For a SAAS product company, do medium or large size clients pay using credit cards .

It's not foolish, but it's going to be extremely hard to pull it off. I would consider starting with a beta program so you can have some paid clients to pay for the company's expenses. After you have some traction, you can raise a seed round.

I was involved with a SaaS product that launched a landing page and made clear that the product was still in development, but that we would give earliest access to people who pre-paid for the product. We also allowed people to choose what they paid, and promised them that payment would stay in-effect for several months. We generated revenue the first day of posting the landing-page publicly and increased revenue month-over-month. However, we discontinued the product as it was simply not big enough of a market for us to justify continued time and energy. But I would encourage you to pursue a similar model in that it's a great way to test and validate the pain others experience for the problem and a great way to ensure you're building the product to satisfy real customers. Happy to talk this through in more detail in a call

Hi. I'm a Business Intelligence consultant with most of my customers being call centers. There are definitely guidelines you can apply but it will be based on several factors. Your question references ratios, which I assume means you would like to know how many agents per customer. That number will vary greatly depending on a number of other factors including: -what is your ASA target (Average speed of answer)? -what percentage of calls should meet the ASA? -are their penalties below a certain threshold (if less than 80% of calls meet ASA in 24 hours, for example) -how long are calls waiting when they don't meet ASA? -what is the call distribution by day of week, time of day and holiday v. non-holiday. -what is the average call duration? -what is the % of calls requiring escalation or call back versus calls resolved on first contact? To simplify it though, the two most important (IMO) will be call volume and your target for ASA (assuming you aren't answering then putting them back on hold, etc). To simplify though, the top 3 are: ASA, Call length and call volume. Regardless of the size of customer base. A good reporting system that combines live metrics and daily/weekly/monthly analysis will help a great deal. Feel free to set up a call if you'd like to talk about this in more detail.

There is no valuation until you sell something. An idea or a company is only worth what its sales are. Once you have your initials sales, sales strategy and forecasting length (ie 9 months from first customer lead to close) then you have a formula for valuation. Valuation for start-ups is generally 3.5 x last years sales model should be the growth factor. When you are looking for investors, you will want to have atleast 9-18 months of SALES, not just pipeline and they will be looking at 5x revenue for a 3-5 year payback.

Use Mattermark.com to find them. They have a 14 days free trial. The tool will let you filter by founding and type of company, so it will probably give you what you need.