What do you think about real estate investments in Montenegro?

Delaware C-Corp I usually Delaware is the best choice for any startup looking for fundraising with a US focus. However, if you are a remote and global team, an overseas or foreign corporation or US tax purposes might make sense. You'd have to talk to an advisor who can dive into your situation, but it would be more difficult for the US owner come tax time, as he'd likely have to file form 5471 to the IRS for any controlled foreign corporation, and form 90-22.1 for any foreign bank accounts. There are a lot of other concerns I didn't hear you raise that entrepreneurs usually have and ask me about, namely banking and merchant accounts/ payment processors. In terms of accepting online payments, any US corporation or LLC is far and away the best option for a company. It's difficult to suggest without knowing more about the company but you might explore Delaware, Wyoming, Hong Kong and other offshore jurisdictions for your legal entity. Each tend to have positives and negatives and there is no one size fits all solution. I do write about issues of incorporation quite regularly on my website FlagTheory.com - so you can read those articles for free, or we can schedule a call - Clarity.fm/incorporation when you have specific questions. Thank you and hope this was helpful!

There is a tremendous amount of buzz surrounding content marketing and its need within a brand’s overall marketing strategy. Doing content marketing is much more than publishing on your blog occasionally and posting your thoughts on social media. “Do stuff and maybe it will work” is not a strategy, it is a gamble. A risky and expensive one, at that. Even so, many brands have yet to create an effective content marketing strategy. What does such a strategy look like? Where are the examples of brands doing it well? Here, I will show you examples of an effective content marketing strategy and offer ways for you to craft your own for your business. What is Content Marketing Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. It is an ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing strategy, and it focuses on owning media, not renting it. This generation of customers are taking drastic steps to avoid marketing messages. As consumers, we use DVRs to skip television ads, pay internet radio subscription fees to avoid commercials, mentally block out — or use plug-ins to avoid — internet click ads, and gloss over road-side billboards, rendering them useless and ineffective. So how are marketers supposed to combat this shift? Education. Consumers are still buying and making purchases, but the way they go about making a decision has changed. With all of the world’s information at their finger tips, savvy consumers are doing enormous amounts of learning and self-education before stepping into a showroom or talking to a salesperson. Knowing this is a huge opportunity for brands. If you know consumers are looking for information, be the source of that information. Not with sales-y content that puts your priorities before theirs, but information that the buyer really wants and needs. The Marketing and Sales Departments must align to create a buying path for this new era of consumers that provides authentic and transparent information about a product or service (the mission of Marketing) and closing the sale (the mission of Sales). Content marketing closes this gap by using brand-created educational content to satisfy the prospective buyer while helping the sales team convert anonymous visitors into buyers. Thought leaders and marketing experts from around the world, including the likes of Seth Godin and hundreds of the leading thinkers in marketing have concluded that content marketing isn’t just the future, it’s the present (see the video below on the history of content marketing): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OHgMMpGLzk The key ingredient to using content to attract new customers is in the advanced planning. The strategy. What is a Content Marketing Strategy A content marketing strategy is a roadmap; a “User’s Guide” to how your brand will do the following: - Meet the customer at their specific point within their buying cycle - Align the customer’s needs with your knowledge and expertise - Use your brand’s assets to meet these objectives Business-to-Business marketers who have a documented content marketing strategy are 66% more likely to consider themselves effective compared to only 11% of those without a documented strategy. A content marketing plan helps you see the end-game before you have even started. Further, it gives a clear, articulable vision for your entire team and keeps you on track throughout the campaign. Just like New Years resolutions often fade into a foggy memory, our intentions are good – but we allow resolutions to fail. To be successful in any strategy, we need to be intentional. For proper sales and marketing alignment, and for the success of your bottom line, you must have a plan in place. How to Start Your Content Strategy The framework of a content marketing strategy is fairly straight forward: - Who are you targeting? What are their needs? - How are you going to reach them? (Attract new and nurture existing) - What content do you have now to get started? - What is your plan to develop and share more - How will you measure your efforts 1. Personas Take some time to consider who you are targeting. Are they male or female? Does it matter? Do they have a career? Children? Are they affluent? Coupon cutters? What are their goals? What happens if they do not reach them? Is their a monetary penalty for them? Will meeting this goal further their career? Will it make them happy? Clearly defining your targeted personas will save you a lot of time, energy, and money as you continue your business. With this person in mind, your content marketing strategy will begin to fall into place and you will feel that you are having a conversation with this “person”, rather than blindly throwing stuff out there. 2. Outreach Content marketing and social media are often used synonymously. This is a mistake. Content marketing is a broad method of marketing whereas social media is a tool that complements getting your content seen. Imagine your website as your online hub, where all of your brand-controlled content resides, your social media profiles are spokes that lead back to your home base. Social media has the power to reach incredible numbers of potential customers, influencers, existing customers, and even the opportunity to convert customers from competitors. Social media, in and of itself, is not content marketing. It is one of your outreach tools. 3. Available Content Next, take stock of materials you have on hand already. Many of us sit in offices filled with brochures, flyers, handouts, manuals, and documents loaded with helpful information, but we do little to extend that information to potential customers on the web. Make a list of the content available to you immediately and start identifying which persona is most aligned, where they are within their sales process, and what pain point they are currently facing. Getting started, you can use what you have on hand. But I recommend expecting this low-hanging fruit to run out. You should plan on developing your own, unique content. For a number of reasons, search engines reward fresh, unique content. Further, your prospective customers will be looking for information that is not available everywhere. Your unique perspective and “voice” (the tone in which you talk, the way you communicate, and what you share) may be the first experience a prospective customer has with you. This is the beginning of a long business relationship. 4. Schedule and Share Your Content After you have compiled your educational materials, grab a calendar. I recommend looking out 3-4 months to start. Mark holidays, special events, and milestones. Working backwards, prepare your marketing message for these campaigns. For example, one client of ours hosts 4-5 annual sales. They all surround major US holidays (New Years, President’s Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving/Black Friday). By knowing this, it is easy for us to prepare everything from banner ads, Pinterest images, blog posts, Facebook Status, videos, and even newspaper ads (don’t shoot the messenger). Once you have those events marked, consider a “theme” of the week for those 3-4 months. With that theme, and your personas in mind, write out the following for each week: - 2 Blog Posts - 8-10 Facebook updates - 20-30 Twitter updates - 4-5 product photos for Pinterest - 3-4 Instagram ideas - 1 Video By no means is this list all-inclusive. It is a starting point to get you thinking about how to plan content. To get a specific content marketing plan designed for your brand, I need to interview you and understand your goals, personas, and timeline. 5. Analytics Finally, how are you going to measure your work? Remember when we set up our goals earlier? Were you specific in identifying how many leads you want to generate? “Get more leads” is a horrible strategy, better is “Gain 50 new leads by September 1st” or “increase from 6% conversion rate to 12% conversion rate” These types of goals are easily measured and tracked. Do you have a mechanism in place to measure, monitor, and gauge your efforts? Further, do you have the right people on your team to help you know what is working and what is not? Can you explain why certain marketing dollars are generating a return on your investment while others fall flat? Final Thoughts Just like runners know the course of the race before they start, your brand should know the route you will take to your finish line. Having a strong content marketing strategy in place will ensure your team is setup for success. I'm happy to help and provide more specifics. All the best, -Shaun

