*It Depends What are you trying to accomplish? You can do this with an email provider like MailChimp, AWebber, or Memberful, HubSpot. There are a number of WordPress plugins that work with your site if you are going to gate content for members or release content at certain times. I'm happy to help more, but I'd need a little more detail to give you an appropriate answer. Book a call and we can discuss more. All the best, -Shaun

You'll want to establish what the lowest hanging fruits in terms of customer acquisition are and maximize their leverage to grow other channels. Where is your traffic coming from? Check keyword volumes for related searche terms and optimize your SEO strategy to retain that traffic. Run ad campaigns targeting competitor searches. Develop a strategic partnership with an existing company.

Google company formation agencies in respective areas Contact them and get the requirements for registering your company and start the process If you dont have money and starting small you really need to register a off the shelf company just to be legal in the country. You can have your partners as your directors, shareholder etc.. so they are legal too. Consider where your main business will be and start from there. A US citizen can buy a company for 150$ on internet. Heading to US? Open a company in Cayman Islands. Need more help, text me... Take action!!!

I mentor Startups and Business Leaders and of course was mentored myself in years past. The best way to find a mentor is to first know who you are. What are your goals, your unfinished challenges and projects? Where do you fall short in your own estimation? Generate these notes and form lists. I can help you with this part of your journey. Now we look for people that succeeded in those areas. I've found mentors and peers through a variety of places - we had shared connections (or none at all) on LinkedIn, I took part in LinkedIn discussion groups and commented on people's ideas, I sent cold emails and made phone calls to people I found interesting thereof. The weirdest place was guests on my favorite podcast or radio show, or even local TV. These are prominent people - local government officials, University Administrators, Business Owners, Entrepreneurs - but not too prominent that they can't take a call to help someone. Pay a sincere compliment and sincerely ask for help. Show you are driven and want to be someone. I can help you understand this more, and in any case, best of luck on this path.

I use ad monetization tactics to drive revenue for global mobile game brands. (Phase 10, Skip-Bo, Scattergories, etc.) Finding a way to monetize your users with ads without pushing them away is definitely a delicate balance. Answering your questions depends on 4 main factors: 1) Type of App 2) Number of daily impressions 3) Location 4) Revenue Goals. There are a number of ways to display ads in your app. Some include; banners, static interstitials, video interstitials, rewarded video and native ads. The most acceptable way to display ads in your app will depend on the factors I stated above. Are you trying to design your own solution or are you looking to partner with different ad networks (there are hundreds)? It is important to understand the types of partners and what types of ads are right for your App. I would recommend using an ad network mediation layer when you build your solution so you can 1) increase your fill rate 2) diversify your ad offering 3) simplify your reporting 4) maximize your revenue. If you would like more specifics just let me know, I would be happy to help you out.

Hi, I specialise in eCommerce strategy and marketing, helping eCommerce people make better decisions, and run more efficiently and effectively. The short answer is 'no'. Your target market isn't "subscription buyers" it's "cigar lovers". So unless there's a lot of subscription programs targeting the cigar lover, you're fine. However, if your market strategy is to go after people who like subscriptions - then I think you're not going to do so well! A cigar is a tough first sell! If you're coming at this from the "I love cigars" point of view first consider if Subscription is the best way to serve that customer base. If you're coming at this from the "I want a subscription business" point of view - then make sure you've researched cigars thoroughly before going down that road. Not least the legal restrictions on advertising - these differ from country to country, but it can be pretty hard to market tobacco online. Hope that helps. Chloe

How many people are you looking to roll this out to? I would caution against trying to automate what should be handled in person during the early days of your business. Talk to people. If they don't feel like you care (because you're automating the process), they won't give you valuable feedback.

Your first step is to bootstrap funding to obtain a rough prototype. Then you can seek out additional funding to develop additional iterations of a prototype. If a development expert doesn't weigh in here, contact the countless success stories on Kickstarter to find out what they have learned during their startup process.

yes. ofcourse. y not. but your product should be having USP(unique selling power) and quality edge. There are various products in the market which have single product line and also have investors.

A few years back, my ambition was the only part of my life that I cared about. I was neglecting my health, relationships, and my happiness — all in the name of "more". I got a rude awakening when my beard turned white and fell out in patches. I was LITERALLY killing myself with the way I was working. At that point, I took a self-destructive stance: I'd focus on my health and happiness more than work, even if it meant I wasn't making as much progress at work. The irony was that I had been overworking before, so my productivity and success IMPROVED when I scaled back and approached work with more balance. I'm currently living in Thailand with my girlfriend, working roughly 30 hours each week and earning twice as much as I did before. I'm also making more progress on my hobby projects than I did when I was only focused on work. I've also lost 40 lbs and generally just enjoy being alive. And my beard grew back. I've worked with some of my clients to bring in more balance, and they've seen similar improvements across the board. I'd be happy to discuss philosophy and strategy behind all of this with you if you'd like. Just remember: we work to create the opportunity to live life on our terms. If work is preventing us from living the life we want, we've lost sight of the purpose of working. Good luck!

