve your campaign around 1 or 2 particular reviews or customer reflections. Read about blue ocean, ignore your competition (they will confuse you and kill your focus - do you think they are studying you? hell no!) Don't give them that validation. My name is Humberto Valle, an actual commercial strategist and consultant with clients and projects around the world. I am also one of Arizona's best marketing strategists. That's where I reside. Feel free to google me, if there is anything I can help you with let me know ;)

I've done this on a small scale for my product, but it worked nicely, and I learned some useful techniques. I'd be happy to talk with you about the process, and also answer any other startup questions you might have. Best of luck, Lee

When we did this for our own company we implemented in house, but we were at a high level of execution and resources (<100 employees). If you are small I'd recommend http://www.referralcandy.com/. It's a very simple system that you can implement and the payment tiers let you get it fairly "invisible" if you so desire.

Where? The world is a big place. Short answer, conferences are not that useful unless you are on a panel/speaking etc. Recommend you focus on building grass roots. Conferences can be a part of it, but how you do conferences matters, otherwise is an expensive use of cash.