Hi, Your question is super long, not 100% clear, and your attitude is negative. Not the best approach if you need assistance from people. In any event, I help train people to give investor pitches and to be public speakers/lectures. I also teach entrepreneurship at a university and give guest talks. I'm happy to give you a free 15 minute call to try understand your needs and your products/services. After the initial call, if I have any valuable advice, we can schedule another short paid call. I've successfully helped over 300 entrepreneurs and would be happy to try and help you. Be positive, positive things will come to you. Good luck

Sure, it's always good to do SWOT at any point of time in business. It gives you a perspective on what's going right and what might go wrong. Critical it is to undertaking enhancements in your business and marketing strategy. It can also drive you towards innovation. Go ahead and do that!

Investors fund businesses that show promise and a handful of bookings wouldn't cut the deal. How are you going about marketing and branding it? If you have a strong website that offers flawless experience, then, the right marketing strategy can be the game changer to attract the target audience as well as investors. If you can share what you have been doing in the past 6 months, I can list out the ones you are missing out on. To get out the tight spot, I would recommend that one of you should get a job and the other one continues working on the startup. If you truly believe in the idea and there is no market leader, then, don't shut down. Look for other sources of raising money. Good luck!

Always ask for reviews. If you're getting lots of small jobs that means lots of new, happy customers. Make sure to ask them for reviews on Google and/or Facebook. Also, start advertising. If you are using a CRM for the small jobs you can use that audience list to create a 'similar audience' on Facebook for advertising. Also use Google Ads and create a campaign around your demographics and keywords that bigger jobs would represent. Good luck!

By learning how to be resourceful. Getting the money you need from the people who have it. Take a current look at your assets and if you can use them to secure funds. Look at your network is there people who may be interested in investing. Bootstrap, start a kickstarter, low interest business loan, competitions, get your early adopters to pay prior to receiving your product. Resourcefulness is a key factor to getting more money.

Er... You don't require investors, you require customers. I know many people running this type of business. Startup cost is $0. Well, whatever your site hosting costs every month. Best starting point is just to research other Medical + Dental Tourism companies. Clone what they do. Pay your time generating clients, not looking for investors... which you don't require... which will ask for a large chunk of your business... and likely won't talk with you, if you're just starting. Intone this mantra all day long... Customer not Investors... Customer not Investors... Customer not Investors...

Having sold to these businesses in a variety of capacities I agree demonstrating the value and benefit to them can be quite challenging. The smaller a business is the more cautious they will tend to be with their limited marketing dollars. My advice is to focus on low risk strategies where you offer value without commitments from them to build a relationship. Make them give you a killer offer to maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns (Free is a magic word). Once they see the direct response to your efforts let the fear of loss do the selling for you. Also ATTRIBUTION (think tracking) is key to getting past the hook point. I may be of service in refining your pitch. Thanks!

First of all, congrats on starting your business! I was head of product for a marketplace company in the hiring space for 4 years so I have a significant amount of experience building a marketplace similar to yours from the ground up. I also know how challenging it can be to reach your customer base! These types of businesses are extremely fragmented and so it can be difficult to reach "critical mass" where your cost per new customer drops significantly. Here are some suggestions: 1. Study your competition. There are plenty of other marketplaces out there like yours (at least given the brief synopsis above) so you can see what has worked for them by studying their public growth tactics. Are they relying heavily on Google AdWords? Do they put out a lot of content that gets significant traffic? Do they have strong referral programs/rewards that seem to be successful? Take a look at these and assume that anything they are doing is at least worth a test for you 2. With any marketplace it's incredibly important to grow both sides of the market (supply AND demand) at similar rates, otherwise one side will not be happy (and if they aren't happy they won't retain). Because of this, I would be hyper focused on your growth by either field/location/etc. Don't try and build your entire platform across all categories at once. Start small with one or just a few key, high demand, categories and focus all of your marketing budget/attention at these demos. If you spread yourself too thin no one will be happy. 3. Rely on what I call the "second mover advantage". Because there are other platforms doing similar things, find ways to use those platforms to grow your own. Contact freelancers on the other platforms, or post your own projects that eventually lead people back to your platform. Make sure you aren't violating terms of service, but do everything right up until that line to bring customers from more established platforms over to yours: offer incentives, discounts, even operate at a loss to get your first customers on board. You are lucky that you don't need to build demand in this sector from scratch so use that as an advantage. Good luck, and if you'd like to discuss further let me know!