The best time to raise capital for a startup is when you have a clear idea of what you want to do and a clear idea of how much money you need to get to a milestone that will set a higher value for your company. In general its better to bootstrap and do friends and family as long as you can, because the more mature and successful you are the better deal you will get from angels or VCs.

You’re asking some great questions, and beyond the fact that there is no teacher as great as experience, it seems tragic how common this experience is, and making great investments is hard even for seasoned professionals. But it’s incredible how often the only two factors used to assess an investment are how much it will make, and how much they like (or know) the people running the deal, when just a few additional questions can often make all the difference. When looking at a new opportunity, the first thing I do is ask if I believe management’s story. This is really about getting a feel for whether you believe the people running the business or opportunity are qualified to exploit whatever inefficiency they have identified in the marketplace. If they can’t express in simple terms what that opportunity is, why they’re qualified to take advantage of it, and exactly how what they do will generate returns for the investor – run away. This is different than asking if I believe in the management, or like them – it’s about their ability to state in plain language their investment thesis, and back it up with the skills and tools needed to execute. Next, put it in context - consider the size of the opportunity and this investment’s place in it. Is it a big market, or small? Lots of competition or not? Does this investment bring something new to the space and will gains come from new business or is the plan to take it from existing competitors? If there are no crisp answers to these sizing questions, consider it a big red flag. The next bit is about understanding the risk of the investment. The single most common mistake made by investors is mis-pricing risk. Markets are pretty efficient, so there has to be a reason someone else isn’t already doing whatever this investment proposes to do and understanding what this dynamic is can be the single difference between good and bad investments. It may be that nobody has thought of it, or no one can do what this will do at the same low cost. Or there is an asymmetry of information, where you know something others in the market don’t yet know. Whatever it is, trying to understand the risk of the investment is key: understanding the timing of the probable returns, appreciating what could go wrong and how management will respond if it does, what change in the environment (like new laws, new competitors, new technology) could turn the deal on its head, and what assumptions need to remain true through the course of the investment. I’m not sure there is any way to get all of the right before making an investment, and surprises always happen, but the more work done to figure this part out can help determine whether the investment is worth making based on what its expected to return, and it often highlights something just plainly wrong with an investment. Finally, know that there are very few great investment opportunities relative to the number of absolute junk stories out there, and finding ones that make sense for your risk tolerance and timeline just takes work. And experience. And even when you get everything right, sometimes good investments still go bad.

What of the following things does your startup have? > Founders who have graduated from prestigious universities / previously exited companies to known acquirers / worked for a known companies (with known being a brand-name company such as Google, Amazon, Facebook etc) > Three or more months of statistically meaningful growth (e.g. for easy sake, double digit growth of a number in the thousands) > At least one investor who is active on AngelList (defined in the ideal state by at least one investment in a company who raised their round through AngelList and ideally whose social graph is connected to "high signal" members of the AngelList network) If you have none of these things, then at least, have advisors and referrers who have a strong AngelList profile. And another option is to seek out the AngelList scouts and pitch them directly. They are more open to this than anyone else and I've seen companies with very little traction and very little social proof get featured because a scout believes in the founder and/or the story. Without any or most of the above, it will be difficult to stand out or build relationships via AngelList, in my opinion. I assume now AngelList operates on a concept similar to the LinkedIn "degrees of connection" model, whereby an entrepreneur can now send unsolicited messages to investors so long as there is a degree of connection between the investor and the company. I get a few unsolicited emails a week from companies whose advisers or investors aren't people I follow but that because of the way they determine "connection strength", these unsolicited emails still gain my attention. I assume this is the case for all investors. So the more that you can build your list of advisers and referrers, the more connections you can solicit. That said, AngelList's inbound email system is almost entirely ineffective for "cold" emails to really high-profile investors. Happy to share with you what I think to be your best options for raising profile for your company.