How can I start a Membership Site?

As a web designer, online visibility is incredibly important when it comes to branding globally. Depending on your business, a lot of your global business goals can be achieved by setting up an online business. You should register domains in the countries you'd like to market to, such as the US, NZ, and SIngapore that you mentioned. Also establish a Business Plan and central brand that includes all of these markets. Try to avoid getting caught in a re-branding process down the road. If your brand needs tweaking in order to achieve scope, do so. I would start by registering the business in the country you mainly do business in, and provide shipping of products/services to all of your other markets if necessary to get started. Then as you establish a foothold in each territory, look into the benefits of setting up locally.

What your trying is one approach to finding investors. Here's another that in my experience is far more effective. I'd tap your network, and it's probably actually a lot bigger than you think! Linkedin is the perfect tool for this. Look for people you're connected to, that you trust, and that are suited to helping your business (ideally in your industry, or experienced in fundraising, etc) and that have a good network themselves (ideally they're connected to some investors you're interested in, but not required). Reach out to them, and let them know you're starting a venture, and are looking for their advice, and would love to treat them to a 30 min coffee meeting. People love to hear that others think they're awesome and they love to give advice which makes them feel awesome, and this is someone you know, so chances are they'll accept. Send this request to everyone relevant in your network. At the meeting, tell them about your venture, give them your pitch, hear their comments and heed their feedback, and ask them for 3 people in their network that would be great people to talk to. Get intros to those people, and repeat. If you do this diligently and listen well, your network will expand extremely quickly, and you'll be able to get introduced to literally anyone you want. This is how our founding team at Tachyus acquired our first customer within 1 month of starting, and having no experience or direct connections in our industry. I'm always down to chat in more detail if you're interested. Best of luck!

Ugh. Investors. Here's the harsh or maybe happy truth. If your Startup offering (product, service, information, courseware, consulting, etc) provides stellar value, then you require no investment. Do your launch + if money starts pouring in, either skip the investors of if you really must use investors (doubtful, if you're providing stellar value), then the more revenue you have, the better terms you'll get from investors.

What the others said about 301 Redirects is correct, but you should make sure nothing is left out. I find it is better to plan ahead as much as possible to avoid errors which could affect your rank. Using free tools like SEO Spider can help you figure out all the links on your site that point to images, css and js files, etc. There is a nice checklist you can use at http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic that covers it. Best of luck!

I think as a first-time entrepreneur who is non-technical, you should focus 100% of your energy on your clothing business with your buddy. There is far less required to make a clothing business a success than a startup run by a non-technical founder. I don't mean to trivialize the challenges of running an apparel company (there are many) but comparatively, there is a greater chance of you having success with the apparel business than a startup. But you *reduce* your chances of success by diluting your focus with other ideas. Happy to talk to you in a call about starting off on the right foot with a cofounder.