It's hard to fully understand the background of your question, but in general, it sounds like you want this company to start a pilot program with your service. To get them to be willing to start a new pilot program with your service, you'll need to make something that solves the problems that existed with their previous service. To do that you'll need to better understand _why_ their previous service "did not work." Was it because the service itself had too many bugs, or because customers didn't need the service, or because the user interface was inappropriate, etc.? Get as in-depth an answer as you can to this question. If possible, ask your contact at the company, ask the engineers that worked on it, and most importantly: ask the company's customers that used the service while it existed. You could reach customers by posting on forums (Quora, Reddit, etc.) something like, "Question for people that use [company X's] services" Based on this info, you can design and build a new product which solves the pre-existing problems. Show this new product to the company's customers that you previously interviewed (through forum posts, etc.) and quantify their interest in it (rate 1 - 10 if you think this would be useful, etc.). You can then show your research, and new product, and how much their customers like the idea, to the company and you'll have a higher likelihood of them being willing to start a pilot program with it. If not, ask them why not, and see if you can address that issue as well. If you'd like more detailed advice on the specifics of doing market research and product development for your idea I'd be happy to help, best, Lee

I dont think the location or type of venue matters much in your ability to pursue and negotiate opportunities for vendors, sponsors and or investors. The easiest to pursue is vendors - in fact most smaller events are paid for by the vendors and sponsorships from local organizations who want to reach your type of audience. Make a description of the type of crowd you will attract and then make a list of potential products/companies that might be interest in advertising there. Create and sell packages to them. That approach is probably much easier than pursuing a random investor whom you have negotiate a lot more than just the ad pricing and can delay things. Unless you know someone who can give you money w/ little questions asked then go for the vendor/sponsorship route.

Hi, I'm a project manager who uses JIRA extensively (and PMP, PMI-ACP, Professional Scrum Master). There is an add-on for JIRA called Portfolio to help with many of your requirements. For question #1, your product manager and project teams would plan out their projects in JIRA by identifying epics and stories as they normally would. The teams should use 'story points' to assess relative complexity for each story, we normally use fibonacci numbers. Then the teams should determine sprint lengths and their sprint capacity (story points per sprint) for the initial sprints. Unfortunately issues appear the same size regardless of the number of story points assigned (but you can see the numbers assigned to each issue) - you can see a visual depiction of the volume of work in each sprint using Portfolio. Ensure the first sprint is 'started' in JIRA before trying out the portfolio view below. Create placeholder sprints in JIRA for all the backlog story items in all projects, dividing them up by sprint in logical order. Subscribe to the Portfolio add-on. Create a portfolio view, add all your projects, then select the capacity filter from the drop-down on the right-hand side of your screen. It should show your projects as horizontal swimlanes, with a bar graph representing the volume of work in each sprint. The green represents work that falls within the team's estimated capacity and red represents work that exceeds the team's capacity. Initially all of your issues and epics will appear grey, you can fix that by adding themes and assigning colours to the themes but I'll save that for another question. For question #2, you can see that status of a project by looking at the JIRA board, the portfolio roadmap, and the reports that can be generated by JIRA and Portfolio. It won't remind you if you haven't checked in less than two days ago, however, you could just schedule in your calendar to listen in to the daily scrum call every second day. For question #3, there is a different filter in the Portfolio software called "Target Schedule". If you select that filter, it will show any deadlines entered into the epics and stories. Using JIRA and scrum planning should help avoid last minute urgent issues (i.e. your due tomorrow example), your product manager should know at the end of each sprint planning session what to expect by the end of each sprint. I'd be happy to walk through a demo of this during a call. Wayne

