I'm thinking about regularly bringing on experts to give you all feedback on your businesses.

Growth for makers. I feel most makers are product centered and should either learn how to do marketing + sales, or how to find a way to work with/hire someone to get the word out.

Many makers aspire to be discovered on Product Hunt, Hacker News or Indiehackers, but don't realize they're mostly pitching other makers, who get excited about the technology.

I think this is a great idea, Courtland. We get a lot of questions from Founders on legal and accounting issues, so you might consider this topics. Happy to have the SureSwift team contribute our expertise to the conversation, if you like.

For me it would be "How to get first 100 users" especially for a market place

finding the right problem to work on

Yea that would be awesome! What kind of topics? For me it would be growth. Feedback, directly related to my business, on how to go from 0 to 100 paying subscribers. Great thought @csallen!

Better software design paradigms.

Designing and implementing systems.

Buying a business. There’s so much content and resources for starting one. How bout for the guy that has 100k saved and wants to buy an already established business. The alternate route to entrepreneurship.

Pricing. Pricing, pricing, pricing. It's the thing we struggle with above all else, yet also has significant potential to increase revenue and profitability.

SEO and general marketing for sure. Would love this

Pricing of services, SaaS tiers, etc. I always feel everyone is more or less winging it (me included).

What I'm currently struggling with is my hope page copy.

I’d love some specifics on how exactly to use paid advertising after product-market fit has been found. I’ve got a winning product and I’m trying all of Facebook and Google in a semi-random way. I’d really want to hear from makers in this regard, rather than pure digital marketers who often plug their own advertising agencies.

I have a full time job as a doctor but a side hustle of mine has proven to get some sales, so I don’t mind experimenting a little bit with money in order to learn how to grow the scale of my business.

yes! marketing would be especially interesting to me.

Definitely sounds cool! Happy to contribute as far as marketing + productized services go :)

1. I'd love to learn a bit more about how growing companies create a scalable and predictable hiring process. People really power our company and as we steam ahead, it's becoming even more important to continue to bring on A players.

2. I'd also love to learn more about leadership and team management. I think this is a really undervalued aspect of many startups and I'm truly starting to realize how large of an impact our leadership team has across our entire team.

Boom!

Hi Courtland,
definitely interesting. I'd like to see expert marketers and growth marketers and if possible, especially focused on small startups: i'd like to see someone that can provide actionable suggestions to solo developers working on little MVPs. It would be very useful for someone that wants to growth his/hers small little side project into something bigger.

Bringing on experts probably wouldn't work for two reasons:

1. This is not a good market for experts. Bootstrapped founders are price sensitive and often outright avoid paying for any services. From my experience talking with dozens of founders most engage sales people to scope out work they would either do themselves or outsource. That's a terrible outcome for experts that they would happily avoid.

2. Founders often don't understand the risks involved in work that experts perform. Experts help founders by preventing bad outcomes. There's many risks involved in building a business that can kill it before it succeeds. These risks are real. Experts exist to help businesses avoid them. I helped organize an event series where founders share their stories of how their businesses failed for this very reason. Why businesses fail is often more important than why businesses succeed. Until the problems founders experience in each area an expert might work on are articulated, any feedback would probably not be appreciated.

Someone to handle some LLC oriented questions would be great. It seems to be a constant question with hard to find answers that aren't dated. For example, if your business is 100% online selling SaaS does it matter if you register to do business in your own state or is Delaware, Wyoming, etc fine?

I've been in sales, marketing, sales operations, IT operations, financial operations... I'm happy to help where I can. Been ramping up my involvement on the site as I'm realizing more and more makers need a good deal of support in these areas (not so much in building things! :) )