I am looking for constructive, succinct feedback and advice regarding mobile, financial software product development.

The best way to build an MVP for any SaaS product is to create a landing page that looks like a real product. Here's an example of one I built. http://www.happiily.com In this case, it advertises the primary features of the product and invites people to sign-up. When they do, they are asked for information which qualifies the person and then sends me an email. I built this quickly and very inexpensively and started getting inbound leads from it shortly thereafter. I got on the phone with each person who signed-up and explained the features I wanted to build and was able to do a lot of customer learning based on that. Happy to talk to you in a call if you'd like to talk more about customer development with SaaS products.

For software development business LinkedIn ads, content marketing and Google Adwords don't work well. The best and most cost effective method is email outreach. Try to find the contacts of key decision makers in Bay Area from your target companies. You want to present yourselves as custom mobile and web development specialists and highlight your core competencies to get an initial call to discuss their mobile strategy or software development needs. Attaching your case studies how you helped other similar businesses and your portfolio can be extremely helpful as well. Try to always focus on the benefits in you pitch that they can get by working with you and point their missed opportunities of not having certain types of software or apps for their business. Clients love that software development companies have not only strong execution but also ideation skills. Hope this helps. If you have any questions I am also available on call for your convenience.

Being a freelance developer for the last 10 years or so, I have seen and used almost every project management software you can think of, open-source and closed, and I have found that the "best bug tracking tool" completely depends on your process. I employ and direct teams in an Agile process that involves loose story-based requirements with point-based estimates, two-week cycles of iterative development, planning and retrospective sessions, and look-ahead and show-and-tell meetings with the stakeholders. It's important to me, then, that my tools have a method of capturing all those pieces with as much detail as I need but no more. On projects, I've successfully used Pivotal Tracker, Unfuddle, Redmine, Codebase HQ, Basecamp, Trello, and many others. I usually recommend people to Trello for light, agile management; it's essentially a digitized version of sticky notes and swim lanes. If your team actually needs a full-featured ticketing system, see Redmine (Rails), Trac (Python), or Mantis (PHP), depending on your language preference. Hosting a version of these yourself is fairly trivial, and numerous options exist for cheap or free hosted versions. For something in the middle, Github Issues is a good fit and the open-source clone GitLab.org replicates most of those features nicely. However, if you're looking for a hosted version, you're probably looking to offload that tricky "backup" thingy, and in that case, how important is your data? How proprietary? What's your business model? If you're working on an open-source project, Github will give your team a free account with private repos, issues, wikis, and the like. If you're okay with your project being "readable by all", public projects on Pivotal are still free. I'm mostly a consultant these days, leading small groups of junior or intermediate developers into a more productive, more mature, fully operational teams of senior software developers. One of the first things I teach folks is how to use a project management system... and why! It'll save your bacon if it's simple, effective, and reliable. With a few minutes of discussion about your project, I can probably help you select the right tool and service for your team. Let me know if I can help with that. Best of luck!

You should try to engage people using social networks, it is easier to spread than email. The conversion rate on emails are low but is still a valid tool for that. Send and email with a simple and objective message that will make people want to try. The best way to have feedback from users is to watch them use the app. You should put them on the hands of everybody that you can and without any instrucions and just watch, don´t even say that the app is yours. Try to do it a lot. If you want feedback from others, you can include the feedback form inside the app and suggest users to answer occasionally. I would also strongly recommend to use a tool as Flurry Analytics. Is the best way to get data from how is the use of the application. Pay attention to those data and be open to change your app a lot, you may need more features or cut some off to make it easier to use. If you need more help please contact me.

I am not sure of the specifics you're asking, it seems like a lot of technical data. This might help in your search for these statistics though: http://jobsearch.about.com/od/networking/a/linkedin.htm http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2014/01/21/how-linkedin-is-thwarting-your-job-search/ http://mashable.com/2014/06/19/linkedin-job-search-app/ http://www.cio.com/article/2403150/linkedin/10-linkedin-tips-to-boost-your-job-search.html