Is Snapchat's name change a valid strategy or desperate rebranding of a failed product?

You might be able to share this and teach courses on Udemy! This is what I do and it works really well! A year ago I was at the brink of losing my startup and now I have transitioned to teaching 18 courses on Udemy full time. You are welcome to chat with me for a few minutes to see where your biggest opportunities might be on Udemy.

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.

Biggest is probably the product-market fit. Is your product or service helping (enough) people solve a problem or fulfill a need? This is the biggest question a startup is trying to answer. You have to answer this question within a "finite time" and with "limited resources". So it really comes down to how focused a startup is in answering this question. If you lose focus with other stuff (co-founder issues, business cards, spending too much time making the product beautiful or whatever else) you are going to run out of time and resources and you have lost the game. I interview some of the very successful digital entrepreneurs on the web that respond to questions like this. Check out the interviews here: http://treptalks.com

Snapchat is definitely not in the same age and situation than pets.com. Look how long it took Yahoo to be forced to sell... If Twitter doesn't start growing soon, it'll be in a similar situation within 24 months. If the table turns for Snapchat and does not grow, they would force the CEO to step down within a year, then give the new CEO 2 years to show results. If they don't want to sell, then they would replace the second CEO within 18 months. Of course, this is pure speculation and considering similar companies in hard situations. You should definitely read THE HARD THING ABOUT HARD THINGS by Ben Horowitz.

Lyft was founded in 2012. They operate in 200+ cities in the U.S. cities. They've raised more than $2B and they're valued at $5.5B. Udacity was founded in 2011 and is valued at over $1B. Vox Media was also founded in 2011 and is also valued at over $1B. Uptake was founded in 2014 and is valued at $1.1B. Oscar was founded in 2013 and is valued at $1.7B.