This isn’t an important decision. Where are people going to see this label? Is this for filling out your LinkedIn company profile? Just select “Human Resources” for now and move on. You can change it later.

When it comes to the verbiage on your landing page, you’ll want to focus less on labels and more on the problem/solution based narrative from your customers perspective.

“Struck gold” is not usually a phrase we use in the ideation stage of business development.

Businesses? Most artists have no concept of business. It’s common for artists to have a deep disdain for the economic side of their world.

Those that succeed are usually the ones who take the time to understand and experiment with a variety of business models and monetization types. Micro patronage. Crowdfunding. Art merchandising. Making their art accessible at various price points. Creative partnerships. Dipping into corporate partnerships or publishing. And of course the traditional… art fairs, gallery shows. And the more recent… constant social media, bts videos, mailing lists, events, classes, retreats, etc.

Either that or they’ve got some truly insane unique talent. But I know plenty of insanely talented artists who have such a toxic relationship to money and concepts of value that they will always be starving.

Source: was once a starving artist; still know many starving artists.

Before spending 2 weeks building an MVP, you should spend 2 days (or more… however long it takes) doing customer discovery through conversational interviews with early adopters.

Early adopters are people who:

• have the problem you’re solving
• know and care that they have the problem
• are actively trying to solve the problem
• have spent time and/or money to solve it
• ideally… they haven’t totally solved it yet

The “customer discovery” phase / method accomplishes many things, including answering your specific question.

While validating the problem, you experiment with locating and engaging “early adopters.” If you can’t manually successfully find a few dozen passionately interested early adopters to interview, then you’re gonna have a very difficult time selling something, because you simply don’t know what channels to use to find them or how to speak their language.

The customer discovery method is useful for far more than exploring product ideas, features, etc. You should also be learning from early adopters:

• what other types of solutions they’ve tried — how successful those have been, the good and the bad
• how they feel, think, talk, and behave about the problem and solutions — giving you insights that inform Your marketing messaging, imagery, stories
• where they look and what they search for — insights for where to put your ads when you launch
• how much time and money a solution is worth to them, based purely on their past behavior and how much they’ve invested
• what related problems might arise when they try to fit your solution into their life

Even though you’ve built something, it may be very wise to go back and just try to find and interview people who fit the description of early adopters. If you can’t find any… shrug emoji.

The alternative is to simply keep trying to get people to interact with your MVP. But you won’t learn nearly as much that way as you would just asking questions face to face.

It’s easy and common to do customer discovery wrong and get bad results. Don’t waste your time! Study these first.

Resources:

• Steve Blank’s website / blog
• Justin Wilcox videos on YouTube
• Rob Fitzpatrick’s book The Mom Test
• David Bland’s book Testing Business Ideas

You are missing one of (if not it the) most important step. After discovering a problem to solve, and quickly surveying the market for existing solutions and competition, you gotta dive head first into Customer Discovery. If you’re not familiar with this, study and practice stuff from Steve Blank, Rob Fitzpatrick, and Justin Wilcox. Learn about the customer development process, focusing on doing discovery work with early adopters. This is the first step to executing well.

But have you tried online/virtual hackathon events, medium articles, social media (linkedin, tiktok, youtube), google ads, one-on-one meetings with industry partners/researchers, and creating your own apps?

Usually, you can’t sell an app or website. You sell a business. The app might be part of the product. But without customers and revenue you have little to no proven value.

Similarly, investors don’t invest in ideas. They invest in functional business models, based either on actual sales or some other tangible form of traction that goes well beyond your idea, passion, and confidence that it will work.

In short, you have to prove it will work before anyone is going to give you money.

Definitely. It’s huge set of tools. A whole corporate tool stack. But it costs years and many thousands of dollars. Whereas the typical first time entrepreneur can acquire more relevant skills much faster.

Do this. Start with a fair dynamic equity model, and it will quickly become clear that unless she contributes her share in the company will continually decrease.

An MBA is generally not preparation for entrepreneurship. Most “masters of business administration” are going into the corporate world to participate in large companies with well established business models.

Side note: startup forums are not going to be the best place to find a lot of consulting advice and service design experts. Those are very well established sectors with lots of support and resources. It’s not a startup. I don’t meant to be pedantic about the word startup. Just want to make sure you’re looking in the best places for expertise that will help you succeed.

You should be more interested in quality than quantity.

Your traction should represent your progress toward establishing a reliably repeatable sales process.

From the beginning of the customer development process, one of you primary goals is to prove that you can successfully identify, locate, engage, and sell to a specific customer segment, and do so with predictable conversion / churn / return / etc rates.

As others have said, the evidence takes different forms at different stages, for different products, in different business models, and for different types of customers and markets. But it all comes down to proof that you’ve accomplished the above.

You should be more interested in quality than quantity.

Your traction should represent your progress toward establishing a reliably repeatable sales process.

From the beginning of the customer development process, one of you primary goals is to prove that you can successfully identify, locate, engage, and sell to a specific customer segment, and do so with predictable conversion / churn / return / etc rates.

As others have said, the evidence takes different forms at different stages, for different products, in different business models, and for different types of customers and markets. But it all comes down to proof that you’ve accomplished the above.

Can you take a more implied competitor approach? Like the Apple ads “I’m a Mac” and “I’m a PC” — I don’t think they ever name Microsoft or windows. Do they? But it’s obvious what is meant by PC. And it encompasses all windows compatible hardware. So very effective.

I think you’re gonna like StackShare…

https://stackshare.io/stacks

This is spot on. My experience as well. Would love to connect and trade insights with you sometime. Sending you a chat request.

1. What compels immigrants to use a niche social platform rather than a general one?

2. Same question for travelers.

3. Who are your top 3 closest competitors?

That’s probably a bad idea. But the answer to your specific question is that it depends on where you’re based.

The correct place to find this answer is probably on a web page posted by the local or regional government wherever you live.

The answer to the question you should be asking is something about doing things in the right or best or most efficient order — which IMHO is the lean method. It’s a waste of your time and resources to register things before you’ve even figured out what you’re doing.

Also, this subreddit is a good place to ask, and it’s great that you’re asking for advice so early in your journey. Keep that up.

Email Octopus leverages Amazon SES for solid deliverability.

https://emailoctopus.com/mailchimp-alternative

You usually have to reverse engineer your marketing strategies and tactics based on where your customer’s attention is. This is certainly true for a coffee shop.

Where do they go? Put your advertisement there.

How do they get there? Put your messaging in their path.

What are they looking at? Get into their line of sight.

Personally… I find coffee shops on google maps and yelp. Then I look at the customer pics on google maps and the shop’s instagram to determine if I’d enjoy being in there. Then I look at the menu, wherever I can find one, to see whether they have what I’m after, usually light roasts and pour overs. So to easily capture my business you’d want to support the customer journey I’ve just described at each point along the path.

But I’m just one person. You need to understand the customer journey across a wide range of your customer types.

For coffee shops and event heavy orgs you’re probably going to lose the battle to technology. Because you actually have a twofold challenge: Not only do you need to complement your customer’s journey, you’re also in competition with any other cafe or event which is leveraging the media and channels your potential customers are consuming.

My suggestion is that you put some guidelines and systems in place which help you only use tech in a creative way, and not a consumptive way. For you, it’s a tool. Leverage it. Schedule and limit the time you spend using it. Keep it in its proper place and it won’t consume you.