This article was originally posted on Albacross Blog.Want to generate higher-quality leads who are easy to close?You’ll have to start with this crucial step: creating the ideal customer profile.Now, some business owners make the mistake of targeting too large a segment.

They think that doing this increases their pool of potential customers…But in actual fact, it’s actually a hindrance and a bad sales strategy.Why do I say so?Say you’re targeting newly launched startups, and you want to offer them your digital marketing services, for example.You know that the biggest concern, for these guys, is to ensure that they have enough cash flow on hand…Bearing this in mind, you can tailor your pitch to talk about how you’ll make sure that they have a steady stream of customers.

This way, they’ll never run out of cash.What if you’re targeting small B2B business owners earning ~$100,000/year, on the other hand?Well, these folks are probably busy thinking of ways to grow/scale their company.So here’s what you do:You pull out some stats talking about how much ROI digital marketing brings you, and tell them that digital marketing can really help them take their company to the next level.I could go on, but I think you get the point.The more specific your target audience or customer profile is, the easier it is to understand their needs and pain points.And once you do that, you can tailor your sales process, and pitch your products/services in a way that’s relevant to them.So, don’t jump the gun and read up on how to write outreach emails, or how to cold-call your leads.

Instead, start by creating your ideal customer profile first.

Afterwards, focus on planning your sales activities.In this article, we’ll walk you through a 3-step guide that will teach you how to create a kickass ideal customer profile.Alright, let’s get started!Step 1: Define your ideal customerTo do this, you need all hands on deck.

So gather all your colleagues in a meeting, and ask everyone to pitch in with what they think an ideal customer looks like.You’ll find that different departments will define an “ideal customer” differently, so be sure to hear everyone’s take on this.For example, your CFO might say that an ideal customer is one that has the highest Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

If you’re an entrepreneur about to launch a startup, then you know how important every cent can be.While executing your core competency will be a crucial factor to the success of your business, another important step is effectively marketing your business.

Below are 15 of the best digital marketing tools that can help you get your marketing initiatives going from scratch.

Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics is undoubtedly the most recognized free digital marketing tool and the backbone of any marketing campaign as it can provide you with the metrics and information that you need.

Their insights help businesses, publishers, marketers and analysts benchmark performance against competitors, find new ways to increase their web traffic, and discover new opportunities to broaden their audience.This tool is also a great way of checking your website’s ranking but you can also use it for knowing about how your competitor is gaining most of it’s audience.

Use the full set of SpyFu resources to layer your research with richer insights.Moving in and out of SpyFu’s keyword tools like Keyword SmartSearch and Ad History lets you build on your findings and gut-check your decisions.

After you discover a compelling keyword, we’ll help you find out what other advertisers ran into after they tried it.

When it comes to the nitty, gritty details of the backend, non-technical startup entrepreneurs underestimate the importance of learning to code far too often.

Of course, they’re experts in non-technical areas like finance or marketing, and as it’s gotten them this far, they might not have considered the value in knowing some essential programming fundamentals.

As such, they often entrust software development to a CTO, hire freelancers, or an agency.However, the founder’s lack of technical expertise can sometimes cause inefficiencies when it comes to decisions about product architecture or design.Simply having a basic understanding of programming fundamentals and how the web works can be helpful in all stages of your business, clarifying many things that might have seemed mysterious before.Turning that basic understanding into high-level knowledge does even more good.

Specifically — to name a few things — it will allow you to map the product specs, create mockups and wireframes, estimate the resources needed to start developing an MVP , understand what expertise is required for the project, and which technologies will be the most practical to use.Now, you don’t need to become an expert in software development, but having a general understanding of what happens behind the scenes when you browse the website or a mobile app is a must if you are up to building a truly successful tech startup.

Turning ideas into realityIf you’re planning to create a revolutionary platform that will disrupt the entirety of the digital assets market, awesome!

Go you!But… that might be difficult if you have just a basic set of coding skills.

