I have had a lot of experience of being mentored and mentoring. I think you should separate the search for a mentor from the search for an investor. A mentor should be a disinterested guide to life and business. An investor is going to look at you and your business as a way of buying a retirement condo! They want different things. A mentor wants to feel valued, to feel that they are helping to build something of value, to feel appreciated. You find such a person by looking for people whose expertise you think is useful (in Meetups, or conferences, or via LinkedIn) and politely approaching them to ask their advice. You will need to talk to a lot of people this way. Once you find someone with whom you "click" then you can see if the relationship develops from there. Investors are a whole different ball game. They want to see evidence of competence, capital, talent, cashflow forecasts. They don't want to hear that you are struggling, that you have dilemmas, that you need advice. Don't mix the two! Feel free to ask me more :-)

Do those prospects come from an opt-in process? Are they aware that your brand obtained their data? If not, than you are cold-calling them and no matter who it is, we humans do not like to receive cold-calls, right. Though, you are in a premium market, thus you are in the market to put in a lot of effort to warm them up or to get in front of your leads. In your case, you already have their names and mail addresses. I'd get those mail addresses into gmail and use discoverly to receive their social media accounts. Discoverly is a chrome plugin that will automatically retrieve the mail addresses linked social media accounts, if there are some. http://discover.ly/ Armed with those you can do further research and look if they have shared interest or even know eachother with followerwonk.com or buzzsumo.com. You can use this data to prioritize your list as you already have a positive WOM signal if they know each other and only one becomes your customer. I'd advise to create a spreadsheet to keep track of your research. I'd consider to think about an outreach method with your facebook channel as your prospects can immediately associate your account with your business giving you higher trust-value than a faceless cold-call and especially if they can see your work without any friction and low mental effort - just a click away. You may even gain insights to their actual consumption patterns, e.g. you might see someone publishing an event that is related to your business and they are going to - thus you could approach them on spot. You could also gain additional insights about lead quality with realizing at what stage of their "marriage preparation" they are. With this you can at least weed out the non-qualified leads, those that are just "interested" but far from making an elaborate purchasing decision. There is so much you could do with that data,but even if all of these seem out of your willingness,take this advice cold-mailing > cold-calls. Hope that helped a bit ;) -Andi

Hard to say with no information, but... I would always suggest starting with the community your customers belong to. 1. Try and get relevant music blogs writing about your app. 2. Look for tweeters who are big influencers of your potential customers and see if you can get them interested in tweeting 3. Try creating some incentive for people to share the app with their friends / peers 4. Write your own content for your website or a blog, good quality content is what google looks for these days 5. Decide based on your markets demographics what other networks are good to establish a following on and create useful content there, e.g. instagram

Make sure you are offering a product others want to purchase at a competitive price. You can do your own research regarding competitive pricing or use software that assist with the detail research. Your question does not note what types of product you are selling; however, most product sells are seasonal and that may be causing the dip you are experiencing. Compare the results to the same week last year and the year before and review trends. I work with clients that sell products on line - feel free to set up a call if I can assist further.

I used to sell event sponsorships via phone, so I think you can sell everything if you want, but you need to make pre-sale emails, find great contacts e t. c. Try to sell expensive tickets on business events, for example. The % you can get from organisers also depends on your negotiation skills, because they can offer a good deal for you.

What are the company's policies regarding the frequency and timing of employee reviews? Start by checking your employee handbook and make sure you completely understand the policies. You then have a decision to make: you can approach your boss to discuss the matter and try to work it out, you can talk to your HR professionals to ask them to address it on your behalf, or you can wait and ask if any adjustment to your compensation can be made retroactively, in light of the delay. Each strategy carries risks. The first two risk impacting your long term relationship with your boss. The last strategy is a financial risk but preserves the relationship. You have to ultimately decide what's most important to you, and what consequences you're willing to live with. Happy to talk with you directly if I can be of more help.

If you go to to https://clarity.fm/yourusername/widget and replace 'yourusername' with your actual user name, you should see an Embed code link to add a widget that includes your profile/per minute rate/Request a call Button. Feel free to give me a call if you'd like help implementing this into your site.

They may have patents on certain algorithms they use to sort / present jobs to people, but it's unlikely that anyone has a patent on the general idea of a career portal. If you'd like advice on how to do an effective patent search, or how to affordably file your own patents in the US I'm happy to help. all the best, Lee

Like most things in web development there are 100 ways to slice that pie - so this answer is by no means all encompassing of all ways to do so. Depending on what your objectives are I would recommend one of two ways: 1. Use the built in WP gallery feature tied to the WP core. No extra code and thus you couldnt get any lighter than that. It already resizes the images to different sizes. To access simply goto "insert media" and look in the upper left hand sidebar for the gallery option, select your images, determine size, press insert. If you want to customize the wp core gallery functionality to show attributions or something similar a good wp coder could knock it out in 30 min or less. 2. If you want a lot of features and customizations an display and interaction I would recommend just getting Revolution Slider. It has more features than you could ever need and it can pull images into galleries OR it can pull posts in from WP and use the featured image, title, and any other custom field you have into the slider. There is a lot more that could be said but that is a quick - to the point - response. Cheers!

