Skip to main content

Micro-lending for Agile Entrepreneurs

These are indeed exciting times for the bootstrapping entrepreneur! If you haven't already, please join our self-help networking group, Agile Entrepreneurs where entrepreneurs help each other with a variety of issues in a format borrowed from the Toastmasters club.

And if you're in a tight spot for money, you should join our group on Prosper.com, an excellent people-to-people lending web-site that I wish had found six months ago. In fact, I wish I had founded this group a year ago! I had certainly been talking about the concept- my friend Pravin can attest to that fact.

Regardless, I've dived in and created a closed group in Prosper, called Agile Entrepreneurs. I intend to invite other entrepreneurs to join the group and use it to raise small loans until they are able to generate cash flow or get funding.

And if you're looking to make money while helping out your fellow entrepreneurs, you should support Agile Entrepreneurs on Prosper.

You make money on the interest that is set by an eBay-style bidding, based on the borrowers credit history. Most people make multiple loans of small amounts to diversify and reduce their risk. Note that Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay is an investor in Prosper!

So far Prosper seems to have had excellent results for both lenders and borrowers.

Check it out!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Splitting User Stories vs. Rally's "split" feature (that has nothing to do with it!)

Agile tool Rally has a "split" feature it recommends to handle "unfinished work" in a Scrum Sprint: Manage Unfinished Work - Split user stories ( new link ) Below are my observations on the "Split" feature in Rally (followed by a few excellent articles on Splitting User Stories):   This "split" feature in Rally has numerous problems: 1. Nothing to do with Splitting User Stories It has nothing to do with "Splitting a User Story" which is an advanced but fairly well-understood field in Agile, and a tool for Product Managers to use in one of the two scenarios: The Product Manager does it before an Iteration commences (i.e. during backlog creation or release planning) to create User Stories by business value that are right-sized, i.e. they can be comfortably implemented inside an iteration; The Product Manager does it in Iteration Planning or in the middle of an Iteration to reduce scope by removing/simplifying accept
Post a Comment
Read more

Entrepreneur Committee - Advisory Board of SVASE

For whatever it is worth, I would like to announce to my millions of would-be readers that I have been invited to join the Entrepreneur Committee on the Board of Advisors to the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs . And I have accepted. If you're a hi-tech entrepreneur, I would love to hear your suggestions on what I can do in my "official" capacity to make SVASE a better organization for startups.
Post a Comment
Read more

Agile Entrepreneurs Manifesto

The  Agile Manifesto  defines the 4 core Values that define "Agile":  " Individuals and interactions",  " Working software",  " Customer collaboration", and  " Responding to change" As I applied Agile requirements (user stories), engineering (XP), and process & project management (Scrum & Kanban) to my startups  (RideStation, and Agile Entrepreneurs)  starting from 2005 to now in 2018, I learned numerous lessons and shared them with my fellow entrepreneurs for the next dozen years. These lessons I have incorporated by "extending" the Agile Manifesto with two additional values pertaining to  Product (5th) and Startup/Business (6th)  -  that the services consultants who wrote it in 2001 probably didn't have to contend with as most (all?) of them were not founders of product startups:  "User Validation, Customer Traction, and Business Milestones" Agile Entrepreneurs Manifesto Us
Post a Comment
Read more