Business names cannot be legally copyrighted. Any name is fair game. As long as it does not confuse people. Even if it is the exact name but marketed for a different product in a different way and different market. Just don't use a little yellow ghost as your business logo and you'll be fine.

I would look to see what stage you're at as a start. I've ben through this many times. 1. First study the VC and the partner 2. See what else he has invested in 3. They may be looking to round up their vertical with something similar or to acquire smaller players. If you're not a competitor, then anything is game. 4. Study when they invest and how Lastly: 1. Set up the call. 2. Start the call by letting them talk a lot first. Ask: What is your mandate, sector? What do you invest in? What stage? What do you look for? What is the typical investment size? Where (geographically) do you invest? This will tell you a lot about why they are reaching out and what you should say after. Hit me up privately if you would like to discuss more, and good luck!!!

Be responsive! Answer requests and messages promptly and thoroughly. Respect the caller's time! I always send a pre-call questionnaire in the message field. I won't take the call until I receive answers to the questionnaire. That way I have my basics answered before the meter starts running. No phone time is wasted on getting-to-know-you questions: just dive right in to the heavy stuff. This saves you time and it saves them money. Be honest! It's great to be labeled an "expert," but if you try to oversell yourself, it can only come back and bite you. Admit your areas of inexperience. Put yourself in their shoes. Ultimately, the caller wants to feel comfortable and secure in their area. They're looking to you for help. If you can go the extra mile for them, that only helps them all the more. Refer them to other experts or industry professionals. Provide links to reading material and resources. Offer to follow-up a week or month after the call (and then make sure you do it!) to check in on them. Etc. Be more than a phone call. Be their help.

Firstly investigate if there is anything trademarked or patentable (I doubt the latter due to court cases like Alice killing off a huge amount of business process patents). Just don't do anything completely stupid like steal any copy from the site and repost it. The fact is that there is no end to situations similar to yours. Just because someone is there first, doesn't mean you can't do the same thing - even in most cases exactly the same thing. In fact, you're in a better position bearing no legacy and not having to pay the heavy price of educating the market on the value of the offering. You just have to innovate within it, or market better, or expand the market.

Yes, you can use personal money to pay for business expenses (just not the other way around.) In fact, most businesses start up this way with the owners putting their personal money into the business to get things started. In the end, the accounts track it all when they balance the books. If the money put into the business is more than the money you get out, it comes out as a loss for the year. But I do suggest you talk with an accountant.

It really depends on your overall business objectives. Some helpful thinking: Why do you need funds or is funding secondary and you have other objectives here? Why Kickstarter? Are you wanting to sell an 'investment' in your business in exchange for equity? A product for pre-order? A room at a discount? Answering those types of questions is a great starting point. Shane

There is no "Best", Do a google search and compare POS Focus on things like Cost, Learning Curve, and functionality.

Several ways come to mind. Formulate your idea into one (or better all) of the following + you'll know by interest level if you have a winner. 1) My favorite. Start a Meetup Group (set the zipcode of group) to match the zipcode of a US city where most people originate travel to your target destination. For example, If your targeting running tours in Chang Mai Thailand, research what city people in US most travel from to visit Chang Mai. Then run Meetup events related to Thai Travel topics. 2) Package information about Thai Travel into a PDF + sell it via Facebook Ads. 3) Start a Kickstarter project. 4) Speak at existing Travel Meetups + other groups + related conferences about your idea.

Your best bet is to go on the Java discussion board for this type of question.

You should try searching yelp, they will give you customer reviews with feedback.

Hello, great question here. First of all you should understand that there is no 1 way and depending on who your audience is and what you sell the answer will definitely vary. A short answer however would be - engagement. Forget about likes and follows and shares are engagement, if you want to be a successful marketer you need to see engagement as conversations. The more conversations you can build around products the more you can rely on them to follow links or follow up on a request when you do make one. With that said, social media updates should be about what your followers want to see - depending on the social media - try to avoid being too pitchy on each post. My name is Humberto Valle, I have been a strategist for about 10 years now and have helped countless of entrepreneurs and businesses thrive through creative competitive strategy and marketing and I'm the co-founder of Unthink.Me. I hope my answer helps you a bit.

