Working in a startup team
Working in a startup team with cofounders can be challenging; it requires wearing many hats, constant learning, and balancing competing opinions about the direction your business needs to go in.
Brainstorming & ideation
Businesses solve problems. And in this exercise, we cover different design thinking strategies to identify problems, solutions for those problems, and current alternatives so you can ideate a viable business idea.
Elevator pitching
As an entrepreneur, you will have to explain your business thousands of times for many different people. We discuss the best practices for creating a succinct and compelling elevator pitch.
Target market and customer discovery
You can't sell to everyone. We discuss how to narrow down your target customer demographic by asking customers open-ended questions, helping you uncover the pains and problems they experience.
Rapid prototyping
You need to create a somewhat-working representation of what your product or service looks like. We discuss the "Minimum Viable Product" and the different ways you can design one.
Vibe coding
It's never been easier to build software. Leverage the power of AI in developing a functioning Minimum Viable Product (MVP) so that you're ready to begin testing your concept right away.
Bootstrapping
Everyone seems to think that the only way to start a business is by raising funds from investors. Nope! Many entrepreneurs "bootstrap", which means to fund their business using revenue and personal funds.
Social good
It's so important to critically think about how your business impacts your community, the environment, and other stakeholders. This lesson talks about how to keep social good at the core of what you do.
Cross functional team development
Startups require nimble teams wearing multiple hats. Learn how to structure early roles beyond “founder” and build a team capable of navigating the full customer lifecycle.
Experimentation setup
Learn how to design and run lean experiments to validate your assumptions about what users want and need. This module helps you craft testable hypotheses around user behavior and value, then build scrappy experiments to gather real-world insights before investing in full development.
User experience research
Learn how to test and validate early product ideas through scrappy research and prototyping. This module helps you explore how to build the right MVP with just enough functionality to learn.
Mentorship
Entrepreneurs need mentors. Mentors bring experiences, relationships, and wisdom that enable entrepreneurs to stay accountable, avoid risk, and make the right decisions. We discuss managing mentor relationships.
User journey mapping & JTBD
Uncover what your users are trying to accomplish. We’ll use journey mapping and the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework to identify pain points and opportunities along the path to solving real problems.
Raising investor capital
Okay, you did it.. You've validated an awesome idea and are ready to raise money from investors. So how do you do it? In this discussion, we explore what raising money means for your business and how to go about doing it.