To say thats a good idea or if it will work? You can't. It all depends on the location, History, and Audience it attracts. If people aren't paying for something currently they're not going to want to have to start. Start off do the research.

Since you mentioned you're raising a seed round, I strongly suggest not using an investment banker. At the seed stage, VCs are investing in you more than your business—putting a banker in the middle will do you a lot of disservice. IBs are typically used for Series B and beyond. I also noticed that you call yourself an engineering services firm—typically services companies don't make good VC fundable businesses. If you have a product that you can spin off and raise money for, that might be more attractive. Happy to chat in more detail about the fundraising process if you wish.

Clarity's terms of service state that: "You (as a Seeker) may cancel an Appointment without penalty; provided, however, that you have not already initiated the call with the Expert via the Services. You (as an Expert) may cancel a scheduled Appointment without penalty at any time." I personally think that if the cancellation is done up to about 3-4 hours before, then it's reasonable not to charge, but anything less than that should come with a partial cancellation fee. I personally spend anywhere from 10-30 minutes preparing for a call in order to promise the most value for the caller. I don't expect to be paid for this time, but if the caller doesn't cancel and just doesn't show, there should be a cancellation fee. Alternatively, each user (including experts) should have 2 'no-shows' after which they get blocked. If it gives you any comfort, I know that the caller's 'Clarity Score' is negatively effected.

I think it makes total sense. If you provide some standard dashboards with number of messages over time and similar, you can get everybody started. And it will give you a platform to interact with the subscribers. In my view, that is the cheapest and most low-risk way of developing it - to work with your customers. No way to know now, whether high level of sophistication is needed. Consider doing your interaction as a blog, a support community or something similar to formalise the interaction. That would push yourself forward as well, and put a face on your service. If you are cloudbased, you can do frequent launches of small changes in the analytics, and talk about them in your community. Also, consider looking into the thoughts of Design Thinking, which would give you different tools for teasing out the thoughts in your community. Good luck with your subscription platform!

Oh man, this is such a complicated question because it depends on the industry. I've worked with dealerships to OEMs to gyms to dentists and retailers - and it all depends. Doing a combination of digital and direct is always a great place to start because you have options under both categories. Try running a Google campaign while also cold calling. If that doesn't drive results, try Facebook and networking. The point is to experiment to find what works for you. You might have a strong in-person skill set where others might excel with ad copy. Use what you do best and keep at it! And keep trying new things. You'll find it!

I've had great experience as a user of Udemy and write my own courses but offer those privately for my clients. It's always better to build a course that answers a specific need. Think about the avatar for your business. You can't meet everyone's needs. Build a course with no more than 8 segments or modules with 4 - 8 learning segments within each module. You will allow the user to achieve rapid and measurable results by completing each section and ending each module with an assessment (quiz) that further validates learning the skill. Udemy is easy to use so you will have a broad audience looking for specific needs.

Hi, the essential thing before fundraising is to understand if you are "investment ready." Fundraising is a full-time job and a lot of startup waste time and resources trying to fundraise when they can't (the basic metrics are not there). So step number one is to check if you have the essential elements to start the conversation with a potential investor. Then you need to start working on all the investment material. When you have all the investment material in place you can start connecting with investors.

I would try to contact lawyers directly, pointing them out to specific potential clients on your platform. It's a labor-intensive job but be sure that after they get their first client on the platform, they will stick around. I would target "fresh" independent lawyers that are trying to build a career. They are looking for a client base and are hangry.

