Course curriculum
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1
Introduction
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How to use Project Founders
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2
Initial Assessment
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Some Information To Get Started
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Basics
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Startup Assessment
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Schedule Initial Strategy Session
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3
Orientation
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What exactly is a startup?
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Customer Discovery & Customer Validation
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What you’ll be focusing on
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Your Market
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Overview of MVPs
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Search Mode
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Overview of Customer Discovery Phases
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Why is this bad advice?
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Relentless execution without knowing what to execute is a crime.
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4
The 9 deadly sins
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Assuming you know what the customer wants
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The ‘I know what features to build’ Flaw
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Focus on launch date
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Emphasis on execution instead of hypotheses, testing, learning & iteration
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Traditional business models presume no trial and no errors
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Confusing traditional job titles with what a startup needs to accomplish
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Sales & Marketing execute to a plan
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Presumption of success leads to premature scaling
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Management by crisis leads to a death spiral
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5
Rules to follow
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There are no facts inside the building
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Pair customer development with agile development
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Failure is an integral part of the search
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Make continuations and pivots
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No business plan survives the first contact with customers so use a business model canvas
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Design experiments and test to validate your hypotheses
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Agree on market type, it changes everything
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Startup metrics differ from those in existing companies
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Fast decision making, cycle time, speed and tempo
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It’s all about passion
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Startup job titles are very different from a large company’s
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Preserve all cash until needed. Then spend.
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Communicate and share learning
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Customer development success begins with buy in
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What not to do
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6
Lessons to Understand
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A startup is NOT a small version of a large company.
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There are winners & losers as founders
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Red flags to look out for
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Why can’t customer discovery be delegated?
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The differences between market type strategies
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7
Tracking & Money
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Things that startups should be measuring to track their progress
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Financial tracking metrics for startups
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Speed of iterations on your experiments
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8
Briefing on earlyvangelists, MVPs & Business Model Canvas
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Characteristics of your earlyvangelists
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The MVP
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Business model canvases
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Overview of the phases in Customer Discovery
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Checklist
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Text length of individual points can be shorter or longer depending on your needs
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Text length of individual points can be shorter or longer depending on your needs
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Text length of individual points can be shorter or longer depending on your needs