Ryan Kelly

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• Hi Ryan, I am creating a fitness marketplace and need advice on how to attract people to my landing page for concept validation. Do you have an specific advice on how to draw in fitness consumers and trainers without spending money? Thanks!

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    You could try posting to various sites asking for feedback or advice on the concept, like maybe HackerNews, Quora, LinkedIn. You could run a poll on Facebook.

    You could run a free Kiss Insights survey on the landing page asking something like “is this something you would pay for? Y/N/Maybe”

    I don’t think you need thousands of visitors for customer validation. One of the exercises used at 3 Day Startup, is to “get out of the building” and talk to potential customers. Try to collect some objective data through surveying.

    Practice lean startup methodology to get through the customer validation phase.

• I'm work on a classifieds site for the island (population about 60K) I live on. Right now there are several others that are really bad (off the shelf php classified systems). So my question is, when should I start talking or marketing my product? I'm afraid that because of the size of the island, the competition will have a jump on updating their sites and perhaps take the heat/flame out of my fire. Any advice you can give would be greatly appreciated thanks!

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    If you’re worried that the competition will be able to quickly replicate what you’ve done, then I’m worried you don’t have enough differentiation.

    Do something different….shake up the market. Make it hard to replicate where they would have to scrap what they have and start over to compete with you.

    Don’t compete on features…..compete on value.

• Hi Ryan I am starting a new internet co and need a software developer. Is it smart to take any precaustions at this stage with people I speak to like ask them to sign a non compete or non disclosure or is it unnessary at this point

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    I think it’s un-necessary until you’ve actually written some code, and you are getting a developer involved then. Starting a conversation off with “before I can tell you the idea, I need you to sign all this stuff” kind of gets someone uninterested, real fast.

• 2Qs: Our mobile app is a disabling technology - think Aegis DriveAssist - addressing work/life balance - There's new-stories about the negative effects resulting from the blurring of the line between private & professional lives. - HR topics are a fuzzy concept that people understand, but hard to communicate still and harder to put a call to action. How can we: 1) Communicate the advantages of respecting employees private life 2) How/who to pitch a disabling technology (CTO or CHO)

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    I’m not entirely sure if the disabling is for my personal phone at work, or my business phone at home.

    I actually really like the concept around being able to disable my electronic devices when I’m home in the evening. So many entrepreneurs struggle with work/life balance, and find it incredibly difficult to “turn off” work when they get home.

    They way I would pitch it might be around “get your life back”, or “improve your marriage” kind of thing.

    If you’re talking about restricting personal devices in the workplace, I would be against that. I run a fairly open work environment with my employees – and I find it strange when companies want to limit access to certain sites, Facebooking, Tweeting, etc. I prefer to treat everyone like adults :)

• If a browser based service is going into the beta stage with a revenue model of free basic, premium subscription, ultimately high traffic ad revenue. What is your opinion to attract potential advertisers early, and should the company use adsence and things of that nature when they are building their traffic numbers until they reach the numbers they need.

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    Personally, I’m not a fan of sites/apps/businesses that rely on an ad revenue model. I’ve worked with some large sites (i.e. 1mm visits/mo) who were relying on ad revenue, and it was tough.

    I’m more interested in your subscription service and the problem you’re trying to solve.

• Hi Ryan! I am opening up a holiday rental website, It will be released shortly. Would it be a good idea to offer free sign up for 6 months to get as many properties as possible on there or not? I am putting up a page this week for people to register for a free sign up. However once the site is released people will then have to pay to list their properties. The whole idea of putting this page up is to get as many properties to sign up as possible so properties will exist when site is released

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    I think your going to have to think through the model here. Airbnb.com allows property owners to list their place for free, and if rented, AirBnB gets a 3% cut and handle the whole transaction.

    Granted, they may not be the same exact site, but you would be going against the grain here in my opinion.

    I’m also not sure if by the word “holiday”, you meant “vacation” or and actual holiday. Either way, you have a cart-horse problem, and will likely need to make the listings free to post for the foreseeable future until you can get some traction with closing rental agreements.

• Hi Ryan, Here's a question that might be geared up you alley. I'm validating a business idea using Google AdWords and came across this test using their traffic estimator tool. Here's a screen shot: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/33173113/AdWordsTrafficEstimate.jpg Does the search term with over 6 million monthly searches mean there's an untapped niche with little competition? Thanks, Josh

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    Hi Josh,

    not necessarily. It looks like, even though you’ve hidden the search terms, that they were run in “broad match”, which means that you’re going to get a lot more garbage in because your ad will appear for more non-relevant terms.

    There should be another column there for Competition, which Google displays kind of like PageRank, a number from 0-10. There are some edge cases where there is a lot of search volume, and little competition (which “might” translate into low CPC’s), but it’s unusual.

    I also must warn you of the accuracy of Google search volumes: http://www.pearanalytics.com/blog/2011/how-accurate-are-google-adwords-search-volumes/

• Where can I go to find startup mentors?

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    Sprouter.com is a great place to start! Apply to an incubator (TechStars, Y Combinator, Capital Factory, etc.) – they always have lots of mentors there.

• Hi Ryan. When presenting an investor with an Executive Summary pitch, is it necessary to provide the dollar figure you're looking for as well as the equity stake you're willing to give up? Or should one wait until interest is shown to discuss valuation? Thank you.

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    When presenting to an investor, they want to know the following:

    1. who you are
    2. what your product is
    3. traction you have (if any, like # of users, downloads, etc.)
    4. who your customers are
    5. who your competitors are
    6. why you are dramatically different
    7. the size of the market you’re in
    8. the opportunity (here is where the ask comes in….like “we need $X to get this to phase Y”)
    9. revenue projections

    The valuation discussion, in my experience, is pretty “hand wavy” in early stage startups. If they like you, you’ve got some tractions, they believe in your product and the market you’re in, you could get a high valuation and have never made a $1 in revenue.

    Sometimes they will look for a much larger chunk in the first “seed” round, knowing that they will get diluted along the way, so the valuation might start low.

    A close friend of mine closed a round in the hosting/tech space and got about $250K for about 18%.

• I'm looking to advertise on a website, and they told me the minimum was $10K a month, but since I'm a startup, they said they would give me half off. I'm looking to drive traffic to this targeted market. Is this a good deal? The Alexa rank of the site is in the top 1,000.

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    It seems a bit steep to me, but I’m almost willing to try anything as long as I can effectively measure the results. You’re going to need to know what CPL (cost per lead) is the maximum you can bear. It will vary from industry to industry, and your product/pricing model, but 15% of your cost per acquisition (CPA) is a good start (or, in other words, what are you willing to pay for a new customer?)

    I wrote a blog post last year about this, and measuring the results of paid sources MUST equal or better the conversion rates from SEO, or other free sources.

    http://www.pearanalytics.com/blog/2010/free-marketing-tools-for-startups/

    Also, you can try advertising for a lot less on sites like buysellads.com.