Igniting the business by a bootcamp
In the last few months I have been working on plans for expanding Musicably’s presence online. My intention is to start building a community of people who want to start making music mindfully. I have been researching a number of various possible ways how to approach this goal. One of the possibilities is to offer online courses to help interested potential ‘musickers’ to learn or to improve their playing.
While researching internet for information about online courses, I have found out about an online company Mirasee , headed my Danny Iny. To my surprise, the company is headquartered in Montreal, Canada, although their customers and collaborators are scattered all over the world.
My first encounter with Mirasee was through their live webinar Build Courses that Grow Businesses & Change Lives. Although this webinar was no different from many others in its final part that included a sales pitch, I enjoyed the way how Danny Iny explained everything and how much I have learned.
To my surprise, just a few days after the seminar, I got an invitation to submit my application for the Business Ignition Bootcamp. It was from Mirasee and although it offered quite intensive three weeks learning, they offer it for free. In this time and age this approach was such unusual, that initially I only glanced through the email and didn’t give it too much attention. Only when I got another email, where Danny insisted that this was an activity requiring only work and no financial outlay on my side, and when he meaningfully explained their reasons to do it – then I started to listen more closely.
After more research, I submitted my application, which required description of my experience, education and business ideas. My understanding was, that these application would go through a thorough vetting process to chose suitable candidates. I didn’t have any idea how many applications they could receive, but I can imagine the number could be in thousands. Just to briefly scan such an amount of documents would require a lot of time, effort and people.
To my surprise, I got an email from Mirasee exactly on the day they promissed. Based on my previous often negative experience with similar companies, this was a promising sign. And it was a positive surprise, as the email stated that I had been accepted to the bootcamp.
I didn’t know what to expect. But as I try to educate myself whenever and wherever possible, what is mostly done by the self-study, this bootcamp promised a lot of collaboration with likeminded people from all over the world. That would be a highly appreciated, although a short, change.
So here I am now in the middle of the three weeks Business Ignition Bootcamp. I would describe it as a ‘nano’MBA, because the education is delivered through business cases. Obviously, there is only this much that someone can learn in three weeks. But that’s what the ‘Ignition’ par is about. For some participant is may represent reigniting of partly forgotten lectures’ knowledge from a business school. That would be also my case. But for many others, this is a great opportunity to learn new ways how to look at their businesses or buddying business ideas, from a different perspective.
I know this, because aside from the online education and homeworks residing on the company’s website, the most crucial part or the whole process is collaboration among bottcamp participants. For this purpose we use a proven collaboration application Slack.
I hadn’t have any exposure to the Slack environment before. Only a couple weeks prior the bootcamp started, one of my future collaborators in another field, invited me to try it as a possibility for us working together. And the truth is – at the beginning it was quite intimidating experience. I don’t consider myself a rookie in the realm of computers, based on my over thirty years of tinkering with music synhesizers, programmers, Atari, PC and Mac computers. Software world is different though.
The first week of the bootcamp was a very intensive process of learning how to use Slack and how to work on asignments. Various Slack channels revealed initially a lot of frustration with this process. And they also allowed a lot of exchanges among bootcamp participants and subsequently a lot of support and help. This is one of the most valuable parts of the whole experience.
Mirasee, as an organizer, was also very clever in how they structured homework evaluations. They call them Peer Reviews and as the name suggest, they are done by participants themselves. Everyone gets to evaluate homework submissions from three other participants. And subsequently, after a set deadline, everyone gets three evaluations of his or her work. Again, this is a great learning experience, where we get exposure to various opinions, work styles and ideas. Everything facilitated by Slack and supported by online readings, videos and conferences.
We have slightly more than a week to go. In the final part, we will be presenting our own busines ideas, using a blueprint we have been learning during the first two weeks. And I am very enthusiastic about this opportunity. Just the fact that I will be, again, forced to describe my business to complete strangers, with the prospect to get some (any) feedback, is thrilling for me. There are a few hundreds participants in the current bootcamp cohort, and from the introductions on Slack it looks like there are a lot of current or future coaches, business owners and business builders. So people, who are quite similar to who and where I consider to be myself. In that regard, just the fact that I can expect a feedback on my ideas from other people, whether positive or negative, is a great bonus.
Based on exchanges with other participants, I am not the only one, who is still a bit suspicious about the Mirasee’s intentions. Frankly – we still expect some kind of a sales pitch at the end of the bootcamp. But after my experience I am writing here about, I cannot blame Mirasee for that. If this is how they run their business development effort, I can just praise them, because they have done a great job so far, to earn our trust, and to help us. If the circumstances will be suitable on my side, I will be more than happy to subscribe to some of their paid courses.
(Disclaimer: I haven’t been asked or paid to write about Mirasee. I simply like what they do and how they do it. Therefore I decided to mention it here on my blog. And I hope that that experience will help my and ultimately my readers and Musicably. That is my goal.)
