Startups For the Rest of Us

Mastermind Matching applications are now open.  Whether you are in the process of validating your SaaS idea and looking for product-market fit to finding a scalable marketing channel, or maybe you are looking for an extra dose of accountability and support as you grow the company, joining a mastermind can help. With hundreds of successful matches under our belt, we have brought together founders from all walks of life, from over 50 countries across 20 time zones, with a collective $150M+ in ARR. To do this, we focus on a number of key data points to get a feel for each entrepreneur’s experience level, expectations, work and personality styles, and other key criteria that allow us to make informed matches, including: Location Time zone Language Experience Level Current Revenue Level Goals Skill Set Industry served Whether or not this is your first business If you already have 1 or more established businesses (like an agency) and building a SaaS as a 2nd business, etc. We've also made some big updates to the content in our mastermind program, including adding a series of 3 mentor sessions to tackle topics and challenges you are likely to experience based on where you are currently at with your business. These mentor sessions range from how to structure and get the most value out of your mastermind to mastering customer interviews, building a marketing flywheel, and hiring and onboarding your first few employees. For those of you who sign up for a mastermind and are doing more than $500k in ARR, you'll be invited to attend three virtual office hours with Rob Walling, Co-Founder of TinySeed + MicroConf & Einar Vollset, Co-Founder of TinySeed. Links from the Show: MicroConf Masterminds Transcript: Rob Walling: Welcome back to Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling, and this is a special half episode, a 0.5 episode, that from time to time we put in the feed when we have a special announcement or a topic to cover that otherwise doesn't fit in the main continuity of the Startups for the Rest of Us feed. Today I wanted to make a special announcement about the MicroConf Mastermind Matching program. If you're not already familiar with what a Startup Mastermind is, we have talked about them in a few episodes on this feed. And I've been espousing their values for 10 plus years now. I've gotten my first Mastermind maybe 13-ish years ago, somewhere around then, and it made such an incredible difference in my entrepreneurial journey. And if you're not familiar with a Startup Mastermind, what that term means, A) you can go back and listen to episode 277 and 167 of this podcast. Or I'll give you just the two sentence definition here. But realistically, Masterminds were a concept invented in a book from the '30s that just isn't that relevant to what we're talking about today. But Startup Masterminds are when you get three founders, five founders, six founders together via Zoom. In person's great too, but usually it's remote and every two to four weeks is the typical cadence of a Mastermind. And you come alongside one another. And in my experience, you form this bond where other people have ownership in your journey. And not only is it moral support, it's sanity check, it's sounding board, but it also is accountability. And it's that idea of one plus one equaling three, right? It doesn't 2x your brain power, 3x your brain power, it 10x's your collective brain power because you get new thoughts and ideas from the experiences of the other people in the group. I would not be where I am today without my Masterminds. I've been in multiple and they have had a profound impact, so much of an impact that part of our Tiny Seed Accelerator curriculum is we match the founders up into Masterminds. And over the years, as I've talked about Masterminds, we at MicroConf have received a lot of questions about, where do I find a mastermind? And my old advice used to be go to Faceb