Today we’ll talk about different options for making the tech side of your project done like finding a technical cofounder, contractor developers, or a technical partner. Looking for a startup partner may take some time, but we’ll try to help you with this challenge. So, how to find a technical cofounder and what other options are available? Let’s figure this out!

You have a great startup idea, you believe in this idea, you live this idea. You are willing to start asap and create something new that will change the world! And even more than to make your idea real you want to find someone who will believe in this idea as much as you do.. and together you will conquer the world.

Recognize yourself? I bet you do!

But the great idea isn’t enough for a startup to become successful. You can have a$1,000,000 idea, a perfect business plan, investors willing to pay you, potential customers and users waiting for your product but it’s only 50% of work to be done. You can handle everything connected with marketing and sales, but what about the technical side?

Why do you need to find a co-founder, a CTO or a Tech partner?

The first idea that usually comes to entrepreneurs’ mind when they start a new business is to hire freelance developers. A lot of small businesses work using this approach, but if you don’t have a tech background or at least a tech lead in your existing team it will be difficult to create a scalable MVP.

There are different ways to solve the problem. You can find:  

• Tech cofounder. A technical founder is one of the key roles in a company. It is a person who will be responsible for all the tech-related processes and have a share of overall profit. In this case, he or she will also call you a cofounder of his company, a non-technical cofounder.
• CTO. It is an employee who will be your hired technical director.   
• Tech Partner. An outsourcing team which will care about all the development processes — not as just a contractor, but considering all the business needs.

Once you define whom exactly you are looking for — you can start searching for the ideal candidate. Or maybe you’ve already tried but haven’t succeeded?

So let’s figure out how to find a cofounder for your startup (or maybe a CTO) and what to do if you can’t find them through your connections or with the help of referrals.

Where to find a cofounder or a partner for a startup?

Here are some popular solutions to find the right technical specialists to join your team.

1. СoFoundersLab — is a platform that helps entrepreneurial-minded people access the resources they need to thrive. It’s one of the best options to find a technical cofounder for a startup.

How to find a cofounder here? You need to register on the platform (you can do it with your Facebook, Google, Linkedin or email), answer a couple of questions about you and your business, and then navigate to the search page. The platform is free but also has premium options.

2. Founders Nation is another place where you can find a startup cofounder. It’s not so big but still a platform with similar options like CoFoundersLab. It was built to connect dreamers that wish to make the world a better place through innovation and technology.

How to find a technical cofounder here? The idea is practically the same. You register on a platform and then find appropriate people using filters for better accuracy.

3. Angel.co is a popular platform created for startups, investors, and professionals to find each other.

Here you can find a technical co-founder, a CTO or experienced developers. The website is very simple, as well as the previous two. All you need to do is to register as a recruiter and post the vacancy. Also, there are filters available to navigate through the professionals’ profiles.

4. Indie Hackers — a relatively new platform for entrepreneurs to learn from the founders behind hundreds of profitable online businesses. The platform was built to connect with others who are starting and growing their own companies.

Looking for a programmer partner or finding a technical cofounder on this website may be a bit more difficult than in the previous examples because it’s all about communication here. No filters, no structure, but lots of professionals speaking with each other in a kind of a forum. But nevertheless, it may be also an effective tool for finding a technical cofounder or another professional you need.

5. Co-founder’s subreddit on Reddit.com. It’s a thread on the popular Reddit platform.

To find a technical cofounder or a partner here you should register and then navigate through a number of threads and also create your own thread describing your business and your needs. Again, it may be a bit difficult to find information because of the structure of the service. But Reddit has lots of great tech professionals all over the world. It’s definitely worth using.

6. Co-founding threads on Discordapp and Slack channels. These are two messengers which have business and entrepreneur channels. In order to find a co-founder here, you should register and use the shortcodes to find the channels by keywords.

For example, on /r/startups in the Discordapp you can find #Cofounding and other channels, and ask people for what you need there.

7. Tech Partner

Finding a technical partner for a Startup is another quite popular option which is often even more goal-, time- and cost-effective than looking for a programmer partner, CTO or a co-founder. In this case, you use the services of a special company which has a considerable experience in tech development and provides “CTO-as-a-Service”.

