For our first book we will be starting out with The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. It’s a great book where Time outlines ideas and techniques to help you become more efficient with your time, resources and goals and as a result become more productive. It should be a great read.

We will be getting together on the last Monday of every Month, starting on June 28th at 6pm at The Factory.

So if you’ve read the book, haven’t read the book or are in the middle of reading the book then please come out and join in on the conversation.

Much thanks to Ken Howk for pulling all of this together, if you have any questions please let him know or leave a comment here.

We’re hosting this day-long event as a free event to our members, or the cost of a day pass for non-members. Please come and spend a day working, learning and meeting other interesting people.

We have a limited amount of tickets available to ensure good seating, please RSVP today to reserve your spot.

To help alleviate a sense of isolation and loneliness we’re putting together an event for those who are in the process of bootstrapping their start up.

The idea behind Bootstrapper’s StartUp Breakfast is to bring together people involved in early stage start ups from around our community to meet, mingle and compare notes as we all venture down the road of starting up our businesses. We want to have exciting conversations over a cup of coffee and talk about those new ideas, marketing strategies, critical feedback about new features and how to manage that elusive work-life balance.

The breakfast will be a monthly event at The Factory on the third Wednesday of each month, starting on 21st of April at 7:30am.

Since this breakfast is aimed at entrepreneurs who are pouring their hearts, souls, personal time and finances into their new businesses we are actively looking for sponsors to help cover the cost of the breakfast (beagles & coffee). If you’re interested in sponsoring please contact us.

So please come out and join us on April 21st at 7:30am to meet your fellow entrepreneurs, get energized, spark new ideas and get that business rolling.

Keep up with all the action on Twitter, Facebook or Flickr or more photos from Mike just stop in to say hello and lend a helping hand!

The evening’s panel was a great discussion on the variety of capital available to those who are building a company…bootstrapping to venture capital. There was lively debate about the availability and access to angle and VC based capital in West Michigan and talks about what phase a company should be in for each form of money.

I think everyone learned a great deal, met some new people and had a good evening.

We’re excited to be hosting the first West Michigan Startup Weekend the weekend of February 26th. This should prove to be a great annual event that helps build excitement around the idea of getting started, just start that business and run with it.

The main goal of the event is to connect people, resources and teams to go from an idea to launch over the course of 54 hours. It should be a great time and if you’re at all interested in helping start up a company or want to learn more about the event please check out their site at startupwmi.com or follow along on Twitter or Facebook.

There will be a volunteers meeting on January 26th here at The Factory if your interested in helping out or learning more in person.