Here are 3 ways you could find out who the investors are. Internal documents At any AGM (annual general meeting, which you would have a right to attend) this would obviously be disclosed. Also in the shareholders agreement, all parties would likely sign and you could find out then, and without making a stink. Public Filings It depends on the jurisdiction but you could be able to see the public filings. This can be bad because generally it's not advantageous to have your ownership as public knowledge. Introduction Why not just ask the entrepreneurs for an intro? You gave them money, surely they could introduce you to other investors...

There are plenty of experts within the FBA field, you can Google them or seek help here on Clarity. Before you seek help, perhaps you want to look into these marketplaces and check for entry requirements and market research. For instance, you need to register for VAT to sell within the UK. Check out the UK government site for more details: https://www.gov.uk/vat-rates You can seek help from accountants over at ukvat.uk.com instead of the big 4 as bigger firms will take longer time to get back to you. As for EU marketplace is simpler once you have applied and started selling within the UK marketplace. Germany now requires sellers to have VAT as well. Selling within the Japan marketplace is pretty straightforward. Keep in mind you will need to translate your product listings when selling to non-english countries. You can easily hire a translator on Upwork.com and make sure the freelancer is fluent in the native language to avoid any direct translation mistakes. Every country and marketplace that you choose will have different rules and regulations so be sure to check them carefully. Stay laser focus on the marketplace you want to expand to instead of trying to sell within all of them. Get familiar with one and generate sales before moving onto the next. If you need more help selling within the UK marketplace, I am happy to help out as I have clients selling within US and UK marketplaces.

Without more detail it is hard to make a good recommendation. Since I don’t know your exact needs I will share the best AI based chat tool I have seen. It is offered by a company called NextIT. You can see it in use at goarmy.com. If navigate there and chat with Sgt. Star you can ask him just about anything you can think of and you will get a good and accurate response.

I've advised 40+ startups on hiring, org structure, and leadership, and excited to take a stab at this question. The key first is defining in more detail the role you need today and the role you aspire the company will need 12 months from now. Where do they intersect? What hard skills vs soft skills are needed at each juncture? The real important part of this will be whomever you hire, will they have their domain in which they can make their own calls and have the final say while you're still there? Management overlap or disagreement is generally what causes leadership to be a mess. The best talent you'll want to attract will expect to have final say on many matters and not have to run so much by you. As you mentioned, COO's typically have different skill sets than CEOs. COO's run the internal business and allow the vision set by the CEO to become reality. It happens, but not a guarantee than a COO can evolve into a CEO. Your typical CEO is busy setting the vision, meeting investors, building partnerships, brand, working with media, hiring, etc... In the case of many CEOs, they simply don't have the time to meet with their direct reports who lead the other business functions. Although it's prestigious to report into a CEO, most people are frustrated by the lack of time, feedback, and direction they receive. This is where a COO can add a lot of value; by having more time to manage, lead, and guide the rest of the leadership. This way the CEO can spend time with the COO, and the COO then pushes the right framework, expectations, and feedback to the rest of the org. If you have any other questions on this matter, happy to discuss on a call.

Hi Sree, I saved your site as a pdf and have begun annotating it, let's schedule a call and we can go over a couple suggestions, all the best, Lee

Short Answer: Build a deep network. This is why network science is my primary focus and the top companies today Google, Amazon, Facebook, Linkedin are heavily leverage networks. There is no "contact here for partnerships" form for large diversified organizations. Unless it is a very specific program, they don't want an inflow of un-vetted opportunities. So how do you do it? You reach out to one of your advisors or investors(presuming you have some) and ask them if they know the someone at Company X. If they know the COO of Best Buy and can make an intro than that is the quickest way to get to the right department. This is a top-down approach and generally works faster and better than a bottom-up approach.

I have extensive hands on experience in prototyping for startups using 3D printers, micron accuracy computer controlled milling machines, power tools, hand tools, etc. Here are some pointers: You can buy your own 3D printer (I'd recommend Afinia: http://afinia.com/), or you could send your CAD design to http://www.shapeways.com/ to have them print it for you. If your design can be made from 2 dimensional pieces, then you could also get it made by a laser / water jet cutting place, such as http://www.bigbluesaw.com/ If you'd like further information about how to do it yourself, other manufacturers, the best CAD software, the limitations of each prototype manufacturing method, or information on the best materials to use for different conditions, send me a message and we can work out a call, all the best, Lee

There are various templates that you can find using a Google search. However, it is sometimes difficult for a founder with limited experience writing business plans to write a plan that is clear to outsiders - the founder is often too deep in the weeds. The first thing you need to do is be clear on why you need a business plan. Is it for fundraising? Is it to decide what your company is all about? Is there some other reason? I've written lots of business plans for my own startups and startups I've consulted with. Sometimes the right answer is that you don't need to write a business plan at all, but you just need some of the elements of the business plan, such as a revenue model or marketing strategy. I've got a few business plan templates and would be happy to discuss them. It all starts with your current situation and your needs though.

