ThinkGareth

After receiving many questions seeking the same answers I decided it’s best to write a more verbose post about BootCycle and my venture.

Q: Who started BootCycle?
Jonathan Markwell – here’s some links to find out more about him:
Blog – Mad Motive
Company – Inuda Innovations
Twitter – @JonMarkwell

Q: What is BootCycle?

BootCycle is a new approach to providing peer support to early stage technology product developers. We help developers turn ideas into products that are ready for either investment or revenue after just 10 weeks. – http://bootcycle.com

Q: Where Is BootCycle?
Participants are based in London & Brighton ( UK ). BootCycle runs out of an affiliated creative office space in Brighton called The Skiff.

Q: Does BootCycle fund startups in return for a share of their company?
No. Bootcycle is like YCombinator without the funding. We instead focus on the other benefits of YCombinator and as such we have industry experts advising us, peer support, weekly progress demos, shared office space, private discussion lists etc.

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Q: What Am I Working On?
My venture is about “Building Trusted Networks of Hospitality”. A purposely vague description to leave some ‘wow’ factor in the idea. I’m building a service for a gap in the market, despite there being a pre-existing audience for this kind of service I still intend to challenge peoples views on a few of the perceived norms surrounding travel and hospitality in society.

Q: When Will It Go Live?
All set for a September rollout. This will probably be a rolling invite structure (e.g. all members can invite a few friends to be members) until mid October. As a bit of a teaser there’s a screenshot from the site used as the picture above this post.

Q: What’s Behind The Scenes?
Symfony PHP Framework & MySQL
Facebook Connect
Twitter Auth
Amazon EC2
Amazon S3

Q: Is There Any Funding Involved?
The venture thus far has been bootstrapped and not applied for or taken investment. Investment will be the next step after the initial public release.