Rob Walling has been working to build the Micropreneur Academy – a focused site aimed at MicroISV’s who want to grow their businesses into high-value, fast-growth affairs (original May announce).
He contacted me a few months back to ask if I’d like to contribute an article on how screencasts can boost sales of software products, naturally I jumped at the chance!
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I first logged in. Rob had sent me a login as I wanted to know what the community looked like, and what they’d need, before I wrote the article. I was pleasently surprised to see a sort of mini-BusinessOfSoftware forum (i.e. friendly, helpful people who are working on cool stuff) backed by an awful lot of solid start-up knowledge written by Rob.
Knowing that I’d have to add an article of similar quality I spent time dissecting Rob’s articles. Having worked in start-ups for 10 years and having founded 3 of my own, I had an idea about a lot of the content, but I kept finding nuggets of really useful material in Rob’s articles.
I was left wishing I’d had access to this when Kyran and I had founded ShowMeDo back in 2005! I must also confess – I ended up using some of Rob’s ideas on market research to help plan my new eBook entitled The Screencasting Handbook.
Anyhow, I ought to cut this long story short. I wrote the article and found a set of happy readers inside Rob’s forum. I’m now also a mentor in his group because of my experience with on-line community building in ShowMeDo.
Rob’s about to open up the site to new membership, so if you have an interest in finding a closed group of people who are all building their own online start-ups, backed by lots of solid knowledge, do take a look at the Micropreneur Academy.
You can see two other write-ups by paying members for an idea of the value they see in the site. Rob’s also very chatty, you can easily get in touch with him if you sign-up to ask any questions.
The following are a couple of the start-ups run by members of the academy (I don’t know any of these, but I did recommend another start-up who has happily joined!):
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.