The first TinySeed founder retreat

I’m writing this from the airport in Minneapolis on my way home after the first ever TinySeed founder retreat. This trip has been amazing and I’m full of inspiration and things to do after days of talking shop and endless masterminding. The official retreat began with a few days in the middle of absolute nowhere in rural Minnesota and ended with an awesome rooftop party at Rob Walling’s house (co-founder of TinySeed). I managed to fly in a day earlier and leave a day later. That allowed me to squeeze in some business and tourist related activities as well as the retreat itself.

What did the Maker do? #

Not a whole lot honestly. Before flying to Minnesota I managed to add support for a few new deployment options, such as SFTP. If anyone reading this is curious to try it out, just let me know. Besides that, I was mostly wearing the Manager hat this week - or technically I was wearing my TinySeed cap, but you get the idea.

What did the Manager do? #

Before heading up to rural Minnesota, I had a coffee meeting with someone at a hosting company who happen to have an office in Minneapolis. This felt like a really productive meeting and gave me more confidence that I’m moving in the right direction.

The retreat itself was great. We spent 2 nights in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota and I really enjoyed getting to know everyone. Each of the startups there had a single formal hot seat mastermind session, but in reality these discussions kept going for 3 days. After the hot seat and all the discussions that followed I have a pretty clear roadmap for the next few months which feels really good. I’m not going to share too much about it now, but I’m sure I will later on.

Last week I offered 10 free (limited) Branch accounts to someone on my email list. Quite a lot of people replied back and the people that weren’t fast enough to respond was offered an extended trial instead. This was a very interesting experiment that I will talk more about on my podcast Out of Beta next week.

That’s all my brain can handle typing out now 😴🤯