

Minnespark: micro seed capital for (very) early stage Minnesota startup - philcrissman
http://minnestar.org/minnespark/

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100k
Hey, awesome. We made Hacker News.

I'm involved in organizing this. If you have any questions or comments, please
let me know and I'll respond and if necessary add them to the FAQ:
<http://minnestar.org/minnespark/faq/>

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sachinag
Is this more Awesome Foundation, where it's $1,000 to just build _something_
or is it a mini-YC where it's $1,000 to really do a company?

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100k
I'd never heard of Awesome Foundation, sounds cool though.

Obviously $1K is not a lot of money to build a company, but the goal is to get
people over the mental hurdles that are stopping them and hopefully get them
to a place where they're making money online.

I'm a YC alumni so I'm influenced by that, but the idea is lifted from Scale
Well in Chicago: <http://scalewell.com/>

The winner of the first Scale Well grant used it to refine his synthesizer,
and he now sells Beep It on etsy:
<http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=25223176>

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andyangelos
Thanks for the props 100k. We noticed with Michael, the first recipient of a
ScaleWell grant, that the community recognition allowed him to more
efficiently collect feedback and support (his existing business seemed more
"real").

So $1000 is not a lot, but in certain situations it is enough to propel an
existing project toward revenue generation.

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100k
Cool. This is an experiment for us, but we are going to tie the winner(s) into
our existing events like MinneBar and MinneDemo to increase their exposure.

And in fact, we're already getting some press about the event...it was written
up next to the $130,000 Minnesota Cup in one of the business papers here.

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callahad
Oh, neat! Is there much of a startup scene in the Cities? Where do folks meet
up?

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philcrissman
That's a good question. A lot of places. I've met a lot of likeminded folks at
Minnedemo/Minnebar events (see <http://minnestar.org>), and just through
working/networking, and the local Ruby group (<http://ruby.mn>).

Tech.MN has a pretty thorough local event calendar: <http://tech.mn/events/>

One group that seems to be gaining momentum is a newish MN Lean Startup group.
<http://leanstartup.mn/>

But yeah, there are many great people here doing many cool things.

Would love to see posts about folks in other cities doing or trying similar
things. Silicon Valley is great and all, but not everyone wants or even needs
to be there. I'm sure the Twin Cities is not the only place with a lot of
enthusiastic folks creating the tech culture they want to see around them...

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varikin
There are a bunch of other active user groups in the Cities too. Python,
Cocoa, mobile dev, groovy and many others.