This significantly reduces such risks as “it’s the wrong person”, “they’ve got not enough experience”, “they work too slow”, and “we need more money than expected” that you face when trying to find a CTO, freelance developers, or even a technical co-founder.

On the other hand, it gives you:

• an experienced team of professionals who keep the terms and the requirements;
• not just contractors who are waiting for your directions, but a partner who cares about your business and takes all the technical matters in their hands: creating an architecture, planning the works, platform design, scaling, monitoring, coding etc.;
• often even more reasonable prices compared with freelance teams (especially considering finance- and time-connected risks).

We work on this model with a number of startups. And for all of them this is exactly what they were looking for. To get the idea what I am talking about – just check our Partners testimonials on Cutch.co.

If you see a fit and need a reliable Tech Partner, just fill in the short form, tell us a few words about your startup idea, and let’s find the best way to develop your project!

Later, when you’re getting traction you can focus on delivering a compelling user experience; but in the beginning, it’s all about getting that initial user feedback.In this article we’ll help you think of an MVP as an efficient mechanism for getting a virtuous cycle going between value creation and data collection.

Remember, as a strategic entrepreneur optimizing for scarce resources, in most cases your best bet is to opt for the most practical solution.

Believe it or not, these can actually reach more users than mobile apps—and as browsers become increasingly functional, their capabilities are growing fast.While the business case of an app like Uber or Instagram depends directly on device features and functionality (geolocation), there are many other products out there that don’t need to interface with mobile APIs; and thanks to responsive web design, these applications can benefit from additional screen real estate, a more convenient mobile typing experience, and the cross-platform accessibility afforded by web app design.These days the tech options for mobile app development available to entrepreneurs are abundant.

The main differences between them come down to implementation speed, cost, and final product quality.

So let’s unpack four popular mobile app technologies that will illustrate the common differences among them.

These will help you identify the most practical way to validate your business idea and facilitate its concomitant product development.Progressive Web ApThis relatively new technology developed by Google enables mobile devices to add a website or web application to a smartphone’s home screen and be able to interact with it offline.To turn a regular web app into a progressive web app you just need to add a home screen icon, web application manifest, and service worker that allows the site to work offline and load faster, as well as to send push notifications.

Being a successful entrepreneur means being able to consider and balance everything from your clients’ perception of your startup to how much capital you need to continue developing the business. The problem with striking that balance is knowing about core startup metrics and how to measure what’s working and what’s not.

Taking a close look at what you can measure will help you keep a pulse on the viability of your startup and change the course if you see that something doesn’t work. There’s a vast array of software and systems you can explore to help you along the way; marketing tools (Google analytics for example) to collect all the data or key performance indicators to estimate your startup chances to succeed.

So what are these metrics and what key metrics in business do you need to use first?

Think ahead

If you’ve just started thinking about your success metrics and don’t know yet which are really important in your case, you should begin by researching metrics other companies in your industry use.

It doesn’t matter what you are launching — fintech, SaaS, ecommerce or media, there is always somebody who’s experienced this stage of a startup to some extent and can share their experience; you can almost always find experts to discuss what metrics will be better for your business.

Are You Measuring the Right Things?

Of course, every business is unique and each needs specific figures that need to be measured separately. For example, mobile products hinge largely on MAU/DAU, bounce rate is particularly important for media, average order value and the percentage of returning customers (or shopping cart abandonment rate) is huge for eCommerce sites etc.

But there are metrics that are standard for every online business that shouldn’t be ignored when launching a startup. Here is a list of basic metrics that will help you measure your startup success in terms of customer and business.

Business-Oriented Metrics

All website traffic — this is an essential metric that tells you how many people visit your website. This metric’s especially important if you run a blog or media portal, where your advertising revenue is largely dependent on number of visitors. Traffic also impacts other industries’ sales, in which case, you would want to examine from a lens of quality rather than quantity.

Conversion rate (CR) shows you the number of visitors who took a desirable action (filled form, registered, bought). Conversion metrics, important measures of profitability in sales, show you the result of your work.

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