Minnespark: micro seed capital for (very) early stage Minnesota startup
minnestar.org
minnestar.org
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/
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
So $1000 is not a lot, but in certain situations it is enough to propel an existing project toward revenue generation.
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.
Scale Well was itself inspired by The Awesome Foundation (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1040599) which has grown from our original Boston chapter to include Providence, NYC, and SF. Two more cities are ramping up: Ottawa and Philly.
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...