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what should be ones priority when looking for a start up partner
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Someone you can fully trust. Someone that complete your own skills. Someone that you can spend time with more than with your wife/girlfriend/etc.
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What's the best way to get large companies to invest in online advertising on my website?
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Media buyers in big companies want to get the best results in minimum risk. For example, models such as CPC and CPA reduce their risk and push it more to you (although in the end everyone simply calculate the ecpm in order to measure campaign success). As you can show them a more targeted and engaged crowed, the easier your sale will be. If you don’t have a big name, try to build a package that includes premium real estate with run of netwrok inventory. Give some discounted prices to start the relationship with and prove the effectiveness of your inventory.
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How should I start to organized my business ambitions?
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Find an idea you are passionate about and just start working on it. The biggest hurdle everyone is facing is just ti start. The moment you passed this, you already passed 95% of the people out there.
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I am 17 and run an eBay Store, that has been very successful. I am now about to start a proper online store, and want to incorporate lots of other features as well. Should I outlay some of my savings and pay someone to design it properly now, or just go on an ecommerce hosting plan and add in the other features later? I want to grow this as fast as I can, and then move onto something else.
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Building your own e-commerce solution is not just about developing it. Most of the cost will come from maintaining it, enhancing it with new features, etc. There are many solutions out there which gives you a “white label”, out of the box solution. I would recommend checking them out, and see if one of them is good enough for you to start with.
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I'm trying to figure out the viability of my startup's current revenue model... does anybody know any examples of websites that subscribers have to pay to become a member?
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Event at times where most services are free there are quite a lot of them out there. One of the very successful ones Angies List. is http://www.angieslist.com/angieslist/
What business vector does your startup falls under? Maybe I can help you with better examples.
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When it comes to user-generated content, how do you go about getting quality content and making it rise to the top?
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Getting quality content on your site means attracting quality users. Doing this mainly requires giving these users some sort of incentive to spend time and effort on your site. Although there are some sites that were successful in implementing money based incentive (Mahalo as aan example), for most users fame is a much better incentive. If you can get people enough readers as well as help them position themselves as experts (for example feature them as “featured experts/users” on the home page), this could help attract them. Of course they first need to know your site. For this, there is no replacement for good old marketing and “legs work”. Try to participate in the communities they live in. Comment on their blog. Talk to them on Twitter, etc…
Now use Google Analytics or other analytics platforms APIs to find the best content (by number of comments, page views, trackbacks, twitter mentions, etc) to find the best content on your site and push it up to your home page.
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Where I can find resources that help me calculate my project budget? I want to consider outsourcing but I dont know the good starting points on the Net. Or people who are willing to help me out with their knowledge.
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For most startups the largest expense is going to be people. A rule of thumb is to calculate between $8,000 to $10,000 per employee per month. This will include al the expenses around it like office, tables, taxes, etc. So if you plan to have 4 employees (including you) who take full salary, you will need aprrox $480,000 budget for a year work (4 * 10 * 12). That said, if you are just starting you might be able to bootstrap by not taking a salary and getting your employees to take very low ones and in return get more equity.
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Shahar, First, thank you in advance for awnsering my question. We are currently developing a web 2.0 tool that monitizes UGC for small to medium size business's. In data collection we have several methods that we will be aplying and have already had a positive response in both social media and seo based methodologies. In your experience what are some proven indexes for getting the best "quality" of content. Were starting to get a stream of data, but I want to be able to show that it is genuine.
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There are many things to look at, but I always liked to look at engagement metrics such as: number of comments, number of raters and rating, number of inbound links and their page rank, etc… The main reasons are: 1. These metrics are harder to fake or scam. 2. It’s easy to use marketing to bring people to a piece of content, it’s much harder to get them to engage with it. For that to happen, the content should touch them in a certain way. I NuConomy we had a module that allowed you to give certain weight to each of this metrics and combine it all together to an engagement rank.
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please help me get started with my esl school in israel? what is needed for me to bring it up and running?
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ESL School? Not sure what you mean. Contact me directly (twitter, email, blog) and we can chat.
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How do you market your startup with a limited budget?
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A long answer can be summarized in: Work hard and be creative. 1. Work hard on your social media efforts. Try to become an expert in your company field and offer valuable content on your site, twitter, Facebook, etc. These can be a great marketing resource for you.
Find an interesting angle about your business and try to market it to blogs, reporters, etc. Think about it from their perspective – can you provide them an interesting enough title and content that other people will want to read?
Instead of paying for conferences booths, simply stand outside of the conference and give your material to people who go there.
Be visible – go to every possible meetup, party, etc and talk with as many people as possible. If you have an interesting story to tell, people will want to keep talking and writing about it. Remember that you are your brand.
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When calling customers to keep in touch, do you think sending emails or text messages works as well as phone calls?
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Phone calls will always have better conversion rate than emails. Emails better than ads, etc. The more personal you get, the better results. That said, phone calls can’t scale like emails so you need to make some compromises there. I highly recommend reading Delivering Happiness where Tony talks about how Zappos call centers are so different than most of their competitors ones.
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When should a company start looking for investment? And what is the best way to start the process?
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Mostly you want to take an investment as late as possible You want to look for investment after you built a prototype, went to beta and can show traction and adoption. That said, if you have a proven track record or great network you can try and raise money before that in order to be able to move faster into the market. The best way to start raising money is through your network. Pound your friends and LInkedIn to get personal introductions to investors. Mostly this is the only way you will get serious meetings.
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