Where Can I Find Community?

About a decade ago, I started championing masterminds on Startups for the Rest of Us. They were popular in the Internet marketing space and, given the impact they’d had on my life, I felt they would be particularly valuable to both early and growth-stage startups.

Masterminds are small groups of people that have similar experiences, challenges, and trajectories in their businesses. Simply put, they embody the phrase: Two (or three) minds are better than one.

Because many bootstrapped founders run solo operations, the idea of having a crew to provide feedback—based on an understanding of our industry that few have—was too good to pass up.

There are three clear benefits of being a part of a mastermind:

Growth. By surrounding yourself with folks who can provide you with informed advice, qualified referrals, and critical constructive feedback on your failures in a safe space, you are setting yourself up with the resources and guidance you need to focus on growing your business.

Hopefully there’s at least one other person on each call who has more experience in a specific area than you do. There are some things in my business that I’m pretty damn confident I’m good at. But I know I have blind spots in other areas. I can bring those things to my mastermind because they don’t have the same blind spots.

Accountability. As many solo founders know, keeping yourself accountable with no outside forces can be challenging. During most mastermind meetings, there is a point in time when each member is in the hot seat, discussing past goals and their progress, setting new goals and tracking them, and reporting back to the other members with updates along the way. By asking your group to keep you accountable to your business, you’re also committing to holding them accountable.

A good mastermind also forces you to look at your weaknesses. You can bring your weakest attributes in front of this small group of trusted individuals who know your story, your revenue, your growth rate, and all your foibles—personally and professionally.

Your mastermind will tell you things that if your spouse said them, you’d ignore them. (Ask my wife about that.)

Support. Humans are social beings. Napoleon Hill says that the convergence of two individual minds creates a third, invisible force that combines the strength of both of its components.

When you share your vulnerabilities and successes with others, you magnify your own experience and make it the experience of those around you. The power that comes from those shared experiences can be just as compelling and empowering as your individual success.

Three of my favorite entrepreneurial communities are Indie Hackers, the Dynamite Circle, and of course, MicroConf.

As the idea of masterminds has become more common in the entrepreneurship space, they’re becoming easier to find. You can start one of your own—I typically recommend you join a community and look for members within that community with whom you gel.

Or you can take advantage of a matching service like MasterMind Jam or the one we started at MicroConf. We started matching because we had so many people asking us how to find a mastermind, and at the time of this writing, we’re close to matching 1,000 founders across 50 countries with more than $200 million in collective ARR.

We also put together a free guide to masterminds, including specifics about format, how to form and run a group, and everything else you need to get started. You can read it at microconf.com/mastermind-101

While a mastermind is a group of your peers—people who are on the same path and facing similar challenges—a mentor is someone who’s been down the path before. A mentor gives you advice from a place of success: they’ve successfully bootstrapped a startup or two, or they’ve been in business for years.

Note: I use the word “mentor” here unconventionally. In this context, I mean online mentors with whom you chat regularly and those you follow from a distance (through a podcast, blog, book, or YouTube) and may never connect with directly.

A mistake many new founders make is either listening to too many people or no one at all.

I made the second mistake for years. I thought I had such a unique take on business that I didn’t need to listen to others who had come before me and likely had insight into how I could be successful.

Other founders make the opposite mistake, following 10 or 15 different people who each have different approaches to starting a company. They try to combine all of their information into a single approach, which often leads to information overload and a mess of conflicting tactics.

My advice: find a mentor or two. But no more. This keeps your information consumption at a reasonable level while allowing input from outside sources.

Perhaps a mentor is creating content that resonates with your goals, or they’ve built a company you admire. Here are a few questions to consider when choosing a mentor:

• Have they accomplished what I want to accomplish? Does it seem like they got lucky, or could they do it again?
• Does this person have a reasonable personal life? Do they treat people well? Do they have a happy family? If someone has a catastrophic personal life, odds are decent that if you’re not willing to do the same, you’ll be unlikely to achieve success in the same way they did.
• Do you want to be like them, and are you willing to do what they’ve done to become successful?

Who you choose as a mentor is a deeply personal choice, but it’s usually pretty obvious who resonates with you both as a founder and as a human.