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Clarity

Brad Nickel

Miami, FL

You will get 26 years experience in startups, presentations, app development, strategy, marketing, and UI/UX. I developed the first web-based SaaS, the worldwide standard for network printing, and dozens of tech products for consumers and businesses. I've marketed and sold millions in real and virtual products and services and have advised and mentored 100s of CEOs.

Is your deck ready to raise money or sell your product? Is your product in the right market and at the right price? Are you targeting correctly and hitting the right emotional and psychological buttons? Is your product usable, intuitive, and ready for market? You'll get straightforward advice from our call on marketing, targeting, strategy, tech / product, pitching, UI/UX, hiring and leadership decisions and more. MBA professor, pitch deck and presentations expert, startup planning, digital marketing, and leadership/management. http://clickbrain.com.

$3.33/min

8

8 Calls

17

17 Reviews

34 minutes
Avg. call

Business Development Digital Marketing Startups Strategy Online Marketing Mobile Apps Presentations Investor Presentations Presentation Coaching Pitch Development

Call me to talk about

Partner and Channel Marketing and Sales

Channels, partnerships, and networking. Whether you are a startup or a growing company, utilizing the customer base of other companies can be incredibly powerful. I'll help you plan and build your market strategy.

Public Speaking for the Rest of Us

If you are seeking help with public speaking and presenting, then you are seeking help with persuading and captivating audiences. The last thing you need are a bunch of paint by numbers steps to take for being a great public speaker. You need a solid understanding of your topic and how best to persuade the people to whom you are speaking. Once you have those under your belt, then you can enhance your delivery.

Overcoming your fear of speaking by making yourself memorize a bunch of rules and steps is only going to make you do a crappier job than you feared in the first place.

I've coached CEOs, VPs of Sales, MBA students, politicians, and hundreds more in how to effectively deliver speeches and presentations. From writing tips to understanding your audience and their motivations, I can help prep you for the real world of public speaking.

Forget the rules and get on track. Your audience doesn't care whether you are imagining them naked or you put your hands in your pockets. They are there for you to persuade and they are there to listen. If you give them something even halfway intriguing and interesting for their life and their needs and remember that it is all about them and not you, then you can have success.

We will review your topic, anything you've written and if you have a deck we can revamp that too. We'll analyze together and understand your goals and we'll structure a speech or presentation that will sell whatever it is you need to sell whether it be an actual sale of services or goods, yourself, an idea, a project, or anything else, we will make you a persuading machine that is confident in yourself and your knowledge. After that, the speech itself is a piece of cake.

After we structure and write what you will cover, I will teach you how to prepare without memorizing anything. We will practice and rehearse and at the end of it all, you will be a confident, strong, and persuasive speaker ready to deliver on what you wanted from your speech.

Get in touch and I'll help you accomplish your goals. Thanks!

App Sherpa - Get Your App Right Without Getting Screwed

Getting a new app to market is difficult if you have experience with planning, managing, and hiring developers, but if you are new to this business or just need help getting prepared, it can be very difficult. About 70% of all clients I've had that have hired outsourced developers have ended up with significant problems, because they didn't know how best to hire and manage a development team. I can help you from spec and interface all the way through to launch make sure your app is hitting the right market, hiring the right developers, getting the right price, managing the project, and getting ready for launch. Every aspect can be handle by us or we can advise you and guide you as you proceed. Either way, we will be your App Sherpa making sure you reach the summit.

Get Your Pitch Deck and Presentation Right

Your pitch and presentation are critical to your success in raising money and selling your product. I've been teaching and coaching entrepreneurs and sales teams to create and deliver the best presentations possible while incorporating the science of persuasion into the structure and copy of their content for years.

Having given and built 1000s of presentations and taught presentation skills to MBA students while mentoring startups of all types, I am uniquely positioned to help you get you're pitch right to raise money and sell your products and services. My experience building, launching, and growing startups while helping companies of all sizes grow means you also get help with your overall strategy. Your presentation coach needs to have the right business experience if they are going to guide you to a successful pitch and raise.