Hi, you need someone that has done investment before. An investor is better than a startup founder that has raised capital. An investor looks daily at a startup pitch and knows exactly what are the key elements that a pitch need to be interesting. Fundraising is a full-time job and a lot of startup waste time and resources trying to fundraise when they can't (the basic metrics are not there). So step number one is to check if you have the essential elements to start the conversation with a potential investor. Then you need to start working on all the investment material. When you have all the investment material in place, you can begin connecting with investors.

Read Dan Kennedy's + Bill Glazer's books to start with. Speak at https://Meetup.com events + tech/niche related conferences.

Interesting question, but I doubt anyone humble enough will be able to answer it in a few lines. I'll use an example from sports to answer: all baseball/soccer/football teams have the same amount of players (on the field) and the same roles/positions. They usually also have a similar amount of managers. Why then do some teams succeed and others fail? The answers are one, and most often a combination, of the below (the bigger the organization/team, usually the more reasons): 1. Individual talent (of the employees and/or of the managers). 2. Lack of experience (of the employees and/or the management). 3. bad fit of the business for the market (this could be a bad fit in general, or just at the present time). 4. (the manager) Not knowing how to inspire and motivate your team. 5. The manager's managers not knowing how to inspire and motivate the manager. 6. Not enough money (this is often used as an excuse, but can often be a legitimate reason - there is only so much a person can do with a limited budget) Many excellent answers have been written on the subject, and I am sure that they are more elaborated that mine. A good start would be "The One Minute Manager" - it's old, a bit 'corny' and has some generalizations, but as I said: it's a good start. I've successfully helped over 300 entrepreneurs, and I'd be happy to help you if you need. Good luck

You can easily search online + find individuals running Solo companies (0 employees) making 6-7 figures/year doing this. Just find a few. Pattern your business after theirs.

Don't start with the KPIs, start with the responsibilities. Think of everybody in your business and list out what your performance expectations are of each person. Then determine how you will know if those expectations have been met: what are the outcomes you will track for each. Those are your KPIs. For example: you expect your sales people to sell. That is a fine starting point. But what does that mean? - Do you expect new clients? And if so how many? At what value? - Do you expect return business? How much? How often? - Do you expect up-sells? How often? - What activities to expect to see to lead to these results? - How many clients do you expect to see? What percentage of business is new, versus old? Are you high value low volume or the other way around? This will be a more effective way to find realistic measurements that are both easy to track, and easy to share and "sell" to your employees.

You may want to look at other lenders and options. See if you can find one that will allow you and your friend to set it up the way you described. Another option is to look for private lenders to fund your deals. Hope that helps!

I had the same question. Clarity told me it was a bug in their system right now and it will be fixed soon. That was a month ago.

Having effectively run a young digital agency as well and growing revenue by over 400% within 6 months, I will share what worked for us. Word of mouth remains your best customer acquisition channel. Referrals paved a way for us in an industry that was already overcrowded. How did we achieve this? We did three things. 1. Niche Marketing: We offered our services strictly to the growing startup community in our city. This tightly knit community who watched each other's moves closely began to notice our work on other startups and reached out to achieve same results. We spent $0 on marketing at this point just by doing this. 2. Free! Free! Free! - Give out free items but be strategic about it. A unique way we applied this was by finding influential business leaders within the startup community and offering them our service for free - A free explainer video. Who says no to free stuff? Most of the CEOs and founders we reached out to were 'delighted by the honor'. In turn they became our brand advocates as they were very pleased to tell other people about us, most especially at speaking events. This strategy alone accounted for 40% of our revenue. 3. Brand Positioning: This strategy is the most effective. It hinges on the idea that by making your agency an expert in a certain field, you make your agency a lead market. People like to share their problems with experts who they believe know and understand the problems best. You can easily do this through many ways, here are some unique ones: 1. Industry thought leadership Articles. 2. Gaining massive press exposure (Everybody wants to work with the popular brand) 3. Distributing Free guides on topics your target audience cares about. I hope this helps.

The same way companies grew before there was the Internet — boots on the ground, people-to-people networking, outbound sales outreach and time.