– Master the skills of strategy building and product development
– Learn how to prioritize, make decisions, and develop employees
How do you start a startup? No one plans to devote months and years to a company that will go bust and not create a successful product. And still 90% of startups fail.
What do experienced entrepreneurs who have launched successful companies know that the founders of unsuccessful projects don’t?
Why it’s important to start a startup well
The reasons why 3 out of 4 startups fail vary, but they often boil down to the following:
- The company is developing a product for a non-existent market (insufficient demand)
- Executives don’t know how to manage cash flow, e.g., they use a revenue generation model that doesn’t work
- Company does not adapt to changes in the market
- Project does not grow fast enough
- Founder gets burned out on the job.
There’s a lot to talk about, but an interesting fact is that not enough attention is paid to the startup at the very beginning.
After working with a lot of startups at Appster, Josiah Humphrey and his team saw that the success of a startup often depends on five key questions that should be answered before creating the company:
- What is your company’s specific line of business?
- What specific problem are you trying to solve?
- what market are you entering?
- What product will you offer to solve the problem?
- What is the economic calculation of your business model?
Your first actions may determine whether your company will be valued at millions of dollars or whether you will be just another startup of the 90% that no one remembers.
Intensive сourse
Master the skills in just two months
Comfortable pace
You choose at what speed you want to be trained
Practice from the speakers
Apply skills to real cases
Access forever
You can go back to the material even after 2 years
You’ll learn:
Prioritize and make decisions
We’ll define the company’s goals and learn how to evaluate features. We’ll get acquainted with the hierarchy of metrics and tools for collecting ideas for prioritization.
We’ll study applied tools: Impact mapping, Poker planning, RICE.
Think strategically
Explore the tools of strategic thinking and understand how to get out of the routine of everyday small tasks.
Work with the team and related departments
We will study how hiring happens, we will learn motivation tools, we will understand how to evaluate, train and develop employees. We will learn how to work in a distributed team.
Defending the project to the team and stakeholders
We will understand the stages of preparation for project defense and learn how to present it to the team and stakeholders.
Any big problem is a big opportunity. If there is no problem, there is no solution and no reason for the company to exist. No one will pay you to solve something that is not a problem.
Is a starter a painkiller or a vitamin?
Vitamins promote health slowly and gradually: they keep you healthy for a while, protecting you from disease.
Painkillers stop pain syndrome instantly: pills help you, solve the problem here and now. The best companies act the same way.
Pain pills are startups that solve serious problems quickly and effectively. The customer is in “pain,” he needs a solution right away.
He doesn’t care what the pill looks like, whether it has a nice logo, or whether it will work in two months or three.
Google is a painkiller: without 24/7 accessibility and the ability to find out anything quickly, we would have a hard time.
Think about how your company can be a painkiller. Offer a product or service that solves a problem today, not a vitamin that will take at best some time to take effect.
The market is the most important factor in the success or failure of a startup. Why? When there are a lot of real customers, the market pulls the product out of the startup itself. The market is hungry for fill and will be saturated with the first viable product that is offered to it.
The product doesn’t have to be grandiose. It just needs to work. The market doesn’t care how well your team works, as long as it produces a viable product.
How to determine the minimum set of functions?
1. Develop a hypothesis. To do this, analyze the results of the focus group survey. Ask directly: what is the problem that needs to be solved. Simplify this information, and you’ll get a set of simple features in the output.
2. Create a group of potential buyers. Find them among the people who have responded to your emails before and who might become your customers, put their names on the list.
3. Give your product a visual identity. Sketch a few layouts that help you get a good idea of the product. This can be done in the free programs Balsamiq Mockups and Lucidcharts.
The most valuable thing to us is your results and the experience you have with us.
If within the first 3 days of starting the training you realize it’s not what you planned to get, let us know and we’ll give you your money back.