The U.S. is home to nearly 10 million microentrepreneurs who operate very small or “micro” businesses, but only 200,000 have access to microenterprise development services. [http://tinyurl.com/2tr4wm] In developing nations across the globe 500 million low-income entrepreneurs are struggling to grow their businesses, yet only about 5% have access to microfinance services. [http://tinyurl.com/2qrayz; http://tinyurl.com/3a6ptb]

These microbusinesses provide critical income and economic options for entrepreneurs in the developing and developed worlds both, particularly for women, minorities, recent immigrants, individuals with disabilities, and the poor. [http://tinyurl.com/245co5] For many, entrepreneurship is one of the few avenues out of poverty. [http://tinyurl.com/yphvtd]

The three pillars of microbusiness assistance are a) access to basic business training, b) access to financial capital (microloans), and c) access to social capital (advising, consulting, networking, etc.). While many incredible innovations are working to scale up the delivery of these first two activities, scaling access to social capital has remained a challenge. Entrepreneurs have a better chance at success if they have access to insider networks, critical market information, and solid businesses know-how. Industry-based advising, in particular, is critical to microbusiness revenue growth, but is often difficult to access. [http://tinyurl.com/2e5x8n]

MicroMentor 2.0 (MM2) seeks to exponentially increase underserved entrepreneurs' access to the people, information, and expertise they need to grow their businesses. With MM2, our primary program activities -- function and industry-specific mentoring, advising, Q&A and networking – will be delivered by a highly-scalable, web-based entrepreneur support network. This network will be comprised of social entrepreneurs, volunteer business professionals, and microenterprise development program staff.

Our goal is to develop a service of true value to both individual entrepreneurs and the microenterprise development industry at large. By focusing on the scaled delivery of a targeted intervention, MM2 will eventually benefit hundreds of thousands of microentrepreneurs around the world.

WHAT WE NEED:

To succeed, we need to increase our social capital. We seek collaborators, connections, advisors, expertise, and doers, especially in these areas:

- Partnership development: business groups, alumni groups, corporations

- Product management, especially consumer web services

- Usability/interaction design

- Branding/identity

- Graphic design

- Salesforce integration and development

- Developing world ICT, especially mobile and wireless communications

- Facilitating effective collaboration online; knowledge management

- Search engine optimization and web marketing, Google Adwords

- Web advertising, Google Adsense, and sponsorships

- Viral marketing campaign development

- Sustainability planning

- And, of course, funders who get it