It’s Time to Call Your Own Shot

Rick Gregg February 25,2025 What do you think?

Introducing The saaskamp Community Startup

Unsure about the future? Join the saaskamp Community Startup. The Community Startup is a funded early stage tech startup majority owned and managed by you, the participant. You can contribute to the Community Startup while keeping your current full-time job, earn ownership for every hour of effort and attain a full-time paid position with benefits if you wish. You can also take what you learned and create your own startup. We’ll even help you get funding for your own pursuits. And, you’ll still retain ownership for what you contributed to the Community Startup.

Motivation

  “I have this problem. Everyone else MUST have this problem since I do. I’m going to solve this problem today. The Total Available Market (TAM) is enormous! Someone else is going to beat me to this. I must act now!” I run into this type of thinking frequently in my work with aspiring Entrepreneurs. Always, it seems, a solution is looking for a problem. Going fast and breaking things is simply useless if you are not moving in the right direction. If you are not pursuing a valuable market opportunity, or not playing in the right field, you are wasting your time, energy and resources … and those of others too. Finding the right direction is not obvious at all. Your unique abilities and resources can address different needs for different sets of customers, thereby creating several potential market opportunities for your venture and a set of possible paths for your entrepreneurial race.

Internet-of-Things (IoT) SaaS MVP Framework

One of our more recent exercises at The saasmvp Project was the development of an open source Internet-of-Things (IoT) SaaS Framework for building an IoT SaaS Minimal Viable Product (MVP) quickly. The reference implementation uses a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W for the IoT device. The source code along with detailed documentation is available for free under the MIT open source license.

We absolutely have no idea if the cool technology we built is useful for anyone. We haven’t identified a market opportunity and one may not even exist. If we do identify a market, how will we know its the right market? Who is going to fall over themselves to pay us money?

What’s the Market Opportunity?

What’s the first step in our Community Startup? Identifying the Market Opportunity using the methodology developed by Gruber and Tal in their foundational teaching entitled “Where to Play”. We’ll take our time, do this together and then proceed with business model innovation; and customer discovery and validation. When we are done figuring this all out … we’ll build something really cool. But only then.

Put me in Coach!

Interested in controlling your own destiny, learning valuable skills and owning a piece of the action along the way in a majority owned Community Startup with little risk? We have the answer for you while staying in your current job. The Community Startup is open to anyone of all skill sets, experience levels and age. Sign up today. In the mean-time if you want to get a head start on where we are going, register for the free six (6) week on-line course entitled “Find the right markets for your innovation – A tool for entrepreneurs and innovators for choosing which markets to play in”. We can’t wait to see what we create as a startup community together.