First - make sure you forget the jargon, like the word 'entrepreneur'; the word 'marketing' has been widely adopted and now everyone and their mothers are 'marketers' when in reality maybe they are 'sales persons' or 'advertisers' or 'network marketers' (sales people technically but relying heavily on connections or pyramids) Being able to orchestrate a a high ROI paid Google Ad or Facebook Ad makes you an advertiser not a marketer. This important because if you happen to fit in this category, internally you need to operate and think as an advertiser (madmen type of approach right with images, captions, fonts, PPC, making pretty and effective ads) and that means that in your own advertising assets you speak to your customers offering them the ad value proposition and not the generic marketing proposition, which can dilute interest, confuse potential clients and lose you a client. Even if you use the work marketing on your own ads - internally you speak as an advertiser, focusing on what people think is marketing which is advertising on social media, uploading pics, creating PPC campaigns. I'm mentioning all this because, an experienced and or well trained (educated) marketing expert probably wouldn't have this lead generation problem. At Unthink, I think we have helped about 5 or 6 other marketing agencies with their own work - we stopped doing this a few years back unless we got some sort of ongoing retainer from the agency. But even Tuesday, I gave a presentation to local (older) business men and women and amongst them was a self titled "Business Success Strategist For Online Growth" - before presentations each introduced themselves and gave their pitch. Hers was something like: I help small business owners get more leads online and close more sales through growth strategies and social media marketing" I'm paraphrasing because she mentioned a few other things but this is the jist of it. After my presentation on "Digital Inbound Marketing Is Not Magic, And How It Really Works" - I talked about bounce rate, management level efforts, SEO, blogging, vlogging, customer facing efforts, good Google preferred website design best practices, etc. she approached me and says: - "I would love to speak with you because I have a website that has 'good ranking' I come up on the 'first page of Google' but I haven't gotten any leads in a while..." !?!?!? So yeah, this is common. Amazing sales person but not a marketer. Now, if you are a good social media 'marketer' and can generate amazing PPC campaigns, show them off! Take screen shots, and showcase them in your website, show them off in your own facebook page, maybe create a facebook group and use that group to share content with key business individuals who might end up hiring you eventually. - nurture them by providing them with the DIY approach and you will see that many will actually just hire you instead because you are the expert. I get this a lot - I'm a guest speaker somewhere and share my insights and literally teach individuals on clever simple marketing tricks and they still come up to me asking me for a quote or those more sophisticated ask me for a proposal for something specific. People will hire you not because of your so called expertise, but for demonstrating that you care enough to be an industry leader, on-going learning, caring about them, and for saving them the time from having to do it themselves. If you do full management level marketing where you actually develop sales systems for their teams, design and create websites that are so effective they actually make the owner money, generate landing pages, create CTAs, work with them for in person 'customer facing' efforts, you manage all their lead generation, customer nurturing, cross promote with other relevant sources and industry leaders, you create the graphics, the copy, the paid campaigns, study their analytics and improve, run A/B tests on as many things as possible, etc. etc. etc. - they're going to hire for only one of those thing plus being able to save them the time of having to learn and do it themselves. It's your job to also think as a sales person, knowing what is it that ticks your customer and how can you be of the greatest value and then only speaking about that (asking questions and making them talk about that only!!) Most clients pretty much sell themselves if you let them do the talking. As a marketer - you think of this before you get the lead and create funnels addressing their possible FUDs before they even reach you so that when they do you are already addressing them and converting them quicker. At www.Unthink.me - we focus on creating these funnels so that by the time a client gets a lead is pretty much sold and just needs to be confirmed. That's regardless of the organization's size. Right now we are working to improve a large custom software development agency in New Jersey, www.betabulls.com, with such funnels so that they can truly showcase their expertise, answer questions before they arise, and get better qualified and ready to go leads for software contracts. If your problem is generating leads to begin with well that's just as much homework to get to the point where you know what to put in an ad, website, flyer, banner, card, etc. You need to know who your customer is, you need to understand inbound marketing. Here's a related article: http://blog.unthink.me/what-is-inbound-marketing-and-can-it-really-help-my-business - create buyers persona for your product, assimilate a potential client's situation, their lifestyle, their point in life with the business 'What are they looking for now to grow?" - how can you fit in that possible answer? - create value for them on that specific problem, use their relevant keywords and make the content or value whatever you create - available to them through your fb groups, page, twitter, etc. add it to your website, send out emails, run a PPC campaign addressing this one specific problem and linking the ad to a 'continued reading' page (landing page) instead of directly to a sales/purchase page - people need to be babied and nurtured first and fully trust you and that goes away if you straight for their wallet. If you have any further or more specific questions, because I wrote this with a very broad assumption of your situation, please feel free to message me. Also if you would prefer to hire me and my team at www.Unthink.me - check us out, send me a message and I will answer any question you may have. We are dedicated to remaining the most affordable agency for new and small businesses and work with budgets as low as $100/month! As a thank you, I would appreciate a like to our facebook page: http://facebook.com/iwillunthink - Humberto Valle, CoFounder of Unthink Digital Marketing.

