The other think I talked with Tomas about is Bootstrappers Anonymous, which is a vision I had of a physical meetup where people without funding (myself included) could get feedback in a professional environment from their peers. I met Joe Mellin at a meetup where I mentioned this and he and I are running the meetup. The first meeting was last night, we had about 18 people, and used a playful approach (that joe thought of) using the idea of "testing a hypothesis" on the meetup group to determine what type of meetup it should be. Here are the sides:

1. Bootstrappers
Anonymous
April 10, 2012 • San Francisco, CA

2. Why
• VC-funded
• Bootstrapped
• mentors for the funded only

3. Hosts
• Jonathan Yankovich
• Joe Mellin

4. Hosts
• Jonathan Yankovich
• Joe Mellin

5. Hypothesis
• People want to receive content
related to their startup’s success.
• People want a group to hold them
accountable to their startup’s
success.

6. Tonight’s Format
• Concerns & Goals
• Minipanel
•Group Share
• Discussion

7. Concerns

8. [ ]
wikipedia.org / Bracketing_(phenomenology)

9. Goals
1 week, 6 weeks, 6 months

10. Hypothesis #1

11. Minipanel

12. Minipanel
• What would you like
to know more about?

13. Minipanel
• Three people
Who knows about that?

14. Minipanel
10 minutes

15. Hypothesis #2

16. Accountability
6 teams / group

17. Accountability
• What is your biggest problem today?
• What did you do in the past 7 days to solve it?
• What will you do in the next 7 days to solve it?

18. Discussion

19. Next Meetup
• Two Weeks From Tonight
Tuesday, April 24
6:30pm - 7:30pm (possibly 8:00pm)

20. Resources
• Lean Startup, Erik Ries (book)
• Noob Guide to Online Marketing (post)
• Startups For The Rest Of Us (podcast)
• Ent. Guide to Customer Dev. (book)
• Blogs
• steveblank.com (Steve Blank)
• startuplessonslearned.com (Erik Ries)