This would really depend on your goal of the lead channel. If you want to deal with warm leads give http://inspirebeats.com a try. InspireBeats will help you find and build a list of targeted leads, do research on them, and warm them up for you through a personalized outreach. That way you have an additional channel of leads flowing in for your sales reps.

According to Clarity's documentation, no. The client suggests times and there is some expected back and forth before a mutually agreeable time is agreed upon. Details here: https://clarity.fm/help/articles/2/how-does-clarity-work

I'm currently advising a client right on exactly that kind of customer service integration. Look into Live Ninja (https://liveninja.com/). It brings together the best of both worlds from web and a call center. Voice + Video + Instant connect without any special software, or a phone. You can have either one way, or two way video, and text chat too. Obviously, get nice uniforms for your call center guys if you haven't already.

Print advertising is expensive and phonebook usage has certainly declined. The marketplace can also be pretty fragmented with so many different publications. It would depend upon your market such as if you have a lot of retirees/seniors in your area that may still utilize a book? And have you previously found good results with phone book ads? If you feel like phone book ads give a good ROI, I would put an emphasis on having solid assets in place to support it such as high quality photography, good online reviews, and modern, mobile friendly website. I hope this helps. We are Google AdWords certified if you'd like to put more of an emphasis on online ads. Feel free to set up a call with me if you'd like to discuss.

I'd run a lead ad targeted towards people with similar job titles or at competing companies. Include relevant job information (title, salary range, etc), then promote the ad as "easy application" and require full name, email and phone. Once they apply, send an email requesting their resume or get them on the phone. I work for a digital ad agency (AdvertiseMint) that specializes in Facebook and Instagram ads, we could help you set these up if needed. - Brian

If you can skip investors and run with your customers money - do this until you're ready for big round. What is good traction...? It depends on how you sell it to investors, how you pitch them, actually. It's not about real traction on this stage in 99% of the cases. But... if you really want to understand what the best traction is, I think it's all about retention and customer happiness. If you have very less amount of money, or companies can't leave without your software and are going to use it daily, switch from other e t. c., so this is the best traction measurements. You can grow money and # of customers, but if they really use your product and like it - the best traction you can have. If you want understand your best traction before the launch, so initiate pre-orders with great discount. How much traction you have is not so important as how fast and how good it is.

As a rule of thumb it's better for you to continue investing yourself as far as you can. The reasons are: 1. The later you raise money, the more your business should be worth 2. You are able to retain more control of the business 3. Fundraising is very time consuming and will divert your attention from making your business work Having said that, if you're getting to the point where you can't continue to move the business forward (or at a good pace) without money then it's worth looking to fundraise. Dan

If you don't mind managing other people, keeping full control will probably be less frustrating in the long run. Your business has a narrow offering, so adding multiple opinions may result in more headaches. Management is a whole separate skill, though, so be prepared to dedicate real time to managing your team (whether it's a partner or a contractor). Another option — assuming the marketing and design is within your capabilities — is to work on the way you schedule your time, which could make the work seem less demanding and take less time. This is what I've done (I'm a developer, designer, and marketer), and after owning an agency with both partners and contractors, I've much preferred staying on my own and being a better manager for myself. If that sounds like something that would work for you, I'd be happy to talk with you about laying out strategies to make that work. Request a call and we'll set it up. Good luck!

To read data from another URL and analyze it is possible to create as a WordPress plugin. However, very little of the actual code in the plugin would be WordPress-related. Does the Kissmetrics site ACTUALLY analyze your site? Or is it "identifying improvement opportunities" and requesting you email for more info? (Neil Patel does this; if you enter the same URL twice, you'll get different results from his "analysis".) So the short answer is yes. Medium answer is that it's not going to have much to do with WordPress. Long answer is that the function you're looking to mimic might actually just be marketing smoke and mirrors. If you'd like to get a full technical breakdown of how the plugin can be built, I'd be happy to work through it with you. Request a call and we'll set it up. Good luck!