Suggestions in chronological order: 1) First, email them asking for the right person to talk to. If no one responds to your email within 2 days, continue to next step. 2) Do a little LinkedIn research and find names of people you think might be the right people. 3) Call the company and ask the receptionist for the right person to talk to. When you ask this, mention that "I figured it might be [insert one or two LinkedIn names here], but I wasn't sure." If this doesn't work, continue to next step. 4) Set up a geographically targeted Google AdWords advertisement for your keywords ('event', etc). Make the geographic target restricted to within 1 mile radius of whatever company you're targeting. See here for instructions on how to do that: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722043?hl=en Do this for all of your potential clients. If you'd like more detailed suggestions on these and many other methods, let me know. best of luck, Lee

If you're asking for templates, with no offense, maybe you shouldn't be creating a strategy...?

You have to consider what benefits you have to offer contributors, and market those in a concise way. Do you have a blog? If so, you could run interviews and guest posts which offer value to your users and advertising for your contributors. Can contributors work with your startups in a paid way, similar to Clarity? In which case, what makes your site more useful or better than Clarity? Have you designed your business plan with both B2C and B2B considerations in mind? This may take doing a second business plan or finessing your idea.

11 days and not a peep from any 'Top Clarity Experts!' Simple, find the experts you feel are high-converting and arrange a call. Let me know if your like to chat, I've been on Clarity since 2012.

What value do THEY get from subscribing to your newsletter? The answer should be: "lots of value, and I make it obvious to readers in language they care about." I've written two how-to books. In each, I point to a book-specific landing page with resources. For my first (on public speaking as a form of business development), I describe the resources as templates that will save them 20-50 hours of work. In my second book (on managing marketing & creative teams), it's how the templates will help them become a better manager. Throughout each book, I have relevant Call to Action (CTA) blocks that point to the resources—an easy "sell" for how-to non-fiction. If you write fiction, think about what would be compelling. Perhaps your subscribers get first updates about your next book, and private updates about your progress on the writing process (similar to what some Kickstarter campaigns will do). Make it about value to them, and signups will follow. I'm glad to do a call to discuss further. Good luck!

In my mind, private label and building your own brand/nich products is the way to scale on Amazon.

Hi, If you were going to sell the business, the first thing a knowledgeable buyer (or investor) would do is normalize the wage expense vs. fair market. If you and the other founders are not paying yourselves what you would earn working for a stranger, then your financial statements are meaningless because you're literally subsidizing the operations of the company with free labour. You've indentured yourself to this venture. If revenues are growing and you can afford to pay yourselves what a stranger would pay you for the work that you do and there is a profit left over after that, congratulations, you've got a real business. Arrange a call if you'd like to discuss your case in particular. I've gone through this with many clients and helped them through the partnership issues that can normally arise from addressing it. David C Barnett

Sounds like you know most of the important pieces but lack the confidence to jump back into the fray. For more than a few years I have been in love with the Lean Startup approach and the MVP. There will always be pros and cons to any approach, but this methodology still packs a lot of horsepower. I have built several companies in just 90 days. My efforts are turbocharged now with this simple approach. More thorough plans are possible than otherwise might be the case. I use the Lean Canvas by Ash Maurya as my template for any new idea or project that I need to explore in detail before deciding to jump. Then I live in it and share it with others as needed. Those nine blocks in the canvas are pure gold if approached with a few pieces of common sense in hand and if (very big IF) you are willing to take some direction. Look it up at leancanvas dot com and if you want some insight, schedule some time and let's make it happen.

If you have a good amount of traffic, I would like to know first how is that traffic finding your link on social media? Are you actively pushing your content through to them or are random people coming to your profiles and or posts? Are you boosting ads? If you are boosting ads - your problem could be wrong target audiences and or wrong messaging plus wrong landing page ---> which leads you to having the wrong type of offer to the conversion. If you are pushing the feed to random users yourself, you could be using the right words for them to be curious on social media but then they may realize that it wasn't what they thought it was. Also, whether you have an app or not, is important to always think of SEO as a growth / user acquisition strategy effort which means that you or an agency (like Unthink) has to do its homework and create the right target for your content so that is organically found by them. Once you having traffic coming in you can always A/B test everything so that you can see what's working and what is not. If you are interested in further reading, check out this article: Best SEO Practices To Increase User Base Naturally Through Google. http://blog.unthink.me/seo-best-practices-to-growth-hack-startup-user-base --- Unthink Digital Marketing is a full service subscription based marketing agency offering everything from simple websites to full developed apps and content marketing strategies through Hubspot. Visit www.Unthink.Me for more information.