The biggest mistake I see startups make is attempting to scale a product before validating the direction that their customers want it to go. You'll see companies validate pre-launch via closed beta testing, crowdfunding, or building landing pages and testing everything from messaging to price point to conversion funnel. Given that it seems like you're already doing some of this testing, I assume you've got a good handle on your options here. The challenge is this: looking for the 'perfect fit' is an incredibly easy way to justify never launching a product, and launching too early is a surefire way to spend your first few months scrambling to figure out why people aren't buying your product like you assumed they would. Launch when you are sure you've got a core set of customers that will buy your product. Don't wait for the 'perfect' moment - get it out to these customers as early as is practical (even earlier than you probably think) and use them to test your price points, messaging, and product fit. Scale when you know what is driving them to buy, the price they are willing to pay, and how much it costs you to bring them on board. The numbers that drive this decision vary for every company based on product and industry - if you're selling an online course for learning jiu jitsu, your optimal rollout is going to look much different than a consumer tech product. One thing holds constant - to scale, you need a repeatable process that you know will drive conversion and customer acquisition while keeping your costs at margins that make sense to your business. Questions I would make sure I can answer between launch and scale: 1. Can you say for certain that you know what customers are willing pay? It's great if they are paying $79, but do you know if those same customers would pay $99? What about monthly vs. annually? 2. Do you know where to find more of these customers in large numbers, and how to drive them to your site/product? If so, how much will it cost you to access these customers? 3. When you do drive them to your site/product, what percentage indicate a level of interest (giving an email address, signing up for your platform, getting on a pre-order list)? What percentage click with an intent to buy right away? It seems that you're already doing the right things by testing your product first and exploring next steps with an intelligent outlook. Keep that up and you'll continue to make decisions that move you in the right direction. Cheers, Chris Justice

The age of your site is a minor factor. Since there are several factors that will drive you to the top in Google, you have a great chance at ranking high with your new startup. I don't know the details of your company, but can offer you some basic guidelines. 1-follow onsite SEO best practices and ensure you new set is set up properly, 2-follow off-site SEO best practices to drive traffic to your site and build social proof, 3-run some basic PPC ads to further drive traffic to your site. I hope this helps and please don't hesitate to reach out if you have further questions!

I'd suggest that "best" depends on who you're targeting and what your conversion goals are. Have a look at Facebook ads, I've had better performance there recently.

The DIY startup method - build an audience around an area of your expertise, deliver that audience content they care about, then engage them to see what product of yours they would be willing to buy. Tim Ferriss (FHWW), John Lee Dumas (EOF), Bryan Harris (10KSubs), and countless others have taken this approach and turned out scalable businesses. It's great to have an idea of what visitors may want to buy, but the minute you build product before you build an audience for it, you immediately risk taking the wrong path at the expense of time, money, and momentum. Even without knowing your industry, how you engage your visitors should be the biggest piece here - it's great to bring a bunch of people to one place, but if you aren't getting their contact info and making them stick around with content, discussions, videos, emails then it's going to be much harder to bring them back, let alone get them to buy from you. This can be as simple as blog posts, as timely as real-time video webinars, or as easy as delivering curated relevant articles via email. The end result should be you as founders and/or your site being seen as the best place to get information your audience cares about. If costs to you are low (negligible, or easily offset by adding a small revenue stream), and you have the ability to deliver a knowledge base to your audience around your expertise, then go for it! The right level of engagement with that audience should give you some great insight into what they would buy, how much they would pay for it, and how likely they would be to share their experience with others. It can take a few shots to find the right balance of product vs. demand, but having that knowledge base and content allows you to be flexible in your approach. Don't assume you know what your visitors would buy - test your assumptions by simply asking them. Get an understanding of the biggest questions they want answered, answer them through content, and use this insight to build product. There is no 'right number' of visitors - even getting 100 email addresses can be a huge start to understanding what to build. Cheers! Chris Justice

Check out a site called SweetProcess to help you build out systems. And also read a book called the E-Myth Revisited to learn the mindset for building them all out. Version 1.0 should be good. 1 year later you'll do a big update to it based on Franchisee feedback for V 2.0

Hi, have you considered this open source ad server? http://www.revive-adserver.com/ It derives from one of the biggest ad servers, that used to be Open Source but continued commercial. This system allows different publishers, sites, statistical insights and more.

