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Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s blockbuster post about Entreporn, his prediction for the disintermediation of startup investment capital, an idea for how to synthesize microlending and angel investing into something called “microinvesting”, Pluggio’s resultant growth from funnel optimization, Justin’s desire to facilitate startup masterminding on a large scale, the movie Limitless and predicting outcomes via game theory, the book Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the possible discovery of Atlantis.
I’m really interested to hear peoples feedback about the WebappGuild idea. (n.b I’ve decided to use the name StartupGuild instead of WebappGuild [thx for the idea Jason]).
I like it. I’ll even come out of anonymity to work on it with you.
NO NO NO JASON YOU’RE WRONG ABOUT THE COURSE. I suggested the idea a long time back, therefore it’s right.
But Justin, if I may make a suggestion: make the course material available online too, but really well hidden. You can still get the SEO benefits.
Oh, lol I think Jason got totally lost about the course… Justin is talking about a TWITTER course, lol.
Ok, last two comments are completely retarded. I now refuse to leave anonymity.
Great show guys. With regards to the guild idea, I don’t see the value ($1,000) as you’ve presented it. If the fee included some big discounts on materials (ie. Amy or Rob’s materials) and maybe a few other things it would start to make sense.
Wait, there is a fee to join the guild? I thought it was something like this:
* Free
* People are grouped by where they are and where they want to be
So, my app makes between $3-6K/month so I may be an “expert” mentor for a pool of $1K but be a new fish in a $20K/month group.
At least that’s what I was hoping for.
Nothing is decided yet… 🙂
Actually, my cofounder and I have been working on this–still laying out the architecture. If we can get enough cycles away from work (we’re bootstrapping this), then we hope to have a prototype ready to launch within the next few weeks. Our plan is to charge a nominal fee (to cover hosting/bandwidth/filtering out some of the noise/screen sharing/etc.) for membership and we’ll help form/schedule groups. The monthly fee lets you join any non expert group (we’re thinking in the ballpark of 14.99/month). We plan to limit group sizes to be large enough to be interesting, but not so large that people get lost in the background. We will have other sessions that are run by a “expert” where there will be a larger fee (roughly $65 for an hour–we have to pay the expert)–discounted for members. We’ve been trying to come up with a good name since the space we’re interested in is larger than startups. Originally, I was thinking of studycircle.com, but the domain is in use, so we’ve been futzing around, looking for a good one. It’s vague, but I’ve been using “Sophiagen” for now as a filler.
We’ve been implementing it in Django–there are still parts that need work and some kinks that I’d like to iron out, but I think the basic functionality is coming along (the design sucks, so before launch, we’ll have to change it). There have been a number of people talking about this off and on, but I think that the main issues are social (I rather enjoyed your interviews with the founders of StackOverflow and Forrst about community building) rather than technological at this stage.
Do you think I should just get something out, even if it’s ugly and worry about tweaking some of the automation later? For example, scheduling is a pain–especially when you start to consider time zones across different countries. Also, I need to look more into the rules for paypal and paying contractors as experts (For those that are experts on coding, I was hoping to pay in the neighborhood of $50-100/hr). This will be the second business for my cofounder and my first, so any advice would be appreciated.
One thing that we’re debating about is whether the group discussions should be public or private….
Justin, I don’t want to be out of line mentioning what we’re up to and I think that the space is fairly large and I’d be happy to discuss things offline if you’re interested.
William
Jason,
For the predictioner’s game, would it be readable on a kindle?
What I have in mind is a little more boutique than an automated system. I’ve been (background process) thinking about it for a while. I’m thinking Y Combinator but a distributed version – that can grow micro businesses to larger startups.
I have it in my mind that the $1000 serves as a qualifier to prove that the business is committed. It serves as a lifetime fee to the guild. And it serves to ensure that I can personally work full time with all startups on a daily basis.
I had it in mind to take on 30 per 3 month period and try to scale up from there.
Then, like y-combinator there would be an ancillary news site and information blog resource center.
I’m very happy with the name StartupGuild.net
Justin,
I think our plans are a bit orthogonal–We’re looking for something more for the masses–We are going with the monthly model because:
1) There needs to be some barrier to weed out people who not interested in learning, or who won’t contribute (not to mention spam).
2) The barrier to entry is low enough that people feel that it’s an ok risk. If they’re out 15 dollars, they’re unhappy, but not terribly unhappy. 1000 dollars seems like a lot of risk…
3) If there is an expert to help out, the charge can be higher, but again, not so high that it scares people off–if they pay say $50 for an hour of someone’s time (with say a group of 6 people, that’s $300 for an hour), then again, the risk is small and you have enough money to pay for an expert to help facilitate the group and to have some money to support yourself if you get enough people.
4) Recurring business revenue just seems more stable…$1000/life seem like a lot at first, but if this last for a few years, then it’s not so much–especially if you want to add material, special sessions with instructors, etc. It’s the curse of consulting (scalability) that Jason has brought up….
