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Dan Martell answered What is the best reference book to develop a solid business plan for an e-commerce retail sales site?
I don't have a book recommendation but I will suggest reading everything by Matthew Carroll on Quora. He's brilliant when it comes to financial modelling and biz models
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Dan Martell answered What is the number one thing a startup founder can do to ensure a seed stage investment?
Have a product that users / customer are using and continue to use. The goal is to derisk the opportunity for investors and the biggest risk is that you'll build something that nobody wants. Once you have that, then try and find a big enough market and opportunity that justifies a venture investments (many startups don't). And finally, once you do those 2 things - spend time building a list of investors near you, or that have invested in companies near you, then network your way via the entrepreneurs that raised money from those investors to get introductions. Nothings guaranteed but those things will definitely help the probability of you closing a seed round.
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Dan Martell answered What are some good hacks to get mobile app developers spend 20 minutes on customer interview or try out your MVP?
The best way to get developers to complete a customer interview is to go in asking for advice. Position the interview as some research that you're doing for a blog post or paper - that way the feedback isn't filtered based on it being your idea. As for finding mobile app developers, the good news is that they're listed in every appstore on the internet. Maybe start with new & less noteable apps so that you get a good response rate from an email to the founder (usually the developer). The other approach I've done is run ads on Facebook to a survey, or work with a company like SurveyMonkey.com to get answers (although I'm not sure if they can target mobile developers). You can always use Clarity to reach out and conduct interviews - I do this often. Here's a search result for iOS developers https://clarity.fm/search/developer%20ios
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Dan Martell answered What are the secrets to great user testing?
Listen, don’t tell. Conduct it on their computer. Fix the issues after each test .. iterate like mad, especially when you’re small / trying to figure it out.
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Dan Martell answered How can we reward our top users without money and without appearing too big brotherish?
You can start by personally emailing them and saying thanks. Doing something public without their permission isn’t cool. I send Direct Messages on Twitter, emails, all day thanking people.
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Dan Martell answered What are some ways to execute a kick-ass beta phase?
A few thoughts. 1) Get a diverse group (geo + backgrounds) to use it. 2) Invite people to use your product in person (on their laptops), 3) Measure the impact using – iterate and fix all the user flows.
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Dan Martell answered Looking for sources of “micro-angel” funding (~$100K) for a food start-up. Any suggestions?
High net-worth individuals familiar with the industry or credit cards. Visa can make an amazing investor, just be sure to ask for money when you don’t need it.
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Dan Martell answered What's the best way to implement a profit sharing structure in a small agency?
The key is to keep it simple at first and focus on rewarding the right behaviour. You can start by setting a gross revenue goal for the quarter, share with the team, and tell them if we hit that, that everyone will get a bonus. So in some sense, it's not about profit sharing at first. The reason for this is, profit can be manipulated and nothing most employees do can effect this. Also, you may not want to share profit with all your employees. So here's my suggestions for thinking through this
Pro tip: Report on the goal as frequently as you can so everyone knows as soon as possible if you're on track or not. Hope that helps.
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Dan Martell answered The best ideas come from solving a problem your market has. What are a few ways to position yourself in order to more easily spot these problems?
One of the best ways to identify real problems in a market is to be a consultant and actually get paid to help solve the problem. Many great product companies started off this way (ex: Freshbooks, Hootsuite, Shopify, etc). They solved their own problem, and then build a solution so that others could use it. If you're already a startup, and you're trying to refine and learn, then you can do more hands-on deployments for customers, where you actually go in and help them solve the problem with your software. Now, if you start to get paid by the hour to do this work, then you went to far. Either your a service company learning and getting paid, so that one day you can spin out a product, or your a venture backeable startup and doing things that don't scale initially to learn how the customer thinks. The best question I've ever heard to truly understand a customer is to ask "What do you do 3 minutes before, and after, you use our product". That's where the opportunity lies.
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Dan Martell answered When should a startup hire a BD person?
Business Development, like Marketing, should be brought on when the product is ready. That usually means that there's a great understanding of your core customer, the use case, and a business model that scales. I would suggest doing atleast 3 business development deals first to test the model, perfect the process (i.e. comp structure, requirements, marketing assets, agreements, etc) - then if they work, you can bring someone on to go after other identified (similar) opportunities. Just because you have a lot of inbound opportunities to partner doesn't mean you should - be sure to focus on the product, API's (they are the future of BD) and business model to ensure they can support a successful partnership. No sense in doing a campaign where you loose 30% of your margins if you only make 15% = You're loosing money on those deals. It happens way more often then you think.
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Dan Martell answered What are the possibilities to make a business if I decide to publish my software as Open Source? How can I test if a business model works for me?
Typically open-source projects that end up generating a profit have an active product that's already being used. So step 1. Is to open source it and see if anyone uses it - then you can make money in a bunch of ways. Checkout Wordpress, MySQL, Linux for examples - but typically it's providing paid devices for either hosting, managing or customizing the software. The hardest part is getting others to use and contribute to it.
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