There's no set-in-stone formula. The answer depends on the degree to which implementing a revenue model would potentially cause a mass user exodus. A) If implementing a revenue model would obviously cause no problems, then investors might be ok with Camp 2. B) If a reasomable person might think that implementing a revenue model could cause a mass exodus of users from your service, then investors would not be ok with Camp 2. Having said that, each investor is different, and there has been a steady decrease in the popularity of investing in Camp 2 startups. The popularity of Camp 2 startups fluctuates with the current strength of the economy (weaker economy = less investors willing to go with Camp 2). I usually recommend a hybrid approach, which involves initially implementing a revenue model on at least a small scale to start testing the waters. You want to deploy this as quickly and cheaply as possible, and then scale it up, just like an MVP. You start off by exposing a potentially unrefined revenue model to just a small % (e.g. 1%) of your users to test the waters, and then slowly scale up its deployment as you improve it (based on data feedback from that first pool of users). Even if you only have time to test the 1% implementation before approaching investors, it will be better than nothing. You can use the data from that experiment to show investors that (hopefully) it didn't cause a mass exodus of that 1% of users, and you can use it to have a ballpark estimate of the revenue you could get if it was fully deployed and better implemented. For certain unique situations, it may be important to remember that for this initial testing, the deployment of your revenue model doesn't actually have to generate revenue for yourself, it just has to have the appearance to those 1% (or whatever %) of users as your revenue model would. The most important part of this initial testing is just testing whether your revenue model will interfere with your user base. For instance, you can start by creating fake ads that don't actually generate any revenue. That may sound weird, but it was relevant to a unique situation I helped someone else with. It allowed them to save time and money to deploy their initial test. Once you have data showing that it doesn't scare users away, then you can make convincing estimates of future revenue based on your growing user base. If you'd like more tailored advice to your specific situation let me know, best, Lee

The answer to this varies wildly. It is dependent upon what you're asking the customer to do, what your relationship with them is, and what barriers they need to navigate to signup again (your stated win-back goal). I've seen success rates as high as 80% and as low as single digit. I don't think you will find a "typical" because each brand, product, and consumer is different. All of which effect this type of conversion rate. I would be happy to help you calculate what is typical for *you* and your product. If you're interested, drop me a note or schedule a call. All the best, -Shaun

Some more information about your situation would help. What is your product? What problem does it solve for buyers? Do they acknowledge that problem exists, and value fixing it? Are they willing to trade money for your solution? Do you have a "ladder" for people to buy increasingly valuable things from you, or are you trying to rely entirely on revenue from this one thing? Do you have Traffic and Conversion tools in place? You are asking us to diagnose a situation, but just like your doctor not being able to diagnose what's wrong if they can't see you or hear fully what's going on, it's pretty tough to blind. Only two components or issues exist when it comes to Sales: Traffic, and Conversion. I don't care how great your Conversion tool is, or how great you believe it is--if you don't have a high quality Traffic source hooked up to it, the Conversion tool is basically useless. So where are you getting leads (potential buyers) from? Are they pre-qualified for your offer (do they have a want or need, at least, for what you can give them)? And in what quantity are you receiving them into your funnel? Each business needs four systems: 1. Lead Generation 2. Qualification 3. Closing 4. Fulfillment. How well are you doing on all four of these? It's very common for a tech guy to rush out and drop money on the development of some brainwave they had. Unfortunately, you cannot ignore "business" in the hectic race to bring a product to life. If you've created something nobody wants, or nobody understands, you've wasted your resources. I recommend these Sales Tactics videos I've made about SaaS; there are links to written blog posts in the video descriptions if you would rather read than watch and listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MGF-C0GPQY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDZQ_8Srt7g

List your item against the wrong UPC code. This provided Amazon with all the correct information, including the correct photo. Then go back and mark your inventory at zero.. keep an eye on this as you don't want to sell the item as you might not have the wrong item to ship. Then email Amazon with the ASIN number and explain that you have piggybacked on the listing based on the UPC code but the detail page reflects the wrong item. Let them know that you have removed your inventory till this can be worked out. I included photos to show the UPC for the correct item. Ask Amazon to cleave the listing so you can list your item. Amazon cleaved the ASIN. I had never heard that term. What Amazon did was split the listings and assigned a new ASIN to the listing I started. This allowed both listings for one UPC code while Amazon looking into the questionable listing. You have to have a UPC code to list an item... or you need an exception from Amazon. You can't take an item that has a UPC code and add a non-UPC code item as a variation. The photos are slower than the text. When starting a new listing, the photos don't even start to be loaded until you have completed the listing. Just the way Amazon's system works.

If there’s one tool that I recommend above all other solutions it’s ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is the backbone of all of our ventures here at Venture Harbour. It’s easy to use, and easily the most feature-packed email marketing / marketing automation tool for small to medium-sized businesses. On top of that, it’s also one of the most affordable tools. What sets ActiveCampaign apart is the fact that it has its own CRM system for managing leads, and marketing automation for nurturing your leads into customers. In short, it’s an all-in-one platform for handling small business sales and marketing. Unlike some of the other tools that do this, ActiveCampaign is affordable starting at $9/month – a twentieth of the starting cost of tools like Infusionsoft, Hubspot and Ontraport.

