Oops! Are you female? ;)
HN user
NicheDiver
A podcast, eh? Now you're talking my language. (I'm a dev looking to build software for podcasters. In the mean time, until I settle on what needs to be built, I've been building an audience by helping podcasters promote their shows.)
Will your podcast be the common "two-dudes" format or are you planning to deviate from that somehow in order to stand out? ;)
I absolutely love the thought of this. I think getting a pre-screened idea every day will be a great way to practice validating ideas, contemplating customer dev tasks, thinking through potential MVPs and determining what "the next right step" should be. If nothing else it will expose people to niches/businesses/processes they would otherwise never know about or consider, which could lead to even more/better/different ideas.
The community aspect sounds interesting too because if you've had a handful of stinkers in your portfolio (and who hasn't?) then you might not trust your own judgment much anymore. Assuming the community is well-moderated and "judgement/asshole free" there could be some MASSIVE strides made by devs who need help in this department.
If I am understanding your question correctly, these are virtual groups in that we do not all live in the same place and we hold our meetings via Google Hangouts. However I will be physically meeting with the people in my group in April. We are all within 1 time-zone of each other so that helps. I suppose you could make whatever arrangements you want with your group once you know what everyone is up for.
I've been matched by this service as well. For me, it also took a while to get matched but I knew going into it that there would be a waiting period. (We're not all easy to match, ya know?)
After 9 weeks, half my group quit but customer support was very responsive and my group is now 100% full again.
If you don't have the right people in your network or you don't have time to be "interviewing" a bunch of people to make up your own mastermind group, then a service like this is a no-brainer.
I love the Chasing Product podcast. Great interviews from the dev/freelancer perspective for anyone looking to branch out into making their own thing.
Digital asset management after death. Something all encompassing that is easy to comprehend by non-technical people. (i.e. The people you leave behind.)
Instead of leaving a list of accounts, user names, passwords and instructions for each, I want to be able to say, "When I die, XYZ co will take care of all of this" and feel confident that it will be as stress free as possible for my family.
I am a self-employed technical female as well but in my case I'm also a semi-recluse so my exposure to such things is greatly limited. Outside of being a developer I'm also known to occasionally fix my own cars and large appliances in lieu of taking them to be repaired.
In that context I have experienced similar issues but I chalk it up to people simply not being exposed enough to oddities like me. I am guilty of it too towards people I come across who break my mental image of how something "is."
For example, I live near Austin, Texas. I recently saw a really tall, very handsome black man wearing a cowboy hat and full-length duster. Certainly that's not the norm for me to see but not too incredibly odd either. That is until I heard him speak with the most refined British accent I'd ever heard in my life. I completely lost my composure and started viewing him if he were a novelty act. I have no doubt I was at least as much of an ass as the men you describe.
As other commenters have pondered, I wonder if these situations will actually start to decrease as the commonality of females in tech starts to increase.