Free 'basic' versions and paid 'pro' versions of software are very common, so it's definately _possible_ that it could be viable. If you want to get investment you'll have to make as convincing an argument as possible that 1) in your hands, 2) with your product, and 3) with your market, it _will_ be viable. The more convincing the argument, the more likely you'll be able to get investment. That means getting some preliminary data (which can take many forms) which makes a convincing argument. See the examples below: Not a convincing argument: "This other company did this and made 10 billion dollars". More Convincing Argument: "In our pilot program, X% of our free users with company size Y ended up converting to paid advanced options, and here's a graph of the increasing rate at which we're able to recruit companies of size Y to the free program." If you'd like more tailored advice for your specific product, send me a link to more background info and I'll look it over, best, Lee

While you might be able to expect initial sales from family and friends who know about it, actual sales from people stumbling upon your book depends on a few factors when you upload it. 1.) Have you chosen the correct keyword phrases and categories? 2.) Are these categories extremely competitive? 3.) Did you incorporate these specific keywords and categories in your title, subtitle, and book blurb?(Note: not everyone can finagle a way into putting the word thriller in their title, but some can do it in their subcategories although at times that may seem too sales pitchy, not that anyone but authors who know what you're doing would notice or even care). 4.) Do you have between one-hundred to three-hundred people ready to buy your book when it is released? (family, friends, subscribers) When you can sell around that many copies the first three days of your release, Amazon's free marketing kicks in. Hot New Releases List, Those Who Bought This Book...etc. That's pretty much awesome sauce if you can manage it. 5.) Does my amazon page look inviting? 6.) Is there too much front matter before the actual sample chapter begins, thus impeding your readers from getting into the book right away? If the answers to these questions are a big fat no,(or a big fat yes to questions 2 and 6) then uploading your book and walking away from it is going to get you nowhere. You essentially need to take your writer's cap off and get serious about marketing. An indie author doesn't get to be complacent in that respect. Becoming a book marketing guru can be daunting and overwhelming when looking at it as a whole, and figuring out where to start has made many authors give up before giving it a chance. Which is why I am super happy to be answering this question for you. Not that you asked how to market your book. I suppose I've basically answered your question, but I'd like to take it a step further and give you a place to start so you aren't flailing around in the deep quagmire of marketing do's and don'ts. Amazon's search engines are designed to find books listed under popular categories and niches so keywords are going to be your best friend. One book that is absolutely stellar at explaining the process behind researching keywords is a book called Making a Killing on Kindle(Without Blogging Facebook Or Twitter) and another book called How to Sell Fiction on Kindle. The Reader's Digest version is this: go to Amazon.com and start typing in your genre in the search tab. The goal is to take your main genre and find subcategories that are popularly searched on Amazon. So when I type in the word Thriller I get "thrillers in books, mysteries and thrillers new releases 2016", etc. Now type in "thrillers a" and you get "thrillers and suspense books" etc. these top key phrases are the ones that are searched the most by people interested in that genre. Now try typing in "thrillers b" and you get "psychological thrillers books" and other key phrases, but this is an important thing to discover. Many people are searching for psychological thrillers. Does your book fall under that category? Is it a psychological thriller, a serial killer thriller, or possibly some other type of thriller that can be narrowed down to a specific niche? This can be a long and arduous way to research keywords and phrases, which is why I think grabbing those books that I mentioned above and memorizing the very dickens out of them is a great beginning for your marketing guru journey. Why? Because most of the research has been done for you, and you get a list of the most highly ranked keyword phrases for your specific genre...all current. You are also given instructions on simple html coding to help make your amazon page sparkle. I hope this information is helpful for you, and good luck with your book. I hope you are able to get it uploaded and visible on kindle as soon as possible. If you’re interested in learning more about the best practices on marketing your books feel free to visit me on my website at The Blond Guerrilla: Guerrilla Marketing, Writing, and Self-Publishing Your Book. http://theblondguerrilla.com Or set up a call and we can work on a plan to help you sell your books. I’m always excited to help fellow authors in their quest to get their books discovered. Happy marketing my author friend!

I'd be happy to give you some initial pointers for free. Send me a URL of your site and I'll check it out. If there are a significant number of fixes that need to be done we could also set up a call to go over everything more thoroughly, best, Lee

Lead with the timing question in your marketing. IE. Sort your prospects by whether they're almost out of their existing plan or not. A quiz might be great if you can capture the lead with that information ("We have important info for you depending on when your existing plan expires")...you could sort the leads by expiry time. You're not "in" the market--like a car dealer is, when they know who bought a car four years ago and is about to get 'the itch'. So you have to go wide and sort. But you can do it intelligently as I suggested.

