I need to figure out how to buy baby bottles in bulk for my business. Do I contact distributors, wholesalers, or manufacturers? How do I go about it?

Don't Outsource. Period. While there are big drawbacks with outsourcing related to building internal expertise the real reason I would never outsource at your stage is the need for speed and flexibility. Per your description, you are an early stage start-up with a MVP that is gathering data. Congratulations as that is a big accomplishment! However, you inevitably have a ton to learn about what your prospective customers need most and what customers deserve your attention most. The means you will be tweaking your product constantly for the foreseeable future and having to submit ideas to an outsourced team, make sure they understand what you want, wait for the new feature to be scheduled, etc is just too slow and too expensive. You should have your developers literally sitting next to you and (if you have one besides yourself) your product person so you can quickly and constantly share information. Good luck! You are in for a fun ride...

Selling any product including "iPhone cases" on websites with high competition like Ebay is surely not an easy mission. There are hundreds of sellers on Ebay and other websites who are already selling cases. If you need to get some sales, you need at least one of the following: 1. High reputation, reviews or feedbacks on the website that you are selling on. 2. The product that you are selling must be unique in some way or simply not found anywhere else. 3. If your products are featured at your own website, then that website of yours must be ranked properly online and marketed decently around social media networks. In your case, a possible approach would be to create your own website to sell your products on or work as an affiliate marketer for other big sellers in exchange for commissions. Depending on your budget, you need to draw the right plan around. If you have a good budget to invest in your business, then creating a website for yourself is a must. Otherwise, you need to rely on other websites and seek to provide unique or special products to get an edge around. Hope that helps!

Budget is definitely important for a successful business, but it is not everything! As a young entrepreneur, I started a similar business earlier in my career selling eyeglasses on eBay. I created an eBay store, worked on advertising, and was fortunate with my results. I would love to speak with you about starting a website and marketing effectively to consumers with a very small budget. The biggest recommendation I can provide is to test different services at a low budget to see what works. Rather than spending thousands of dollars on a marketing agency, there are many services that can help your iPhone case business in marketing effectively. Feel free to reach out to me!

I am assuming your question is more pertaining to empowering and motivating (rather than hiring). I can outline some of the practices I have seen really result in high motivation and sense of ownership among engineering teams: * Empathize - Your engineering team will work well and be more motivated if they see you as one of them rather than a person who doesn't understand their function. Show your geeky side to them, and show that you understand their thought process and drivers. * Pick their brain on big and small decisions (roadmap, usability, whatever it is) - Product teams value being heard. The more you position yourself as someone who is WANTS to listen, is keen to have their inputs, you will be surprised at how involved they can get, and also how you can actually tap into a lot of smart ideas/thoughts from them that you can develop on. * Take care to explain - show how you arrive at decisions. Share your research, competitive analysis, and even your thought process on arriving at a feature set or list of things for a release. Its stuff you would have worked on anyway - so no harm sharing with more eyes! * Share customer feedback - nothing motivates your engineers than a positive interaction with a customer. Get them to see customer feedback. Have them sit in and observe some of the usability studies. (B2B - have them see you do some demos or do a successful sales pitch) * Send out interesting articles, insights, business and tech articles with your comments/highlights to them on a regular basis (maybe twice a week?) - maybe even some analysis you did on competition or customer feedback * Engineers like working with people they feel are competent and complement the work they are doing to build a great product. So make sure they see how everyone else around them is also doing a good job and adding value and contributing to the success of the product. * Be transparent about the product/business - Make them feel they are responsible and involved in the business, not just technology. I've seen engineering teams happy about their annual goals having components relating to making revenues, keeping customers happy, or reducing costs. If they are enthused about the business as a whole, they will be more motivated with their engineering efforts * Have a mix of little experiments, R&D, attending to engineering debt, in addition to bug fixes and new features that each engineer gets to spend some time on (based on their interest) * Finally get to know each of your engineers personally, and be aware of what their priorities are. Each of us has different motivations in life, so there is no silver bullet to motivate people. When they know you care for them, they are more motivated :).

I've used a ton of different plugins and services to create and sell online courses, and here's the best combination I've found: WordPress + Gumroad + ProductPress 1. WordPress: You'll use WordPress to host your course content. I typically put each lesson in a new Page. 2. Gumroad: Use Gumroad to sell your course, handle payments, and to communicate with your customers. 3. ProductPress: the ProductPress plugin will allow you to connect your WordPress site and Gumroad account together. As soon as someone buys your course on Gumroad, they'll automatically be emailed login information for your WordPress site. It's only $39 (one-time fee). More information here: http://productpress.me