Answers To Your Biggest Burning Questions About Growth, Entrepreneurship and More…
We’ve been publishing our Friday Q&A series for six months. Now, you can find every answer in one place.
Back in June, we launched a new “feature” on the Groove blog: our Friday Q&A series.
I get a lot of questions via email, Twitter and through this blog, and every Friday, I pick three of them and publish my thoughts on each.
I’ve gotten a lot of value from doing the series, which I covered here.
But it’s not that easily skimmable for new readers. We’ve had a number of requests to compile all our Q&A posts into one page for easy reference, and I’m excited to publish that here today.
We’ll continue to publish new posts each Friday, but while we work on building a “hub” for these on our site (coming soon!), this will serve as an easy-to-navigate repository that makes finding, reading and sharing any question easier.
Enjoy!
Questions About Entrepreneurship & Startups
- When should I incorporate my business and put together a ToS/Privacy Policy?
- Should I quit my job to pursue my startup idea?
- Do you wish you raised more money in the early days of Groove?
- How should I go about building the first version of my product?
- When should a startup begin to focus on legal issues?
- How do you decide if a strategy should be continued or stopped?
- How did you come up with the idea to create Groove? If Groove fails do you have another idea to start with?
- If you were to start again from scratch, what would the outline of your business strategy be?
- How did you structure your beta testing program?
- How tough was it to start a tech company for a non-tech guy?
- How do you decide what features to add or remove from Groove?
- Do you need to own the .com for your startup’s name?
- What are the biggest challenges of starting a company outside of Silicon Valley?
- How do you deal with people copying you?
- What are the most important startup metrics?
- What are some of the businesses that inspire you?
Questions About Personal Developmentand Productivity
- Do you have a virtual assistant?
- What’s one thing most entrepreneurs should be doing. but aren’t?
- How do you turn the ideas you read about into action?
- How do you avoid getting overwhelmed by all of the advice on the internet?
- If you could have given yourself a piece of knowledge or advice when you first started Groove, what would that be?
- What book has changed your life?
Questions About Hiring, Managing & Firing
- Do you outsource any of your web development?
- How do you hire your first programmer?
- What do you expect from your team-members at Groove? What does your team expect from you?
- Am I a weak CEO if the idea of firing someone weighs heavy on my conscience?
- How do you know who to hire next?
Questions About Content Marketing
- How can non-native English speakers create useful content?
- How far in advance do you write your content?
- Why doesn’t the Groove blog use WordPress?
- How much time should you spend creating content?
- How do you promote your content?
- How do you track success with content marketing?
- When starting with guest posting, should you go after big blogs or mid-sized blogs just a step above your own?
- Do you keep SEO keywords in mind when deciding on blog post titles?
- Should you hire a content marketing agency, or do it yourself?
- How do you write a good author bio for a guest post?
- What are the necessary tools to start doing content marketing?
- How do you use content marketing in a developing country where the reading culture is really poor?
- Should I guest blog first, or wait until I have useful posts on my own site to send people to?
- How do you deal with writer’s block?
- Can a new business succeed without blogging?
- How early is too early to start blogging?
- What do successful blog posts have in common?
- How do you research for your content?
- What should you write about when you have two very different audiences?
- Should you pitch guest posts to big general publications or smaller, more targeted ones?
- How do you market content marketing?
- Is it important to have a system for content marketing?
- How do you do content marketing on a lean budget?
Questions About General Marketing
- Which channels deliver the most loyal customers?
- How do you find your ideal user personas?
- Should you wait until after you launch to start marketing?
- How can you get your first customers without spending a lot of money?
- How do you find and hire a great marketer for your business?
- How do you find your audience’s pain points?
- Is going to conferences and trade shows worth it?
- Do you spend money on advertising?
- What tools do you use to track metrics?
Questions About Influencer Outreach
- Is influencer outreach harder in a massive market?
- How do you connect with influencers on Twitter?
- What if you can’t do influencer outreach?
Questions About Remote Teams
- How do you measure remote employees’ performance?
- What slack channels have you guys created?
- What interview questions should you ask remote workers to gauge their “remote skills”?
- How do you manage your trello boards?
- In the beginning, should a remote team hire full-time employees or contractors?
- Where do you hire remote workers?
- How do you build a culture as a remote company?
Questions About Mentors & Advisors
- How do you keep mentors engaged after a first meeting?
- How do you find the right coaches and advisors in your market?
- How do you “add value” to a mentor’s life when you are just starting out?
- How do you compensate startup advisors?
Questions About Sales and Onboarding
- If English isn’t your first language, how do you gain the trust of potential customers on phone calls?
- What’s the best way to say “no” to sales people?
- How do you get your first customers to trust you?
- How do you gather customer feedback?
- How do you handle onboarding for customers who want their hands held?
- When cold calling, should you only call warm leads?
- How do you deal with bad customers?
- How do i reduce customer churn that happens after a user is already engaged?
Finally, A Request
I hope these questions and answers are as valuable for you as they have been for me.
To keep this series going, I need your help.
I’d love to answer your burning questions.
What are you struggling with? Whether it’s involving business, entrepreneurship, leadership, marketing, or anything: how can I help you work through your challenges?
Post your Friday Q&A questions in the comments below!
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