Let's pay our leanstartup mentors instead of the founders

Our ultimate goal remains the same. Investing in full loops of the build measure learn curve (credit to Eric Ries). We have run multiple experiments most recently paying teams $100 to share their hypothesis.  Our measure of success is 10 teams who complete two full loops in our system in under 6 months, measured from the time they submit their first hypothesis to the time they share their SECOND learnings post on our medium blog. 

That model is finally working but there are a few things we can improve!

1. the incentive is "off". We shouldn't need to bribe the entrepreneurs, we should be paying the channel.
2. the incentive is off for another reason... it was not clear to our entrepreneurs that the money we were paying them for the hypothesis was separate from the funds they needed or thought they needed to run their first experiment 
3. we are finally starting to see some bogus requests for funds (this is a good sign - I always love to reference the paypal example in this case). 

For this reason, starting now (until further notice, or until we spend another $10,000 on acquisition) we will continue to pay cash for hypotheses - but we are only paying the MENTORS for the hypothesis. Mentors, continue to use this framework but make sure your team puts YOUR TWITTER HANDLE in the subject rather than I saw this on MEDIUM)

Not much is changing for this iteration - I think we are in a good place with the trello board of hypotheses, and the learning there... the only thing that is changing is who gets paid for the hypothesis itself (teams still get paid for doing 100 interviews and we will be testing something soon where we fund their SECOND experiment)

OUR OWN HYPOTHESES is... I believe that at least 25 mentors will refer at least 5 teams each by the leanstartup conference (let me know if you want to come, I might be able to get a discounted ticket for our mentors) in November because they see the value to their teams in structuring a hypothesis, because they trust our community to help with that task, and because $125 is enough to buy a nice meal:)