Every presentation you give has the goal of persuading your listeners, but if you don't understand the psychological keys to moving your listeners to action, then you are less likely to be successful. If your deck is just a recitation of the standard startup slides, then you are less likely to succeed. I make sure your deck hits the right notes at the right time and you are prepared for your potential investor or customer.

Whether you want a strategic deck built from scratch or need coaching and critique of your presentation style, I can help.

Besides strategy, content, structure and persuasion tactics, we can also provide a cutting edge design for your presentation.

Get your pitch right. I'm here to make sure you succeed.

App Critque and Positioning

I am a master app shredder and although they cringe when they ask me to critique their app, my clients and mentees love what they get when I am done. My goal with any app critique is to get to the core of the user motivation. How to I get them to the end goal rapidly and eliminate all the excess that creeps into every app. Sometimes you can't see the feature creep for the bloat. Get a set of expert eyes on the what you'd created and them implement the changes.

Answers 7
Reviews 17

Answers

Brad Nickel answered

How do I sell email marketing software that I own?

Tough market. Would need some really compelling features and capabilities in order to compete but hopefully that is the case with that significant an investment. If you would like to discuss the potential please reach out to me. Having been a pioneer in the SaaS space I've mentored / advised a lot of companies on bringing their software to market.

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Sales

Brad Nickel answered

What's an alternative to equity based compensation that recruits, motivates and retains employees?

A lot of great answers.

It's been my experience, that a lot of solid feedback and encouragement goes a long way. I want my team armed with all the skills they need or want to do a great job and if they want to pursue something on their own, then I've done a great job as their "boss", because they've grown. If they leave for another job, then who am I to tell them they should stay. Something wasn't motivating them or I was doing something wrong. That said, I have had a lot of people go away in situations where it wasn't my company and then when I went out on my own, they came back to work for me again.

I challenge my teams to grow beyond their comfort zone and I reward them for accomplishing growth. Sometimes the reward is simple and enthusiastic acknowledgement to them or the company and sometimes its financial or perk based.

I do think profit sharing in one form or another is a great way to help motivate your team, but it will never be enough alone to motivate people.

One of the benefits of being growth minded for your team, is that no matter what happens, you know that you've been a part of helping them as a person.

I once worked for a woman that reprimanded me as a VP for being friends with my team, while I watched everyone around them fleeing the sinking ship except for my friends on my team. Everyone is different, but I can't help but become involved in my team's lives and for that I get a lot of rewards.

As a startup, you have a lot to consider and it depends on the talent you need. If you need developers for a technology product, then you are going to have to compete on wages and benefits and it may be difficult to recruit without equity unless you have a solid and followed profit sharing plan. You can though also compete on culture, atmosphere and team dynamics. If someone interviews with you and your team and walks away excited about your mission, your product, and your people, then it may follow that higher wages and equity aren't required initially. If you are a one-man band and bootstrapping, you are going to have to also prove that your vision has legs and that you can drive revenue. Lots of folks will join a risky startup, if the backend rewards can be significant, but you will have to prove a little more potential stability if you want them to invest their career in you.

Sorry for the rambling brain dump. Feel free to follow-up with me if you have any questions.

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Early-stage Startups

Private Equity

Hiring

Brad Nickel answered

How do you stay calm and make good decisions when your lean start up starts to get too lean...?

I really don't know enough about your product to give you a comprehensive answer, but the best way to raise money is to sell something. Having been through this several times before, here are some of the solutions we've used. In this case, you don't want to sell equity, so you either need to presell your product if it doesn't exist or you need sell your testers or early adopters if it's already available.

If you are offering a product in the B2B space, then it might be a good idea to sell a lifetime license to potential clients for a discount off what they would pay for the regular product, but enough cash to keep you going. It may take multiple to make it work, but it could work.

