Bootstrap Austin – An Entrepreneur Community

I recently met Bijoy Goswami who graduated from Stanford and came to Austin to work at Trilogy. He later left Trilogy and started his own company called Aviri which runs an entrepreneur community called Bootstrap. The group promotes the concept of bootstrapping startup businesses. In discussing with Bijoy we brainstormed the concept of taking NIs top five problems and presenting it to the bootstrap community to see if budding entrepreneurs could solve any of the problems.

I presented the top 5 issues to about 40 entrepreneurs. My primary goal was to find someone who could solve the Voice of the Customer problem. In looking on the market, there were few software tools that provided VOC analysis and those that did cost more than my budget. Some of the tools I found cost well into the six-figures. If you are interested in hearing the presentation, we captured it on MP3 and stored it as a podcast here.

After presenting to the group, I found four takers. Two of them had interesting tools but didn’t quite solve the VOC problem, while two were working more directly on the problem. It’ll be interesting to see what results come from this experiment.

If you know someone who has an easy to use Voice of the Customer tool, please send them my way.

Best regards,
Hall T.