You should check out cool apps like Weave, Shapr and Sites like FounderDating (getting some traction). Attend pitch evening or networking evenings and breakfasts where many such candidates might be attending looking for their next great challenge or advice. Try to look for meet ups that are in the food/ beverage space. You could also work out of food/ beverage focused accelerators where you might find a person passionate about the problem you're solving. Make sure you pick someone who fits what you're not good at. Too much overlap of strength becomes a focal point of disputes.

You would promote this like any other way, through such as your personal social networks online, build a reputable LinkedIn network, attend and present chamber of commerce meetings, rotary clubs, etc. if be interested in something like this. I actually think I had one before but might have gotten removed. Consider situations like mine for improving your service perhaps helping guaranteeing that pages will stay up. I used to help curate W so I know that others can evaluate your pages and flag down... Message me if you want to share with me how you do this...

Congratulations on your new opportunity. For any business strategy to work, you must have the following: - A clear, articulable mission or objective - Buy-in from the entire group - Ownership from each member of the group - A system to measure the success of the strategy - A well-defined customer persona including their pain points/ frustrations - How you will solve those problems Those are the elements of putting a strategy in place. Many in your position overlook key points: buy-in from the group and relentless obsession with solving the problem of the customer. Your opportunity sounds interesting; I'd love to help you more and offer specific next steps. If that would be of benefit to you, please reserve some time and book a call here on Clarity and we can get into a very specific plan for you. All the best, -Shaun

I think my advice here (https://clarity.fm/questions/3426/how-do-i-put-in-place-a-business-strategy-for-a-new-vertical) also applies to this question. To create a brand story, focus less on the brand and more on the story of your ideal customer. What do they struggle with? What problem are they looking to solve? How do you solve that for them? How do they feel before their problem is solved? After? What happens if they don't solve it? Why would they choose you over someone else with the same solution? As I said before, this sounds interesting. I'd be happy to discuss more in detail and specific to your needs. Feel free to book a call here and we can discuss your next steps. -Shaun

In my experience, angel investors bring money but little else. There are exceptions (super angels, etc.), but most angels expect you to run the business, have the ideas, turn them into something profitable and figure out how to make it all work. If your investor has specific expertise in your market, it makes sense for you to try to tap that expertise. Is once a month good enough? If I had an angel investor with specific expertise in my market, I'd be asking the investor how much time they are able to devote. I would take as much of their time as they could devote - so the answer is really with your investor. I'd be happy to get on a call to discuss your specific situation.

Read my books at Amazon Books under Michael Von Irvin. Find something that you have a great deal of passion for that also as the potential for earning lots of money. This may not be what you end up doing, but you will learn. Start now, right this moment. Start before you make a plan, but write out right after you make at least one move in the direction of your chosen path. This plan may change over time, but that is normal. No general ever went to war and fought every battle with the same strategy. The strategy usually changes after the first offensive move. The same is with business plans, but the core goal will remain the same. Good Luck, MichaelVonIrvin.com

A degree is a great start! What works well is successful campaigns to spread awareness - get people to sign up for a social media account, contribute to a Kickstarter, raise money for charity. Interning for a medium size firm as their marketer will give you a chance to make mistakes, learn basics of email and social, and get some small wins to get paid positions down the line. Hop on a call with me and I'd be happy to help you plan a career trajectory.

I'm not totally sure that you have to know the correct class in order to file a patent. I was under the assumption that it was the patent examiners job to ultimately determine this. With that said, I'm sure it's quite important to know what class you'll end up in and this should help you complete a patent search of other competitors in the same class. Also, if you have a budget for IP, a thorough patent search done by a reputable IP firm will bring back information on any potentially overlapping patents and you can check and see which class these patents are in and work backwards from there. Also, I'm pretty sure your product could belong to more than one class.

If you can win a customer on price, you can lose a customer on price. But its not price, that customers are sensitive to...its value. To answer your question, its important to be in a similar pricing range to your competition if you want to play the pricing game and commoditize your product. But I would argue that the reason you customers care so much about price is because you are not giving them anything else to care about. What do customers value most, communicate that to them, desensitise them to price and sensitise them to value. More than happy to discuss this with you further...Jon

In case Godaddy does not offer you a bigger data transfer plan, you can move to Heroku. They let you choose how much efficient you want to configure your server

From a usability perspective, having all your FAQs on a single page is the best way to go. Most visitors don't want to have to click back and forth between the main FAQ and each answer page. If you feel that each Q&A is deserving to be it's own landing page then I would suggest writing blog posts for each one.