You can also try to do the same with consumer products and services and offer lifetime or other advantages for a larger upfront commitment.

Although distracting, you could also consider offering services around what you are selling to enhance the revenue stream from the product.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about how to pull this off.

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Equity Funding

Lean startup

Brad Nickel answered

What is the best way to bid on a website domain auction?

If this is something that will improve your business, allow you to start a business, or in some way will have a positive impact on what you want to accomplish, then trying to game the auction won't be effective. First and foremost set what you are willing to pay for it in your mind based on what value it will have for you short and long term.

If it is a revenue producer, then if nothing happened to improve it, how long will it take to get your money back.

If it has some other positive impact, then determine what that value is to you and the very highest possible level and then set a dead hard last price on it.

On Flippa, I typically wait to see where things are at the last few hours. If it's got value to me and the bids are in my range, then I jump in at the last hour and see where it goes from there. Flippa extends the auction automatically though, so there's no value in sniping.

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Domain Registration

Business Strategy

Domains

Brad Nickel answered

What is the standard equity stake for an advisor of a pre-funded and pre-revenue mobile app startup?

There isn't really a standard. If you know what the advisor would normally bill for their time, I would start there. Determine how many hours they will put in and then what they would normally bill per hour. The next part is the hard part. What is the startup worth? We sometimes will wait until the first round of funding and extrapolate out the stake then based on the valuation, but we also normally insist on part of the payment in cash. You can also set and agree to a valuation at the time the work starts, but that could bog you down in a lot of negotiation.

Both sides need to agree on deliverables and value of the advisor to the startup getting off the ground.

Sometimes an advisor is so impactful, that it might make sense to offer closer to founders level shares, but that is all in the determination of value.

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Business Advisory

Early-stage Startups

Advisor

Brad Nickel answered

How can I take an idea for a new app and turn it into a real product?

As another comment said, you have a lot of work ahead of you. Here are some questions:

1. Have you validated the idea(s)? In other words, does anyone want what you want to develop? If it is a game or entertainment related app, validation is much more difficult and that is not my area of expertise, but if it has utility, productivity, or business implications, then you can interview the people that would use the app. Before you do that, I would either hand draw or use one of the numerous mockup tools out there to create what you envision the product doing.

What problem are you solving?
What are the benefits to the users or company or both?

These are all core components to understand before you even go down the road of development.

2. What is the market viability for the product? If people want it and it solves a real problem, how many people will want it? Is it enough to v make the investment of your time and your money to make it work?

3. Do you have the money to build it and then to market it?

Learn to code or use other tools that will let you build with less coding knowledge. You still need to understand concepts though. I like LiveCode (https://livecode.org) and Bubble (https://bubble.is/home). You could also use these tools to mockup the interface to provide for interviews or to a developer to get a quote.

You need to get a quote if you can pay someone to do it and that requires a detailed description of the product, mockups of the screens and flow, and other technical details. There are a lot of dangers in using outsourced development shops, because they may give you a low ball quote and then hold you hostage through the development process. I can't list all of the things you have to be careful of, but happy to help you with that process if you are interested.

In my decades of working with entrepreneurs that are not technical, I would say that about 75% of the ones that have already hired a developer were screwed over in some way.

If you are looking for a developer to do it for you for equity in your company, then you need at the least an executive summary of what the app will do, what the potential market is, and how much you think you can make with some basic financial projections. You also need to be prepared to understand and implement the legal aspects of it. You need to convince a developer that investing their time will be worth it and that is not an easy task.

Finally, if you've come up with a powerful enough idea, find an investment group, incubator, or accelerator that would be willing to invest and that already has a reputable development company with whom they work.

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Social Media

Software Development

Brad Nickel answered

How can I find a custom B2B contact list provider?

I've removed this answer, because I really wasn't answering the question directly.

