Need help to understand how far APIs can take it us & what the user experience will actually look like?

here is my simple advice which should save you a lot of time and money. your journey should start identifying whether or not you have a problem worth solving. Most of your issues, assumptions, solution you put forward is irrelevant until you have done this. Don't get me wrong, your idea is sound and it often starts from a vision or an intuition that your idea is great. You now need to take a step back and do a coue of things: - what problems does cabsharing solve? Share the cost? Meet new people? Etc. - how would you rate the pain i.e. have people been dying for someone to co.e up with such a concept or is it simply a nice to have You have to come up with a porblem statement, good understanding of the problem and start testing this first. Get out there and interview people. Measure. Learn. If you have not heard of it yet just follow the lean startup approach (i recommend ash maurya's blog that will give you plenty to start with - his book running lean is also a great and practical resource). If you need help structuring it all or formalising your initial lean canvas I am happy to help. The most important thing is to test and validate key assumptions before you embark on something bigger. Many ways nowadays to do this, give me a shout in less than am hour we can get you up and running. Hope that helps, good luck the exciting part is just starting now: making it happen!

Whoa, start by reading the Lean book again; you're questions suggest you are making a classical mistake made by too many entrepreneurs who live and breath Lean Startup. An MVP is not the least you can show someone to evaluate whether or not building it is a good idea; an MVP is, by it's very definition, the Minimum Viable Product - not less than that. What is the minimum viable version of a professional collaboration network in which users create a professional profile visible to others? A website on which users can register, have a profile, and in some way collaborate with others: via QA, chat, content, etc. No? A minimum viable product is used not to validate if something is a good idea but that you can make it work; that you can acquire users through the means you think viable, you can monetize the business, and that you can learn from the users' experience and optimize that experience by improving the MVP. Now, that doesn't mean you just go build your MVP. I get the point of your question, but we should distinguish where you're at in the business and if you're ready for an MVP or you need to have more conversations with potential users. Worth noting, MOST entrepreneurs are ready to go right to an MVP. It's a bit of a misleading convention to think that entrepreneurs don't have a clue about the industry in which they work and what customers want; that is to say, you shouldn't be an entrepreneur trying to create this professional collaboration network if you don't know the market, have done some homework, talked to peers and friends, have some experience, etc. and already know that people DO want such a thing. Presuming you've done that, what would you present to potential users BEFORE actually building the MVP? For what do you need nothing more than some slides? It's not a trick question, you should show potential users slides and validate that what you intend to build is the best it can be. I call it "coffee shop testing" - build a slide of the homepage and the main screen used by registered users; sit in a coffee shop, and buy coffee for anyone who will give you 15 minutes. Show them the two slides and listen; don't explain, ONLY ask.... - For what is this a website? - Would you sign up for it? Why? - Would you tell your friends? Why? - What would you pay for it? Don't explain ANYTHING. If you have to explain something, verbally, you aren't ready to build your MVP - potential customers don't get it. Keep working with that slide alone until you get enough people who say they will sign up and know, roughly, what people will pay. THEN build your MVP and introduce it first to friends, family, peers, etc. to get your earliest adopters. At some point you're going to explore investors. There is no "ready" as the reaction from investors will entirely depend on who you're talking to, why, how much you need, etc. If you want to talk to investors with only the slides as you need capital to build the MVP, your investors are going to be banks, grants, crowdfunding, incubators, and MAYBE angels (banks are investors?! of course they are, don't think that startups only get money from people with cash to give you for equity). Know that it's VERY hard to raise money at this stage; why would I invest in your idea when all you've done is validate that people probably want it - you haven't built anything. A bank will give you a loan to do that, not many investors will take the risk. Still, know not that your MVP is "ready" but that at THAT stage, you have certain sources of capital with which you could have a conversation. When you build the MVP, those choices change. Now that you have something, don't talk to a bank, but a grant might still be viable. Certainly: angels, crowdfunding, accelerators, and maybe even VCs become interested. The extent to which they are depends on the traction you have relative to THEIR expectations - VCs are likely to want some significant adoption or revenue whereas Angels should be excited for your early adoption and validation and interested in helping you scale.

Consider instead where a $2500 price point puts you. I use a selling technique called Monetizing The Problem, and in that process I get the prospect to calculate the size of their problem. Then I charge 5-10% of that figure. There's never any resistance, because they see where the number comes from, how it's based on reality--and a number THEY came up with (not me). So here you are at $2500. Let's be conservative and say that's 5% of the size of the problem. Meaning you are trying to help them make $50K in sales over the next year. What kind of a business has a revenue goal of $50K? A sole proprietor who's just trying to get by? Is that your target customer? Really think about this. A serious SME won't play at the $2500 price point, because it's too low. They know the vendor can't commit enough resources to do the job they really need done. For instance a business with only four high-value employees plus the owner needs to bill at least $60K A MONTH to survive!! Why would they let you touch their marketing collateral (that's their website) for a mere $2500?! Stay at $2500 and you're attracting a really low level of client. If you have the horsepower to achieve more with the skills you have, then I highly recommend going after a better class of customer.

2 different categories come to mind. H&R Block or other tax preparation services. The second is restaurants. This may seem like a product more than a service but I think it truly falls into the category of service, especially if you look at the national chains. Think Applebee's, TGI Fridays etc. The reason people go to these places is because of the experience they receive. The franchisors have created a system that generates nearly identical results nationwide. The first thing you need to do is figure out what makes your service superior to others out there, then you need to figure out how and why this is the case. From there you need to document it and make sure that you have a mechanism in place to ensure compliance. Granted that is a huge amount of work, but the basic premise is quite simple. You want all of the people you hire to do things more or less the way you would do them.

It varies and it's very very specific to what you want to develop. The concrete design of your circuit matters. Also prototype building costs are usually a factor 10-100 higher than series. If you already have your prototype then you can shop around various manufacturing companies. To do that, you need Gerber files (your PCB design) and a bill of materials. You also need to think about casing: designing it and creating the mold is expensive. If you don't have your prototype yet, I recommend having it engineered in eastern Europe. Custom engineering is cheap there and high quality. IP protection is a problem. One thing to do is to distribute the work to different manufacturers. For the design phase you are safer if you design your prototype in Europe or the US where international patent laws apply. I could give you more specific advise in a phone call, getting to know a bit better what you are trying to build.