1) Look up local universities and email the chairperson of whichever programs relate to the type of cofounder you need (i.e. electrical engineering, marketing, etc.). You could even possibly go there in person and put up a sign on a bulletin board. 2) There may be relevant Meetups in your area, go there and network with attendees (www.meetup.com). 3) If you're specifically looking for engineers, look up local 'hacker' / maker spaces that may exist in your area (see here: https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces). Send me a message if you want to discuss more options and how to access them, all the best, Lee

I'm concerned that I don't see a back end to your funnel here. Looks like you only have small, medium, and large of one service. Rather than concentrating on discounts and discounting methodology, why don't you look at Cost of Customer Acquisition? If you knew that number, you'd know what you have to make to break even. I also think you're hamstringing your lifetime customer value by limiting yourself to one service. There's nowhere 'up' for your customer to go. If you knew the CAC and LTV of your buyers, then you would know exactly what you had to charge. You'd understand even taking a loss on the front end because it lead to a big profit on the back end would be a possible strategy. But right now, you don't have a clear picture; that's why it's so hard to decide.

I used to design and manage complex business processes in the large BPO industry, I'm a fan of efficiency. After I left the industry I bought an offshore service based software development and digital marketing company that was probably pretty similar to yours. Fundamentally the best answer comes down to how you want to run your company, specifically what YOU want to spend your time doing. I'd recommend checking out Basecamp.com By the time I sold my company I was managing 3-4k hours of project work almost exclusively from BC with 20-25 hours of effort per week....it's pretty great. AUTOMATION, AUTOMATION, AUTOMATION, virtual assistants are great, but if you focus on eliminating their need you'll end up with better quality services at a lower cost. Good Luck

First of all, don't be afraid to share and exposing your business model. The Fear of stealing ideas is limiting you. I don't know your business model, your idea, your service or product, but no one of these will be the key of your success. The people, and how you talk to your market, will be. You don't sell product or service, you sell yourself (people) ... especially in the first time of your startup, when no one knows you. Every day someone builds a product or service that is a copy of another. The difference is the market and how he/she talks to the market. Back to your question. Hire one senior, skilled person, that after will be in charge of hiring other people is a right way. I didn't understand the reasons of why outsourcing wasn't the right way to follow. Costs? Was it a firm? Don't know. But... I can share a simple process that I follow every time in my business, even if I'm a developer and I could write all the code, I didn't write a line of code for software that serves my clients. You have to sketch your solution (application). Do it with tools or pen and paper (the right tool is better). I use keynote for mac or balsamiq is also a great tool. You have to have the entire application designed. Every page, every feature is running in the sketch. All the elements. It'll take a lot of hours or even days. Don't care about design and "looks good" now. Be fast. Don't care about "is it possible this?" question. Sketch it and write a note or doubts in a post-it. Now you don't have only a clear vision in you mind, you also have something that you can share with a developers. Developers are strage guys. They can build and make things from nothing but it's not easy when the product is placed only in a corner of your mind. "Rock Star" developers loves to work on UI (user interfaces). There is no-way to get off the road. And when they perfectly understand your application, they can give you advice, clear your doubts and build it faster. The key point here is to get the version 1.0 as fast as you can. Give it to your market and get feedback. To overcame the fear of stealing ideas, you could split your big application in a lot of smaller pieces. You should search and hire rock star freelances from website like upwork.com and give to a single professional only a small task. Then, hire a trusted person that put all together, like a puzzle. This works, I know a few friends that do this strategy. I can't tell you more than this, because a lot of decision depends of what are you trying to build, how much money you can invest and what are getting you stuck.

Buy targeted traffic. Describe the targeted traffic's problem in such detail that they instantly understand you know their market and their situation. Get the prospect to get on a strategy call with you. Sign them up for the coaching or service. That's it. Where's the problem? A lot of these "coaches" shouldn't be doing it. They have no experience and no ability. But they learned this system, and if they can talk confidently, they can get orders. All they needed to start was a pot of money. They paid another coach to learn the system (sometimes up to $50K+50% of their business, which would be fine for a legitimate, established operation but is highway robbery for newbies) and be given the marketing materials to attract prospects. Then they paid for the targeted advertising. What's funny is seeing their bitchy comments about prospects not showing for strategy calls, or them being so nervous they can't close. Further proof that they have zero business offering "coaching" in the first place. It is not rocket science, and it is the latest fad that will be dead in two years when the market is so oversaturated people will have to completely change their language, as they had to for SEO services, to get customers. I've been here doing real business consulting for a long time before it became trendy, and I'll be doing it long after these poseurs are gone.

What foods do you like ? What are the other restaurants in the area? What do they server ? What is your budget ? Is this an upscale neighbourhood ? What about franchising ? Do you have prior experience in the restaurant industry ? Did you work in a restaurant before ? I did multiple business analysis and financial analysis / plan modelling for restaurants before. You may reach me if you need more help.