If you're just working on an MVP you can use a freelancer sight like Upwork, but you have to be careful in your hiring. 1) Post a job stating everyone that applies should give you their github / bitbucket username and Trello username. 2) For the top 5 most promising people to apply, give them a simple task which should take about 30 - 60 min for a decent developer to do (e.g. implement this screen with these one or two actions). 3) Pick the developer that actually delivers exactly what you asked for the fastest, and in the most professional manner (not asking a million questions, etc.). To assign and track this and subsequent tasks use a Trello board with three columns: To Do Doing Done Ask the developer(s) to update the Trello cards in real time so you can keep track of what they're working on and for how long. If you'd like any more specific advice in relation to your specific app idea let me know, best, Lee

You've been doing all the right things, so you're on the right track. Not sure what you mean by, "launch the idea" though. You can't start selling it until you have an MVP (Minimum viable product), and it doesn't sound like you do. Your next steps are to make an MVP and deploy it to people with the appropriate personas you identified in your previous user research. Your MVP, and defined personas will most likely be iterated as you do subsequent testing, that's normal. In order to get people to test out your MVP you don't necessarily need a website or promotional video, but they may help in the recruitment of testers if needed. Nobody other than the people you solicit as testers are going to see the website, so don't worry about that. You don't have to be very secretive, but if you want to be cautious, you can ask if anyone wants to test your MVP (on forums, etc.), and describe it in general terms (i.e. just describe the problem it solves, and maybe generally how). Then for all the people that are interested you can give them the details and show them the device (or whatever it is) and see if they're still interested. You should have all your solicited testers fill out pre- and post- questionnaires which will help you quantify optimal personas, the functionality of your product, approximate price people might pay for it, etc. I've done many of these myself, and also helped lots of other people design them, analyze the results, and iterate their MVP based on the results. Let me know if you'd like any help, or if you have any questions relative to the specifics of your product. best of luck, Lee

Still gather cash flow generating assets for your mom business; such as mortgages, bonds, and other types of debt/s and repackage them into discrete classes based on the level of credit risk assumed by you as an investor. Then you can help your mom get her business publicly trade.

You can quit from anything for any time for any reason. You, or other people reading who want to leave a similar arrangement, may have an operating agreement in place which describes what happens. You still have shares to deal with, for instance. Next time, work out a way of dealing with people up front. That way, disputes will have a path to resolution instead of ending up in this emotional mess you're in. The two of you sound like neither of you really understands business or how business ownership works. Is there value in this business? If there is, you should consider talking to an attorney to protect your rights and property. Your co-founder's concern that nobody will fund the idea if you leave is less important than he believes. People make changes all the time. The question is: does the idea have life in it? If there's genuine value, your being there or not won't have much impact on funding decisions. Yes, founder credibility is important. But it's not the only thing, or the main thing. You are way too wrapped up in this thing emotionally and my advice is that you find ways to disconnect yourself from it entirely (including ownership) ASAP.

I would look into Stripe they seem to be leading the way in developer tools / APIs for payment services.

Hello. I'm a real estate broker, investor, I've completed hundreds of real estate transactions and author of 5 books on investing. Based on my cumulative experience, I would never encourage investing in a region that an investor is unfamiliar. The common misconception is that real estate is easy when it is in fact a brutal business due to the use of leverage. Any miscalculation in your assumptions, will lead to losses. You have to understand the geography, the political climate, the neighborhood, understand where you are in the economic cycle, interest rates and determine if you are in the path of progress. I strongly suggest investing in your locality.

There shouldn't be any "magic" to this. It's stock standard: 1. Set the conversion cap 2. Give them follow on rights should you need another round (you never know) 3. No anti-dillution 4. No liquidation multiple, just preference 5. 7% interest rate That's as fair as fair can be. Don't reinvent the wheel. Also consider a YC safe note. Downloadable and usable straight out the box.

You do not mention whether your site is B2B or B2C, but "corpwriting" suggests the former. In that case, you may wish to write a post on a LinkedIn profile where you are offering an image, a powerful headline, one or two paragraphs, and then a link to your site that the reader can follow to complete the post. You can join relevant groups on LinkedIn (and Facebook as well) and then share your post intro with these groups to reach even more readers. This is one of many strategies that would drive more traffic to your blog, and I can suggest more if you would like to speak with me on a first call.