Being from Denmark, I had to look up disposable books as a concept. It lead to an interesting link, I wanted to share, that describes disposable books as "the dregs of the book infrastructure" http://craigmod.com/journal/ipad_and_books/. So I assume, that your market is in some sense a niche market. That leads me to my first suggestion, which would be that you build market knowledge from your existing ebay-customers - f.ex. through a newsletter or website with unique content from your area of expertise or just by asking, when they buy. Are they passionate about which books to read? Are they interested in volume - to look good on the bookshelf - or are they interested in individual items, and buy disposable books, because they are cheap? Are they price sensitive? Are they driven towards specific genres? Will they buy again, or is it a one-time deal? If enough people sign up, you get new distribution right there. Also, I would want to understand how your business model works. Does it allow for price differentiation if you add value to the product, or is it low-margin high volume (which would explain your idea of selling more pr. transaction)? Does the model allow for you to make a living out of it, or is it a hobby? What drives the needs for "massive quantities"? How do you aim for driving individual books in massive quantities unless you are Amazon? Then I would look into your distribution channels. You have two options: Stay on ebay, or go outside. Let's start with ebay, which supports individual transactions, but "massive quantities" are a little harder. Here is a few things you could do: 1. Build better storylines on your sales - add value to the transaction. "I have read this book, and it is great" or "Here are some online reviews". Show that you are passionate about the product. 2. If you need the ebay platform for some reason - convenience, legitimacy - think in distribution through others. Could family, friends or someone else help you? You provide the storyline, they provide the phone number, you split the revenue. Low risk for them, some payment and better distribution for you. 3. Theme the content - sell packages about f.ex. project management, parenting, etc. These are disposable books - maybe some customers are looking for volume? If you want to move outside ebay, consider some of these suggestions: 1. Build your own website, where you add reviews to the books - become the source of knowledge on disposable books, recommendations, etc. See what existing websites do, and implement a different one with the structure, you like. 2. Sell directly to bookstores or have them take your books in commission. If you have them in store anyway, they might as well take up space in a bookstore. Maybe they can also better buy volume. 3. Look for existing platforms, that support volume sales - f.ex. Amazon or similar - f.ex. this: https://www.goodreads.com/genres/disposable. 4. Build a physical store supported by webpresence, or get to go to book stores or libraries, where you sell the most interesting of your books. 5. Host disposable book meetups - like home parties, in cafés, in your own apartment. Create a cult. 6. Think about, who is in the market for massive quantities of disposable books at the same time. Could someone want to open a bookthemed cafe with lots of books on the shelf? Could a filmset be looking for a lot of nondescript books as a prop? Think of other situations, where columes of books are needen. I hope this has helped you in your way forward. If you are interested in more suggestions or thoughts on this, feel free to set up a call. Best regards Kenneth Wolstrup

Cold emailing is just as bad for you and the recipient. Even if you have the perfect list, the attempt to sell in a cold email is rarely going to be effective. You're better off curating the list to the top prospects, find a mutual connection on LinkedIn or even just cold-invite them on LinkedIn,. Worst case scenario, send a 'permission pass' email where you simply gauge interest and let them know you won't be emailing them again if there's no interest. Keep it very short, non-commercial with just solid information/links to web, and an easy to reply yes/no answer.

Hi, The language annotations are a best practices conducive to a better organization of your web pages within country and language SERPs. They won't provide higher rankings. They will, however, produce a better experience for users who will find content that is intended for certain geographies, so if by "better" this is what you were asking, then it could be. Typically, if you succeed with your SEO program in country-specific campaigns, chances are that the localized versions of the content will also rank in the local version of Google. The example above is correct.

Have you considered providing the book in electronic format. If somebody wants the book and are willing to pay the shipping fee, they get the paper copy, otherwise, it's a download.

Start providing knowledge services, write down areas you are best at and advertise your services probably against an hourly rate. You can use lots of freelancing sites to spot on jobs and projects and as you collect enough money, this will help you to restrategize and relaunch a successful venture. I went through this sometime ago and put a full system for it.

I ran a web design agency for 6 years, despite of studying PMBOK for advanced project management (for Engineering projects). I used "Web Redesign, Strategies for Success by Kelly Goto" Courser Link: http://www.lynda.com/Web-Design-tutorials/webredesignstrategiesforsuccess/316-6.html as a basis for building our project management model. 1) Breakdown the project into milestones for your team and for your client example (Finish Wireframes, Confirm on Design Palette and colors, Confirm on Content, Functionality Testing) 2) Include all expected tasks/hours from the beginning, should be increasing with your experience, especially you are focusing on specific platforms, let customer see the different dates in which they are required to provide feedback, even schedule calls with clients on these days 2) Use a robust Project Management tool like BaseCamp, where you can give client direct access to the platform preferably with a Skype/Telephony functionality to schedule calls. If you need any more help designing and deploying your PM system, I would be glad to help.

There are many different kinds of investment that you might be looking for. I am afraid you will need to provide further details about your startup's niche, your investment goals, etc. before recommending any particular path. There are angel investors, there are VCs, etc. and also incubators / accelerators depending on what your business is and at which stage it is. Be sure to have a well-researched estimate of how much money you need to raise. I would be happy to discuss the possible options for you over a call.