What free B2B applications should I offer?

Half the people on Clarity, including myself, can do that. The real question is: who understands your business and your marketplace? What level are you at? How many employees do you have, what gross revenue target do you have, is your marketplace expanding or contracting? The usual thing, though, is lack of focus on revenue-generating activities. I'll give you that one as professional courtesy. People do everything they can to appear "busy" in order to avoid selling. Are you and your people focused on getting and closing orders? I'll bet if I surveyed what they're doing, a lot of their time is eaten up with grunt work that makes them look busy but doesn't lead to sales and money in the door. After that, I'd look into positioning.

I'd suggest that there is no "should". The beauty of being an entrepreneur is that YOU get to decide what success is. In fact - In the system I use with entrepreneurs you learn to define "success" for yourself and build it into the requirements of your business model.

There are a lot of tools designed to help "sketch" business ideas and business models. You need to be able to define and refine your ideas with a pencil and paper at the best. Other tools like Business Model Generation are great at sketching and documenting business model assumptions. I'm a huge fan of Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences and you can find his talks at http://www.billbuxton.com/#talk For UI work check out: * http://www.onextrapixel.com/2010/09/29/40-brilliant-examples-of-sketched-ui-wireframes-and-mock-ups/ * http://webdesignledger.com/inspiration/18-great-examples-of-sketched-ui-wireframes-and-mockups You goal is to be able to effectively communicate your ideas, your business and the next steps.

If I was going to start over, with a blank slate I would do several things differently. 1. I would hire an accountant and bookkeeper on day one. I know that on the surface it's easy to look at the cost of an accountant and justify spending those resources in other areas, however I have seen this play out horribly for a number of businesses (ours included.) An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. 2. I would make a list of all of my start up items, edit it and then edit it again. Start as lean as you can. We started our t-shirt company with basic equipment in my mom's attic and slowly moved into proper production space as we needed to, however we made the mistake of buying too much equipment early on because we thought we needed it. Get by with the bare minimum for as long as you can, get traction, customers and cash flow and then expand cautiously. 3. Don't listen to salespeople! Talk to friends, other businesses and look on the web for answers to common questions. Salespeople are great when you know what you need to buy, however often times you are going to end up wasting money that would be better spent in other places, like on your accountant. 4. Don't take on bad customers just to make a buck. If you are interested in knowing our 10 tell tale signs of bad customers, schedule a call with me and I'll run down the list. It will save you hours and it only takes a few minutes. 5. Find a team of advisors and listen to them. I wish I would have listened to advice that people were giving me for free when we first got started. There's an old saying, "if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in trouble." Find good council and listen. Hope that's helpful, I've been a freelancer and small business owner for almost twenty years and enjoy coaching startups and entrepreneurs in getting their ventures off the ground. Feel free to schedule a call and I can help get you started.

Simple: The right investor is someone who wants to invest on standard terms at a good valuation relative to your current stage. Extra bonus points for someone who has relevant industry connections that could accelerate your business and is willing - at the right time - to make introductions for you. But you should have really quite low expectations of most angel investors. Certainly they should have NO operational control of the business. Although I want to be as helpful as possible to companies I invest in, it's entirely for the entrepreneur to drive me, not the other way around. There are very few exceptions to this rule, for example when angels who actually do have very recent and relevant experience want to back someone who is inexperienced and need oversight in order to feel comfortable investing early. But this is a real rarity. Finally, to answer your question about what entrepreneurs do when they receive funding, they should spend it in the best possible way to accelerate the success of the business. I'd be happy to talk to you in a call to provide more clarity on the matter and also discuss when is the right time to accept investment. If you have people willing to back you, that's great. You want to make sure you have a clear plan and set expectations accordingly.