For a small business (about 12 physical products), how much should I charge for implementing an online selling platform?

Unless you have a decent traffic or hugely demanded items larger comps might no be interested. Access to market is what leads companies to buy one another. I rencently bought a commercial cleaning company and merged it with my residential one to create an improved service with my people but leveraging the other company's subscriptions. I would not buy based on services, but buy either access to data, people or market. So your approach can be based on that rather than pitching a retailer with zero margins. Finding companies to pitch to is harder than it sounds and it literally simply comes down to you picking up the phone as much as you can. Good luck!

First of all, what you have is a provisional patent **application**. For now, the provisional patent application is not publicly available. This can be a big advantage to you. You can use this time to improve your invention and file additional provisional applications. If you don't plan on making/practicing the invention yourself, you should make sure to try to think of everything possible regarding how that invention can be improved. This would (hopefully) come naturally to a practicing inventor. When you file your non-provisional application, your disclosure will be made public ("published") 18 months from the filing of the non-provisional. While your applications are not publicly available, I suggest waiting until you file your non-provisional application(s) to talk to others. Quite often, provisional applications do not have the detail or the scope that the non-provisional will have -- due to the time spent on getting drawings accurate and making sure everything is included in your non-provisional applications. It is best to have a complete application before talking to practicing companies. Sophisticated companies will take advantage of information not disclosed in your provisional application to file their own patent applications. If your applications are not publicly available (or even they are published), you should sign confidentiality agreements (non-disclosure agreements) with anyone you talk to about licensing or buying your invention. Keeping track of who you talked to with confidentiality agreements can be the basis for "notice" of the invention by an infringer -- when they eventually steal your invention. You can sell your idea anytime, but a provisional application is worth a lot less than a non-provisional application which is worth less than an allowed application or issued patent. Provisional applications are generally not as complete as they could be -- and require additional time and finesse to complete the non-provisional application. In terms of appearances, if you are not willing to put in the money to file the non-provisional application, the invention is likely not worth that much money. Companies as well as non-practicing entities may look at provisional applications, but not for long, and will not give you the kind of money that you may get from selling a fully examined patent. Of course, it depends on how good your invention is.

The way I see things, a pay-per-minute phone consultation ought to involve no sales pitch whatsoever. Nobody wants to pay for that, and nobody should. Consulting and sales are utterly different roles. Mutually exclusive, in fact. Is your value proposition external to the call or internal? A consulting call ought to be self-contained. By the time a client hangs up, they ought to be in a better position than where they started – with no further obligation to pay us. So ask yourself what the purpose of the phone call is. If your goal is to sell a product or service – a useful WordPress plugin in this case – then the call is a sales presentation not a consultation, and it ought to be free. The hard truth of sales is that a large percentage of prospects (the majority, usually) won't buy, even after a 30-minute presentation about the virtues of your offering. Time spent talking to dead ends must be factored in to your price and recouped by successful sales. Adding that cost as a fee for the sales pitch itself won't work out well. This is sometimes a tough distinction to make. In my own case, I offer a number of services (e.g. brand name creation) that go beyond the scope of a 15-minute phone call. When someone is paying me $5 per minute, I don't want to squander their time and money by explaining some other paid service! So the rule I've set myself is to stick to problems I can solve on the phone. When it's appropriate to explain the broader services that I offer, I try to do so in a non-paying context. Mainly through email. There's nothing wrong with using a free Clarity.fm call for a sales pitch. But it does sound like you're using phone calls in order to pitch a purchase; so charging for such calls would probably backfire.

Yes, it is possible to sell t-shirts through Instagram direct messages (DMs). I'd recommend using an online payment processor such as Stripe (https://stripe.com/), so you can accept orders and track your revenue. As your business grows, consider using an e-commerce platform like Shopify (https://shopify.com), so you can reach more people.

How did you come to the $10K number? Based on revenue? Each of your contributions? Tough to answer this without understanding if the app is on the upswing or on decline etc. So... Does he want 5% equity of the app or 5% residual royalties? My guess is that he wants to participate in the revenue. If that is the case, I would structure an X-year sliding deal that eventually worked him out of the app. It could be something like Year 1: 5% of PROFIT share. Year 2 3% of PROFIT share. Year 3 1% of PROFIT. Year 4? Nothing. It has to be based on PROFIT not REVENUE. Structuring a company and then issuing "shares" in an app is insane to me given the likely lifespan of an app. Too much hassle.