Do you have an idea of what kind of invalid emails you are receiving? That will help you determine which vendor is the best fit for you. For example do you consider support@, info@, or postmaster@ invalid, some vendors will weed those out for you? Or are you just concerned with making sure the email has an accurate Domain/MX Record? Will blocking SPAM IP addresses be enough to address your needs, if so you need a vendor who checks agains URI DNSBLs. With that in mind, here's a good blog article about the top vendors. Best wishes! https://www.formget.com/best-email-verification-services/

The way you describe it, the 301 redirect is looping right back to the original URL which is odd. Start by looking at your .htaccess file. It lives on your server with all the other files that drive your website. Often times it's hidden and you have to take extra steps to find it. Your hosting provider should have instructions on this. *Back up this file first* Make a copy and name it htaccess.bak or something like that. Small errors in this file can break your website so always make a backup before tinkering. Once you have it open look for lines that say RedirectPermanent or Rewrite Rule with 301 in brackets nearby. If you find something that doesn't belong you can comment it out with # or delete it. Based on what you find, I recommend doing some research to see what others in similar situations have done. If you do something that breaks your website, simply copy your .bak file and rename it .htaccess file and start over. Don't be afraid to explore and learn, but do understand you can drastically change how your website operates with just a small error. Backups are your friend! Shoot me a message if you need more help.

Probably not. Most carousels these days are javascript-driven. Therefore the source code for those products exists on the page (and is therefore easily viewed by Google et al). The javascript moves items around the *screen* but it does not modify the *source.* And it's the source code that matters most to search engines. The exception to my answer above is AJAX. If any products are being dynamically loaded to a page via an AJAX call, then they would hidden from search engines. Google's John Mueller confirmed about a year ago that, despite all their progress with javascript and AJAX, Google still struggles with some Ajax-driven websites — http://searchengineland.com/can-now-trust-google-crawl-ajax-sites-235267 So, as with so many answers in SEO: *it depends.* If you have any specific examples, I'd be happy to take a look! Feel free to message me here on Clarity.

The complexity of your situation is similar to multiple acquisitions I have encountered on both sides of the table in private and public transactions. In most situations involving private equity, it is doubtful if the additional cost of a private agent would generate a material gain given your minority position. However, since your situation has the additional complexities of differentiation in EBITDA contribution and negotiation with family members, I would agree with your recommendation to use an external agent. If the cost is a concern, you may want to consider using an advisor/coach/consultant to work on a fixed fee basis instead. I took this approach in selling one of the private companies I ran and was able to complete the transaction at a much lower cost than using an investment banker or agent. I'm happy to share my experience and lessons learned if you would like to follow up with a discussion.

There are a number of best practices -- and, generally, they are universal regardless of your product or service. The one that I would stress above all others is: Understand Your Customer. That is, resist the temptation to "jump in and build something", take some time to interview prospective customers. Understand what they want (be looking for clues, as Steve Jobs famously said, most consumers don't know what they want, but you can find sources of friction and answer those) Talk to people. Understand what frustrates them with the current solution. What would their lives be like with your product? Do they *need* this? What happens if they don't have it? Are their implications if they don't buy? Is their FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)? A lot of entrepreneurs make a solution based on *their* perception of a problem without taking into consideration that their ideal customer may have a different need. Good luck and let me know if I can help further, -Shaun

Clarity charges by the minute. It is not possible to have two different rates.

Hire a local immigration lawyer. Been through the process myself. Sooner started, sooner finished. Probably good to get in before the administration changes and possible new guidelines come down from on high.

Based on what you've shared, I would recommend splitting your two products into different brands; they appeal to different audiences and should be marketed as such. That said, there is ample opportunity for cross-promotion, as there are some similar needs between the two audiences. Good luck. I'd be happy to help more. Just drop me a note or book a call. -Shaun

Absolutely! In fact, this is where many solopreneurs "max out". With the Internet, as long as you have a flow of traffic of interested prospects, you can keep converting and selling, right? There's no limit at the scale an individual can operate on to that flow. As a consultant, if that's what you choose, you need to move beyond "trading time for dollars" as soon as possible. Staying stuck in that mindset is how most consultants hamstring their revenue. Key ideas: > work with high ticket industries so you can charge high fees in line with the value you are creating > get your own products (courses, physical goods) out there for sale ASAP > always be looking to expand your distribution channels to expand your revenue sources.