Would a Tour bus or trailer that is a venue itself work? How could I tweak it to make it work?

If you're a service business and haven't been able to make profit, then I highly doubt investors are going to get involved. The beauty of selling your time is you can get people to buy right away, and if they pay anything above $25/hour - then you should make profit assuming you can live off of $50K/year salary. All that being said, here's what I did when I almost went bankrupt building my company Spheric Technologies (at the time I had 3 employees). 1) I got on the phone and started calling old friends loosely tied to the industry and asked for advice. Doing so introduced me to new opportunities, ideas and connections. I spend every night - after working 8 hours with a client - emailing and calling 15+ people. Some I knew, some I didn't, many I hadn't talked to in years. 2) Focused on sales & getting paid faster. Many times - especially a service based business - will die due to cashflow issues... they can't afford to pay their employees bi-weekly, and wait on the sidelines while their customers pay them net 30, 45 or worse 60+. So I hustled to get my existing customers to pay me Net 0, and going forward, got a deposit (20% up front) and kept the invoice every 2 weeks, Net 0, paid via wire transfer or credit card. 3) Refined the business to focus only on 1 customer type that was profitable. In the early days you take on anything that will "make you money" but you quickly learn that not every customer is the same. If you know this, stop working with customers where you can't make 30% net profits off a project, and use that as your filter for new opportunities. Also, raise your prices if you aren't making profit. Someone in your industry is... so can you. Unfortunately, there's no short cut or silver bullet - but the pattern to follow is listed above. I eventually grew that business to 30 employees in 4 years (bootstrapped 100%) and was acquire in May 2008 before the crash. It was the easily the most intense time of my life, but I learned A LOT of lessons that I continue to use today. Call if I can help, but assuming I maybe priced outside of your range ... that being said, there's thousands of other folks who can help for as little as $30, so get on a call today.

Regardless of your launch date - keep calm. Having a competitor or twenty is all but a certainty in our new business environment. It has never been easier to discover a problem, validate a solution, build a product and reach customers. But that goes for everyone. I'd urge you to consider a few questions: 1. Competitive Intelligence: If this competitor's offering is very similar to yours - what can you take away from a year (nearly) of their operations? Can you use this intel to modify your own product or approach? What have they learned in a year that you can use as a shortcut? Have they shown success in a particular vertical? If so, can you also focus there? This isn't an exhaustive list of questions on this topic - just pointing out that there is likely a silver lining to this cloud of competition. 2. Product The question of "is this ready to release?" "should I do it now, or later", "if later, how much later, when is the right time to launch" is one I field more than once a week. My opinion always skews to the "as close to now as practical." Watching founders struggle over knowing exactly when to launch as if it's a ribbon cutting ceremony for a bridge is painful for me. There is always a minimum level of development, engineering or design required to get your product into the market - but it is usually well below the perceptions of the founder. Take a minute to step back and ask yourself what will happen between now and whatever arbitrary time period you've determined is "ready". What features will you be adding? Do they matter to your users? If you said yes, how do you know - did you ask users? A lot of them? If not - you may be adding bloat before you even launch, or worse, doing what I call "building a better Yeti trap". Make sure your efforts are driven by the actual, and not perceived, assumed, or gut intuitions about what they need. Conclusion A competitive entrant is always a bit unnerving - but remember that being first to market isn't the race you need to win - that's just the start. Turn this into an advantage by drafting off their momentum. Chances are, your product is ready for some level of use right now, and that users will derive some benefit from it, and that you'll learn a lot from their usage. So, for my 2 cents, I'll borrow from my stiff upper lipped ancestors from across the pond - and suggest that you "Keep Calm, AND Launch Now" Cheers, Ryan Rutan

Just because two people are connected to each other on LinkedIn, doesn't mean that these two people have a strong connection to one another. So first, ask your Mentor directly whether (s)he knows this person well enough to make an introduction. Also, I'd suggest that instead of asking that the introduction be made via LinkedIn, that the introduction be made directly via email. The way this best happens is to email your mentor with a two paragraph email explaining why it is that you want an introduction to this person and explaining why you think this person would want to meet with you. Then your mentor can forward this email directly to this person with a request for an introduction. If the person replies to your mentor, your mentor will then connect you two directly. If the investor is interested enough to accept an intro, then you'll likely get a 30 minute to 1 hour in-person meeting or call scheduled. In terms of what that investor will be looking for, I've written a lot of answers to questions around seed-stage financing that I encourage you to review. I'm happy to schedule a quick call to give you some specific feedback on where you're at and how investors might perceive your progress to date. Best of luck with this connection!

The ideal way would be to hire the engineer while the project is still under development. You and the engineer should follow up with the outsourced partner in the process. This will give hold to the engineer and later more staff can be trained in upgrading or follow on versions of the product/service.

In my experience, every step you take to complicate your company's structure and ownership rights reduces the likelihood of investors providing your venture with seed funding. To attract seed funding, investors expect a single-minded laser focus on the entrepreneurs' assessment of his or her best path to validating their business and growing it into a very large business as quickly as possible. So the very idea that you are reliant or considering taking multiple paths to success is likely to act as a red flag for most experienced early-stage tech investors. Also, until there is significant traction achieved, an investor is expecting to own everything generated by the business. There are rare occasions where a particular asset, brand, domain or other component of the business can be spun-out (usually in the case where it's a distraction from the core business but there's inbound demand from a buyer), but when I say rare, I mean this happens so infrequently that it's not anything that should be reasonably expected in the course of planning. Speaking candidly, this entire strategy creates a perception (accurate or unfair) that you are undecided on a number of the key questions you need to be sure of before you have a good chance of raising seed funding. I'd be happy to talk to you about what you're doing and help provide some clarity based on what I hear. I encourage you to review my references as I have been helpful to many other Clarity members on these types of issues.