Mintnow Alpha

                   Mintnow Alpha Start up school for grown ups

Are you a dreamers ? Who has thought about one day starting a start-up?

Have you already started it?

We'll have a range of experts on every aspect of start-ups, from technical details like how to incorporate, to a bigger questions like how to build something that millions of people will want.

Many would be entrepreneurs  consider starting a company at some point, but are put off because the process seems mysterious.

The goal of start-up school at Mintnow is to remove that mystery.


One day is not enough to teach all there is to know about start-ups, but past years have shown it's possible to cover a surprising amount of ground.  


                                       What’s holding you back?

Well, the Household Survey of Entrepreneurship identified five key barriers for employees who want to start up a business including:
· Fear of debt
· Fear of failure
· Losing the security of a job
· Worry of not making enough money
· Not enough time to put into a start-up whilst employed 
                       Any of those sounds familiar? So what’s the solution?


                        Google 20% time
Through its ’20 per cent time’ initiative Google encourages its engineers to spend one day a week, or 20% of their time, on projects that are unrelated to work. The initiative has helped the company dramatically expand its offerings, including, for instance gmail. 

                     

                    Friday Entrepreneurs Initiative

Mintnow has a Friday Entrepreneurs Initiative, for anyone who like to come and join us for cup of tea or something more just give us a call and pursue enterprise opportunities.
The aim of the initiative is to make an innovative contribution towards the growth of enterprise in Glasgow and west of Scotland.
If you are an employee but would really like to be an entrepreneur – what would help you take the leap?                              



Questions
The fact is, most start-ups end up nothing like the initial idea. It would be closer to the truth to say the main value of your initial idea is that, in the process of discovering it's broken, you'll come up with your real idea.

The initial idea is just a starting point-- not a blueprint, but a question. It might help if they were expressed that way. Instead of saying that your idea is to make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet, say: could one make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet? A few grammatical tweaks, and a woefully incomplete idea becomes a promising question to explore.

Why?
It's obvious why you want exposure to new technology, but why do you need other people? Can't you just think of new ideas yourself? The empirical answer is: no. Even Einstein needed people to bounce ideas off. Ideas get developed in the process of explaining them to the right kind of person. You need that resistance, just as a carver needs the resistance of the wood.

This is one reason Venture firms has a rule against investing in start-ups with only one founder. Practically every successful company has at least two. And because start-up founders work under great pressure, it's critical they be friends.

Doodling
What happens when your mind wanders? It may be like doodling. Most people have characteristic ways of doodling. This habit is unconscious, but not random: I found my doodles changed after I started studying painting. I started to make the kind of gestures I'd make if I were drawing from life. They were atoms of drawing, but arranged randomly in space imagination is greater than reality
Great Ideas
Of course the habits of mind you invoke on some field don't have to be derived from working in that field. In fact, it's often better if they're not. You're not just looking for good ideas, but for good new ideas, and you have a better chance of generating those if you combine stuff from distant fields


Solve a Problem
Finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be possible to solve it. Simple as it seems, that's the recipe for a lot of start-up idea.


Wealth
So an idea for a startup is an idea for something people want. Wouldn't any good idea be something people want? Unfortunately not. I think new theorems are a fine thing to create, but there is no great demand for them. Whereas there appears to be great demand for celebrity gossip magazines. Wealth is defined democratically. Good ideas and valuable ideas are not quite the same thing; the difference is individual tastes.

So what is the big idea?
Lotus began with a program Mitch Kapor wrote for a friend. Apple got started because Steve Wozniak wanted to build microcomputers, and his employer, Hewlett-Packard, wouldn't let him do it at work. Yahoo began as David Filo's personal collection of links. And you began while reading this …. 


That's probably the number one question people ask me. I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups? That might seem a stupid thing to ask. Why do they thinkit's hard? If people can't do it, then it is hard, at least for them. Right? Well, maybe not. What people usually say is not that they can't think of ideas, but that they don't have any. That's not quite the same thing. It could be the reason they don't have any is that they haven't tried to generate them.

                                      Mintnow α Program is ideal
· We match ideas to Personality of the entrepreneur
· We analyse strength and weakness of the entrepreneur and suggest Technology related product that compliment his/her skill and education or experience background
· We support mature start up
· We provide ideas to create enterprise from concept
· We provide a one stop shop for Ideas –Business