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Lead Generation

Marketing

Email List Building

Reviews

I had a great call with Brad. Has was very pleasant to speak to and provide heart felt feedback and ideas as though the business was his. I came off with newer ideas and feedback than I imagined. Every second of the call was worth it.

Kess Eburu Source: Clarity

I enjoyed my call with Brad. He's got the experience I was looking for, but more importantly, he was proactive in helping me.

Prior to our call he researched my website and was able to offer custom advice. This level of feedback is rarely given, and I am appreciative of Brad's support.

Eric Conley Source: Clarity

I honestly don't know where to start, I spent a few hours going through many different profiles, but something gravitated me towards Brad profile. I reach out to him and he got back to me right away. All I can say is Brad is a gem of a person that exemplifies what it means to be an altruistic, selfless, generous, kind, and honest individual. I will forever be grateful to Clarity for creating such a wonderful, amazing platform. I highly, confidently, and most definitely recommend Brad!

Source: Clarity

Brad brought to the conversation a wealth of valuable insights. He spent the time going through our information previous to the call, so our call was productive from the get go. As a result of the call with Brad we starting fine-tuning our marketing strategy. Brad also gave us specific tips on how to test our marketing initiatives. Very useful conversation!

Juan Olano Source: Clarity

Had a short call with Brad who was hugely helpful. I felt like I was at a crossroads, not knowing which road to take, and after the call I know exactly where to go. Thanks Brad!

Robert Neckelius Source: Clarity

Brad is a great guy who gets the job done. Smart politics and IT mix. Always came through in a pinch.

Charles Chamberlain Source: LinkedIn

"Venali 2004-2006: As the Director of Channel sales I worked closely with Brad and his marketing team to position our internal and our business partners' integrated solutions to meet our strategic sales and marketing goals. Brad's extensive marketing experience with web-based promotions, education and publishing helped the Channel division promote partner solutions that made our company unique in our industry space. Brad's expertise, exceptional marketing vision, and his team's integral participation enhanced our Channel sales with unparalleled results."

Bob Buettner Source: LinkedIn

Brad demonstrated to me that he understood what business is all about. He thrived under adversity. Almost without exception, he put the customer first, feeling as I do that the key to good business is satisfied customers. I suppose doing well in business is easy if you are, as he was, driven in equal measure by both quality and efficiency. I admired him for his many valuable qualities, and regarded him with evermore respect. Very goal oriented as well as a team player, Brad was always punctual, yet easygoing. He was keenly devoted to his work, but being a real people person, he was also enjoyable to be around. I have no hesitation in recommending Brad Nickel and I feel confident he would be an asset to any organization.

Richie Doletina, CSSBB, CCISO Source: LinkedIn

Brad's one of the most friendly and knowledgable marketing professionals I've ever had the pleasure of working with. He's able to understand complex web applications at all levels even down through the underlying systems and then identify possible partners and their respective synergies.

Bradley Pirman Source: LinkedIn

I reported directly to Brad Nickel at Venali, Inc. As VP of Marketing, Brad was a terrific manager who respected his team and was able to assess and sharpen the individual skill sets of each team member, myself included.

I worked with Brad for a number of years and appreciated his management style and his ability to delegate responsibility. Brad was instrumental in growing our company’s marketing initiatives and fostered a collaborative environment. He inspired me to learn more and motivated our team to effectively and efficiently solve our marketing communication challenges, particularly in technology and social media.

Brad generated enthusiasm about the marketing process and was always upbeat and positive, which spilled over to other departments in the company. He is a tremendous asset to any organization and I thoroughly enjoyed the time I worked with him. Without reservation, I highly recommend Brad for any endeavor he chooses to pursue.

Kim Isaak Source: LinkedIn

Brad Nickel is highly intelligent and creative. As a VP, he managed the marketing team through various time consuming projects, such as a complete redesign of the corporate website, marketing collateral, trade shows and other promotional projects. He is highly respected by his peers and his enthusiasm is contagious.

Cristina Ebert Source: LinkedIn

Member since August 2014