I would go for the direct client contact-approach for several reasons: - It sounds like you are still searching for exact client requirements. You will get those from talking to the clients directly. - You are not sure, whether your clients are enough tech-savvy that redd-it makes sense. This puts a significant downside to approach no 1, where you would let your competitors understand your product but risk having no clients. So unless you need to create cashflow quickly, and therefore need to scale fast, I would go for the safer solution and interact with clients directly. No problem assessing their tech-savviness, so you can move to an electronic platform, where growth will be faster after you have made sure, that your clients will be there as well. Let me note here, that the direct approach probably works best for b2b. b2c is hard work directly, so probably the webbased marketing would work there. But still the clients must be there, so you could start of with a b2c-test directly to gain knowledge. Good luck with approaching your target group. If you would like more dialogue on this, I will be happy to talk more. Best regards Kenneth Wolstrup

The conventional wisdom is to create a minimum viable product (MVP), release it, get customer feedback, use that feedback to improve the product, release again, get more feedback and so on. In terms of releasing to a closed user group, that is fine but when you launch a new website you're probably doing that anyway in that no one will have heard of it unless you through lots of money at online marketing or get lots of PR. In other words, usually it will take a while for your website/web app to get lots of traffic so a public MVP should not be an issue for reputation etc. On the subject of MVP, it should be the minimal amount of time, effort and money needed to develop the product to a working point, the most basic version of the site. Of course if s/he is just re-skinning something else, I'm not sure that is an issue.

I have become a Stripe convert. The simplicity and straight forward pricing is great. The platform works seamlessly. Previously I was a big proponent of Paypal but now after a few months with Stripe I am not ever going back. I have not had one issue at all compared to having at least a dozen issues a week with Paypal. For subscription services, recurring services there really is no comparison to Stripe as they allow you to integrate it and develop custom API's. If you want to jump on a call we can discuss it further. I can definitely give you some tips to getting up and running with Stripe and if you are using Wordpress as a minimum viable product we can discuss a few plugins that you can use in conjunction. Hopefully this helps!

You mention, that you can code and maintain yourself, and at the same time it sounds like your data can be dispersed across multiple sources. And you want to minimise license cost. In my business we use R a lot for both analysis and reporting. It is free (open source), but you will have to build programs. But it will read any format, and also create output to any destination you want. So you could start off with a mix of R, Excel and pdf, just to get things going. However, it could make sense for you to build a database already so you familiarise yourself with data warehouse thinking, since you want to expand with marketing automation. At that point you will need a database for monitoring response, sales etc. So it is important to build the right foundation as ealy as possible. If you don't want to code, but want point-and-click, there is boatloads of software for that, but probably more license cost (unless you can find open source for that). So If I were you, I would start off with something smaller. After all, you want to focus on the value you create for the business and your colleagues, and the time you save, rather than a smooth IT-infrastructure for this. I have lots of experience building reporting and analysis in the areas you mention, so if you want to discuss further, feel free to set up a call. Good look with your development. Best regards Kenneth Wolstrup

First, congratulations! This sounds like an exciting opportunity. However, part ownership/partnership can be tricky. What happens if you disagree down the road? What happens if someone gets sick, dies, or has to leave the company for any reason? What happens if there is a divorce and a spouse who isn't currently involved in the business also becomes a part owner? Have you considered structuring your compensation to be salary plus a share of the profits without true ownership? That could potentially reduce headaches and liability for both of you.

Hi there, If I understand correctly, you want a definitive list of .edu domain names to compare users against to automatically approve them for your service? The most authoritative list would be held by Educause - http://net.educause.edu/edudomain/index.asp but you won't necessarily be given the list. I would try dropping them an email anyway. In the meantime, here are two other sources (but likely incomplete) that you could use. 1. https://github.com/Hipo/university-domains-list 2. http://pastebin.com/LND21t5F If you'd like to discuss more, please schedule a call! Best, Neil

I'm not sure if I understand your question. But if anyone one started something on a budget, the best choice (temporarily) would be leveraging Wordpress. Typically Wordpress is scalable up to about 10-15k total users... By then you should be working on your own platform and bigger programming team. If you're not on a budget the question is almost irrelevant.

It's a tough ask because there are so many people looking for developers to work for free and not enough developers around to fill the paid jobs. However, there are some people who if they love the idea might come on board, more likely as a side project. To find tech co-founders have a look at the following sites: https://www.cofounderslab.com/ https://www.founder2be.com/ http://www.founders-nation.com/ There are also meetups and networking events for founders to find tech co-founders try looking through www.meetup.com for ones local to you.

Regarding US taxation of internet sales. Since you are a foreign entity or person (in regard to the US), and there is an income tax treaty between Canada and the US, you will not be liable for US federal income tax on internet sales unless you have a “permanent establishment” in the US with which the internet sales income is effectively connected. So as long as you do not have a warehouse, physical store, sales office, etc... in the US you don't have to file US returns or remit tax to the US. Amazon should be charging to the customer and withholding any sales tax due to a state in which your products are sold. If you sell through other merchants or directly you may have to deal with this yourself. Regarding incorporation Incorporation is almost always a good idea from a liability standpoint as it prevents a judgement for damages from taking all your property and limits the collection to what is owned by the business, With the facts you have given I would suggest incorporating in Canada unless you have a business reason to establish a physical presence in the US. This will eliminate US taxes and related compliance costs. Once you establish a US presence you will need to begin filing returns in the US even if you are running a net operating loss. If there is no benefit to having a physical presence in the US then the related compliance costs and tax would be an unnecessary expense. Feel free to setup a phone call if you would like to chat for a bit regarding the matter. Thanks