Over the last five years I have taught myself to code: mainly PHP and JS. I built various web apps, one that got traction and now pays me a monthly income (enough to pay rent). Building it threw many challenges at me from sys admin to the delights of JS... but it's now not something I'm going to spend a lot of time on (for business reasons). So I am at a natural point of looking to the next five years and what to spend my time learning (and building). I'd like to get to know more developers too. So it's not so much a problem I have, it's more about understanding how other developers went from low/mid competency to a higher level of competency.
In terms of "forcibly dropped" - the group is run free of charge, so contribution is key. No contribution = "forcibly dropped". Contribution means taking part in a mastermind group, discussions or asking / giving help.
On evaluation, I'd like to move to a democratic way of evaluating it where the group or a group within the group decide. I believe that's what http://yec.co/ do.
* Mastermind groups are run on Skype or Google Hangouts
* It's a global group
* We have group owners (volunteers) who start groups and organise them to suit their goals and timezones
* It's mostly a tech / web audience
* It's more support and accountability than mentoring
* Mastermind groups are run bi-weekly (depends on the group owner). We're looking to introduce weekly mastermind groups on specific subjects i.e. PR, SEO, pricing, partnerships, etc.
* We also include a weekly summary / round up of discussions that have taken place in the group that week and on Mondays people post their goals for the week, which other people comment on / offer help / ask questions
I think your idea has enormous potential, don't screw it up :-)
To quote General Rumsfeld, a solo founder usually has a lot of "unknown unknowns" because a single human being is likely to have a lot of skill gaps that they themselves are not fully aware of.
Many solo founders could probably see an order of magnitude in the success of their products if a bunch of peers give suggestions like "Dude, this page needs a link for tweeting your completed images" or "You need a call for action on this page" or "This font makes your web page look like it was created in 1998"
The dynamic of a startup is very different when you have 2-3 founders, in that case it is probably better to work as a team to try and resolve these types of problems, but for a solo founder a semi-confidential outside opinion could be valuable.
Asking "real-world friends" about these types of things doesn't really work most of the time because they may not understand startup tech and because polite society usually follows the rule "If you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all."
Most community software would give people the option of G+, FB and LI identities, on top of regular email identity. I can't imagine the cost/hosting of something like buddypress or elgg would be all that burdensome, which would give you multiple social logins as well as keeping things in-house vs under google's control.
You're trying to go after a rather single-minded crowd (solo founders) and you may end up losing a fair amount of value from people that won't bend to your identity requirement.
I'm not a regular G+ user but I'd rather use G+ any day of the week over either BuddyPress or Elgg (because they're terrible) and I am certain that these guys have way better things to do with his time than write a better community portal. It is burdensome and it's presumptive of you to expect him to burn his time on something that benefits a tiny outlier of the audience. To be honest, I'd be less interested if it was populated with people who care that much about waving their Not Google+ flag because trivialities like that should be a very low priority for people in that solo-founder bucket.
Thanks, gregormck and crew! It's a great idea, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of it. I'll be looking into it this evening.
Good points and you are correct (I'm the creator of solo.im)
The group is full of founders who all have different experiences and knowledge to pass on. "Quality" can be subject for sure, but I believe founders can help other founders regardless of where they are in the process of starting / running a business.
The big thing is contribution. solo.im / mastermind groups is just one thing of many you can get involved in and get help from when you are a founder.
I applied about three weeks ago but haven't heard anything as to whether I was accepted. I'm sure you have a backlog of applications so I'm not sweating it but would love to hear one way or another soon!
Really appreciate your information. Looks like the rest of the web pages are not ready yet. It depends on how many people sign up. A list of signed up solos should be posted for people to choose from, I guess.
