Course curriculum

  • 1

    Introduction

    • How to use Project Founders
  • 2

    Initial Assessment

    • Some Information To Get Started

    • Basics

    • Startup Assessment

    • Schedule Initial Strategy Session
  • 3

    Orientation

    • What is a startup?

    • What is Customer Discovery & Customer Validation?

    • What you’ll be focusing on

    • Your Market

    • Overview of MVPs

    • Search Mode

    • Overview of Customer Discovery Phases

    • Why is this bad advice?

    • Relentless execution without knowing what to execute is a crime.
  • 4

    The 9 deadly sins

    • Assuming you know what the customer wants

    • The ‘I know what features to build’ Flaw

    • Focus on launch date

    • Emphasis on execution instead of hypotheses, testing, learning & iteration

    • Traditional business models presume no trial and no errors

    • Confusing traditional job titles with what a startup needs to accomplish

    • Sales & Marketing execute to a plan

    • Presumption of success leads to premature scaling

    • Management by crisis leads to a death spiral

  • 5

    Rules to follow

    • There are no facts inside the building

    • Pair customer development with agile development

    • Failure is an integral part of the search

    • Make continuations and pivots

    • No business plan survives the first contact with customers so use a business model canvas

    • Design experiments and test to validate your hypotheses

    • Agree on market type, it changes everything

    • Startup metrics differ from those in existing companies

    • Fast decision making, cycle time, speed and tempo

    • It’s all about passion

    • Startup job titles are very different from a large company’s

    • Preserve all cash until needed. Then spend.

    • Communicate and share learning

    • Customer development success begins with buy in

    • What not to do

  • 6

    Lessons to Understand

    • A startup is NOT a small version of a large company.

    • There are winners & losers as founders

    • Red flags to look out for

    • Why can’t customer discovery be delegated?

    • The differences between market type strategies
  • 7

    Tracking & Money

    • Things that startups should be measuring to track their progress

    • Financial tracking metrics for startups

    • Speed of iterations on your experiments
  • 8

    Briefing on earlyvangelists, MVPs & Business Model Canvas

    • Characteristics of your earlyvangelists

    • The MVP

    • Business model canvases

    • Overview of the phases in Customer Discovery