builtinbuffalo

This smells like a long play on cannabis. As it becomes further legalized across the country the demand will grow for suppliers.

You know you can buy health insurance, right? When you start a business, you will have costs. Health insurance, part of benefits, is one of them. You need to factor this into what you charge customers and clients.

It shows poor business acumen to assume that what you charge is what you make. You may be able to get away with that when you're doing side gigs, but if you start a business, you must plan for costs.

One of them is heathcare. If you can't afford it, maybe you shouldn't have gone out on your own in the first place.

He needs to show something tangible to investors and the world. He's a phone guy, so he starts here, knowing voice assistants are still a few years away from mainstream. That'll give him a customer base and some revenue, keeping investors off his back which extends his timeline as the voice assistant / smart home market develops over next five to ten years.

This is because the use the technology and it works well.

We've created a patient feedback software (http://www.repcheckup.com) that allows doctors to automate their patient feedback by sending email and text rating/review solicitations.

On average, less than 5% of all patients seen will leave feedback. When prompted, we've seen this jump to 10-15% of patients seen, although we do have a few who have much higher conversion ratios.

(This is likely due to the doctor introducing the feedback concept at the end of the consult.)

What has been most interesting to see, contrary to the story, is that most doctors and healthcare professionals are still on the fence about implementing these sorts of feedback loops.

We find often times that buy-in does not occur until the professionals can see "comparisons" as to how others are doing.

There are also a ton of hurdles to implementation of these types of feedback loops, due to HIPAA and other requirements that often makes things near impossible.

This makes the whole thought of introducing this into a practice daunting for some and that's why usage of feedback loops like these are not already widespread.

Hopefully, as legacy practitioners give way to a new generation of medical and Heath professionals, patient feedback will be more widely solicited and used.

There's more money in real estate.

The state owns much of the real estate around campuses across the state.

Give away the content, make your money back on rent and living fees.

Similar to their StartUP NY program which offers income tax relief in exchange for leasing state owned office space.

Its probably some combination of paid "shout outs" from popular accounts to the new account they are attempting to build and reposted or shared content where the popular account showcases a piece of content from the new account.

There are also likely to be large, influential, account networks that are real and when used to boost a new account, very effective (I know numerous people on instagram with multiple million+ follower accounts).

All of this is similar to content marketing and link building strategies that have been effective for a decade plus.

Google said so themselves late last year.

Exactly why Google is aggressively monetizing the search results by reducing the number of organic listings, in favor of AdWords, Knowledge Box, Featured Answers and direct response plays such as Google Guarantee.

Google no longer applies a demotion penalty to a site with spammy links, especially those from negative seo campaigns, but rather devalues the links. This is since the "real time" Penguin update at the end of September. You can still use disavow, but it's likely a waste of time...and if you don't know what you're doing could make things worse.

I don't envy the position and having been on both sides before there's no simple answer. I wish I lived in a reality where I could actually take the time to build meaningful relationships with the press at all times, but most of the time being a little pushy and eek spammy is required to deliver.

For as long as sending 100 emails results in one or more sales. Cold email, even done poorly, will still net 1-2%. If economics work, then people do it.

So then how does one make you aware of what they're doing? Should they send you over a fax or wait for you to call them? Part of your job, whether you like it or not, is interacting with pr agents and in house marketers via phone and email.

Except if you do that you won't get very far. At least with MailChimp, which does a lot of policing. You'd be luck to get a few thousand emails out before their spam filters pause your campaign.

This is true, but new competitors also haven't been around as long as Avaya. Before Asterisk and other software hit the market, there were four players - Avaya, Cisco, Mitel and Nortel. Now there are dozens of large players and hundreds of medium sized ones. These companies are gaining market share in the enterprise - just checkout the exhibitor list for enterprise connect 17.

You are correct. It's been a closed system in a space that was opened by OSS like Asterisk in the early 2000s. Their solutions cost 5-10x's similar ones available from competitors. Add in their late embrace of cloud and it's not hard to see why they went bankrupt.

You'd be surprised. There's more customer using the internet than businesses investing in it across many niches. I launched a trades business with my brothers and thanks to seo and social we've grown a real, substantial business. We launched the site and marketing before we bought the equipment. We acquired over 150 accounts in the first two years (businesses paying thousands per year). Phone just keeps ringing now.

I know your product and space well - you'd be better off with getting people on an email list via a content giveaway to start your marketing. You need a lot more top of funnel and long term engagement marketing to convince your prospects to buy.

This isnt as far fetched as one may think.

There's a lot of talent in Montreal and great technology has been developed there.

There's a lot more entrepreneurs than many assume from their daily interactions.

Example:

The worlds first visual word processor was developed in Montreal by Stephen Dorsey - well before Gates, Jobs and Woz.

He then went on to develop real time fax over IP in the late 80s / early 90s and owns the patent on t38.

Steve and his company are still active, developing communications tech that's used worldwide.

This is just one example of many I've unexpectedly encountered doing business in the area.

Never say never :)

Not when you factor in that this program revolves around the startups using state owned and run real estate facilities. To be eligible for the program, you must locate your company on a designated "campus." So, you get incentives...but the state gets new tenants and fat profits, since most of the spaces offered to house a startup are recently renovated warehouses and empty university space.