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 … 😉

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.

http://justinvincent.com/page/1464/introducing-the-startup-guild

How is it going to be different from http://www.asp-software.org/, for example?

However, you need to really make it successful before you can charge $1K for lifetime membership to something special.

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.

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

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

For the predictioner’s game, would it be readable on a kindle?

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

* 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.

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.