Course description
The first days is focussed on management: prioritize based on a strategy, running experiments and making a milestone planning as execution guidance for the next three to six months. The second day is all about communication: deeply understanding your customers and investors, understanding their decision making process and we spend half a day on pitch training.
At the end of the boot camp the teams have an updated slide deck they can use for their pitches to customers and investors.
The process after boot camp will take 4-6 months where the team will execute the plan it made in the milestone planning, continue it's customer discovery process by running experiments, build its sales pipeline and start conversations with investors (or if that is not viable yet engage with government agencies for non-dilutive funding). Again, it will be very helpful for the teams to get follow up coaching, partly to keep them on track and deliver on their plans, partly to make them learn faster.
Course content
This boot camp consists of the following 8 modules:
- Assumptions of your startup: What are all the assumptions or hypotheses you have for your company? The teams list these in the exercise, categorizing them in clusters like 'business model', 'legal', 'team' etc.
- Hypothesis testing by running experiments: How can you turn assumptions into facts? By running experiments. Startups should be built as much as possible on facts, not on guessing. In this exercise we train the teams to design experiments so they can validate their assumptions.
- Prioritization: Where to start? One of the hard things about a startup is the overwhelming amount of decisions that have to be made with very imperfect information. This prioritization tool focusses teams on the high uncertainty-high impact assumptions.
- Milestone Planning: What will you achieve in the coming six months? Even though there are many uncertainties in running a startup, it's crucial to have high level goals that the teams is focussed on.
- Persona: Do you know who your customer is? In this exercise we take a deep look at your customer and turn them into person that you can relate to.
- Decision Making Unit: Who makes the decision to buy your product? Selling to larger organization is a long term effort that includes many people inside the organization. Your understanding of the Decision Making Unit will greatly increase your effectiveness in the sales process.
- Tailoring the message: Who are you talking to? Learn to tailor your message to your audience, the context and what want to achieve.
- Pitch training: How can you improve your pitch? From the overall narrative to how to use your voice, we take an in depth look at your pitch and how you can improve it.
Program Day 1: Managing your startup
- Introductions
- Assumptions of your startup
- Hypothesis testing by running experiments
- Prioritization
- Milestone Planning
Program Day 2: Engaging with customers and investors
- Persona
- Decision Making Unit
- Tailoring the message
- Pitch training
- Pitching
Course format
The course is a combination of classroom lectures and group work.