Anyway, that’s just some of our thoughts. What we are envisioning is more of an online learning community–you want to learn a programming language or a framework, we’ll find a group for you. Statistics? Mastermind group? CPA exam? Etc. If you feel you need an expert, we’ll find one–for a price (for example, if someone wants to pick up Ruby, then we’ll find a Ruby developer and pay them for an hour of their time where a group can ask questions of them…)…As people in major cities, we’re a bit spoiled because we have a decent chance of finding a group of people locally, but there are a lot of places where it can be hard to find a group of people to study a topic with. The reason we were considering an automated approach is to be able to scale. However, it might be better to just go with something simple and boutique so that we can launch and to see if there’s interest before we spend too much more effort in engineering….What do you think?
Would people be willing to spend say $14.99/month for an online mastermind group (or to study anything else) without an expert (screen sharing/telephony/white board included)? Would people be willing to spend say $50 for an hour long studygroup session with 5 people where they could ask questions of an expert on say Rails/Django/Node.js? Would a freelancer be willing to sit with a group of people for an hour answering questions (sharing a screen/skyping) for $75 for an hour (I’d like to be able to pay decently to get good developers who can answer questions–no prep work, just answering questions). You could have “courses”, but the risk for any particular lesson is relatively low.
Are you thinking of just putting up a launch page to see if there’s interest?
William
Awesome points William. I really like the sound of what you are proposing.
Just to be clear I WANT to scare people off. At the start I only want people involved who are very, very, very, very committed to hard work, masterminding, & success.
I will probably offer a 3 month 100% money back guarantee so they can get a serious sense if it’s for them or not. Also, I will be doing a detailed background check (including NDA signing etc) for each applicant to ensure they are the real deal.
Ultimately the $1000 will become irrelevant for me as I will not draw finances form it. However it will serve as a deterrent. It’s also a signaling mechanism. This is for the select few who are taking this VERY seriously.
I would ultimately aim to make myself redundant and create a process for anyone who is serious about moving forward with masterminding and getting into the elite group of dedicated “no-investement” entrepreneurs.
There would also be scholarships to enable a select few in under free scholarship terms (probably the younger ones). The first task of the mastermind group would be to review scholarship applicants and select which scholarship entrant they wanted in their mastermind group.
The focus would be on creating very tightly knit mastermind groups who could trust each other and ultimately become close friends and lifelong colleagues.
What I’m envisioning is not so much a learning system as an elite network/club. Basically a distributed y-combinator for folks interested in the “no-investment” route.
One thing I should add is that 99.9% of StartupGuild material would be free. The only thing the $1000 gets you is to be a member of the club with me personally matching up your mastermind group. Almost everything else you can get for free. There would also be 2 level of guild memberships Free & $1k club.
(Note: This is an emergent idea and I’m teasing out of my brain even as these comments are being posted!)
@Bopinder – See above re pricing
Ok, I can see what you mean about being serious.
However, you need to really make it successful before you can charge $1K for lifetime membership to something special.
@Bopinder – Think of the twitter “Verified Member” concept. It would be more like a status badge than anything else. It also proves to other master-minders that your taking it seriously. As I say, it’s an emergent concept. All the free stuff would be there long before any charging started.
I think you have an idea there, regardless of the specific $$$.
How is it going to be different from http://www.asp-software.org/, for example?
After further ruminations I think the $1000 is not even worth thinking about. So forget that. Here’s what I’m thinking now. 100% free. No charge:
http://justinvincent.com/page/1464/introducing-the-startup-guild
I like it. Don’t go overboard though. The key thing will be connecting people to mentors.
@bams – You don’t need to reveal your true identity I already know who you are 😉
Justin, I figured. Too easy.
I like the idea and signed up for emails.
I sitll need to think of something that I can make outside my various hobby projects which can generate some income for myself, but thats a small step I guess.
The discussion on the prisoner’s dilemma reminded me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVi7XQP-wDU
@Andrew – Yep, that game is exactly prisoner’s dilemma. Wow, that was painful to watch.
Fuck grammar. And spellign ;
I had read the Entreporn post when Justin published and had followed the thread on HN, as well as on Twitter especially between Amy Hoy and Alex Payne. What a fascinating exchange of points and counterpoints. Kudos to you Justin for starting it all!
The Startup Guild is a very interesting concept – although similar to Rob Walling’s Micropreneur Academy Forums but on a wider scale. I wonder what Rob’s feedback is … 😉
Personally, I ‘m not a big fan of the “guild” word as it has a gamer connotation associated with it. While there is nothing wrong with gaming, I feel that building a group around the name guild is kind of odd. I run a user group in Minneapolis that used to be called the “Twin Cities Developers Guild”. People didn’t know what to think of the “guild” part of the group name. I spent more time explaining what it was than talking about what we do. Long story short, I ended up changing the name from Guild to “Group”, so it’s now Twin Cities Developers Group. I’ve since had much higher turn outs and people come to the group understanding what its. Its kind of “Name SEO” if you think about it. 🙂