“There has never been a better time to be a person with technical skills and entrepreneurial drive.”
The Micropreneur Academy is home to developers who launch. The applications below are the first round of products launched by Academy members.
Description: Bidsketch is web based proposal software for small businesses or freelancers.
Academy Member: Ruben Gamez
Quote: “I was initially doubtful that the Academy would pay for itself every month but I completely reversed my position on that. One of my colleagues is running into major problems trying to tackle these types of issues and I’ve tried to get him to consider the Academy. He really doesn’t realize how much pain he’s putting himself through by not signing up.”
Description: Bidspeed is an opportunity and capture management tool designed for businesses selling to the U.S. government. Bidspeed is integrated with FedBizOpps giving you instant access to all published Federal opportunities. Bidspeed is also a complete CRM system that helps you track due dates, store related documents securely, share information with your team, collaborate on bids, keep connected with contracting officers, and win more government deals.
Academy Member: Ryan Reid
Quote: “The Academy content is helpful; I expect it will more than pay for itself by helping me avoid silly mistakes.”
Description: Book Keeper is a BlackBerry application for managing time, invoices, and clients that integrates with FreshBooks.
Academy Member: Eric Muntz
Quote: “The Academy’s lessons and resources removed every obstacle in my way and took the guess work out of the situation. I can’t recommend it enough.”
Description: BV Commerce is a hosted shopping cart solution that simplifies running an online store.
Academy Member: Marcus McConnell
Quote: “I wish the Academy existed when I started BV Software. It would have saved me several painful lessons in the company’s early years. If you’re thinking about selling software or a service save yourself a lot of time and trouble by subscribing to the Academy.”
Description: CashWaltz is a hosted family expense tracking application. It’s currently in soft-launch.
Academy Member: Ronnie Pitts
Quote: “I would recommend the Academy to a friend, but not to my competition. The materials are very good, and I’ll know next week if one small contract paid for the course many times over.”
Description: Cronless is an online cron replacement service that offers scheduled task execution (e.g. cron jobs) where you don’t have access to (or simply don’t want to configure) Windows Scheduler or UNIX crontabs. Cronless is used to backup databases, send billing invoices, auto-post to blogs, update online games, and more. If you can write an URL, you can run a cron job with Cronless.
Academy Member: Dave Rodenbaugh
Quote: “The Micropreneur Academy was the push I needed to hone my skillset into a full-fledged business manager, rather than just a skilled developer with some business knowledge. I’ve built businesses before, but the lessons filled many gaps for me and allowed me to bring a new business online within 4 weeks of starting. These are battle-tested, launch-ready suggestions to go from Zero to Hero in online business. Seriously, you could Google for the rest of your life and not find as much valuable information that the Academy packs in the first 8 weeks…”
Description: EditMe is an on-demand wiki and web publishing service. An embedded development platform makes it the only wiki-platform-as-a-service available.
Academy Member: Matt Wiseley
Quote: “I came to the Academy with a mature product, and the material here echos most of what I learned the hard way through trial and error. It succinctly communicates many of the finer points of marketing a software product that I would have had trouble putting into words, and has certainly improved my thinking and process around marketing. Most importantly, the Academy provides a private community of like-minded solopreneurs for the exchange of ideas, feedback and support.”
Description: Flip-Start is a foreclosure listing website that allows real estate investors to quickly find and screen property for potential purchase. The coverage area is Allegheny County, PA. We will be adding more areas in the coming months.
Academy Member: Charles Snell
Quote: “The Academy has saved me the price of admission in AdWords optimization alone. Trying to figure out on my own what I learned by reading the lessons would have taken me months and lots of money.”
Description: Provides ideas for available domain names based on your keywords.
Academy Member: Jorge Monasterio
Quote: “I’ve been a solo software developer and consultant for many years. I thought I knew it all, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the content of the Micropreneur academy. Every new lesson has monetizable tips and ideas that I haven’t heard about anywhere else. The Academy is a great resource!”
Description: Lapsus is time tracking without timers. It runs in the background and knows what project you’re working on. Find out how long that last project took without the hassle of updating a timer. Beta in Spring 2010.
Academy Member: John Gallagher
Quote: “I joined the Micropreneur Academy skeptical that it would help me. The fact that it cost money was a real stumbling block for me. However, I took the plunge and I’m really, really glad I did. When I joined I was downhearted and depressed about the lack of progress on my product. I posted to the forums and immediately got loads of constructive criticism and encouragement. It’s still early days for me with the Academy, but it’s already paid for itself in the progress I’ve made since joining. If you’re working on your own to develop a product, you know as well as anyone that it can be a really hard slog. The big value for me is that when I’m feeling low and times are hard I know that there’s a dedicated community that will support me. I get the feeling that when I launch version 1 of Lapsus I’m going to look back and wonder how I could have made it happen without the Academy.”
Description: Merspi is a social learning hub for students from Australia built on StackExchange.
Academy Member: James Spittal
Quote: “It’s a laugh to think that many of my peers pay thousands of dollars a year in university fees and learn skills and knowledge that are a lot less useful than what they could learn in one month of the Micropreneur Academy.”
Description: Orchestrate is a hosted workforce scheduling application – it makes it easy to send a qualified technician to a location to perform a task, then track the outcome and capture their feedback. Clients can be granted read-only access to their data, and all completed tasks are stored online.
Academy Member: Andy Wright
Quote: “I was expecting a lot and the Academy has exceeded my expectations.”
pixur.me
Description: A pixur.me stream is a group photo album where anyone can add photos. Pixur.me is made for groups of people who all want to share and contribute to the same stream. For example, you might be hosting a Graduation party for your kids. Nowadays there will be multiple digital cameras there. Will everyone get to see all those photos? Maybe. But, will everyone be able to find all those photos (no matter who took them) a year from now? That’s Pixur.me!
Academy Member: JD Conley
Description: QuickReader is a speed reading eBook reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Think of it as an eBook reader on steroids. Does this give you an unfair advantage? Perhaps, but we won’t tell anyone.
Academy Member: Patrick Thompson
Quote: “The Academy lessons tell you what you need to do, why you need to do it, and, give a time and cost effective recipe for how to do it. This short-cuts a lot of research you would need to do otherwise. Beyond the Academy lessons, Rob and Mike have been generous in their advice and the forum community has been very supportive. If you are a developer starting on a solo venture, joining the Academy will greatly improve your chances for success.”
Description: SAM Contacts is a simple and powerful contact manager with unique features such as mapping and tags.
Academy Member: Mihaela Mihaljevic Jakic
Quote: “I would definitely recommend the Academy for two reasons: First I find the content to be invaluable. The lessons are assemblies of best practices and experience that have saved me a lot of time and a lot of mistakes. The second reason is the forums, in which people with similar ventures and problems meet and help each behind closed doors.”
Description: SAM Reports is Asterisk reporting made simple.
Academy Member: Mihaela Mihaljevic Jakic
Description: ThoughtMuse lets you to create, edit and share mindmaps online, directly in your browser – no special software required.
Academy Member: Thomas Kjeldahl Nilsson
Quote: “The forum is pure gold. The big value is in the mutual feedback taking place, and the signal to noise ratio is outstanding.”