Get the Heck Out of the Building

In Founders School Part 2

With a ~$2 billion endowment the Kauffman Foundation is the largest non-profit focused on entrepreneurship in the world. Giving away $80 million to every year (~$25 million to entrepreneurial causes) makes Kauffman the dominant player in the entrepreneurship space.

Kauffman launched Founders School - a new education series to help entrepreneurs develop their businesses during the startup stage by highlighting how startups are different from big companies.

In January 2014 Part 1 of the “Startups” section of Founders School went online.

Now you can watch Part 2 “The Lean Approach."

This group of six videos provides an overview of how to successfully do Customer Discovery. You’ll learn how to:

As in the first part of this series, I’m in good company – I’m joined in Founders School by Noam Wasserman of Harvard teaching Founder’s Dilemmas, Craig Wortmann University of Chicago covering Entrepreneurial Selling, Peter McDermott helping understand Intellectual Property, and Nathan Gold offering how to give Powerful Presentations.

These videos are not only great tutorials for founders but also provide educators with another source of well produced and curated resources.

These “Startup and The Lean Approach” videos are a great general purpose companion to my “How to Build a Startup” lectures on Udacity.

And you get a tour of my living room and office…

Introduction, for Part 2 is here

Module 1, The Lean Method

Module 2, Getting Out of the Building: Customer Development

• 0:24: What is Customer Development?
• 1:09: How Do You Start the Customer Development Process?
• 1:36: Customer Discovery is a Series of Conversations
• 2:05: The Founder and Customer Development
• 3:16: Real World Example of Customer Development

Module 3, Customer Development Data

• 0:31: Designing Experiments to Test Hypotheses
• 0:48: Doing Customer Discovery Without Collecting Data is a Sin
• 1:06: Insight is Key
• 1:49: Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups

Module 4, Minimum Viable Products

• 0:18: What is a Minimum Viable Product?
• 0:38: What to Test, Why to Test and How to Test
• 2:05: You’re Not Building a Product … You’re Getting Customer Feedback
• 2:53: Use MVPs to Run Experiments
• 4:15: Real World Example of an MVP

Module 5, Customer Acquisition and Archetypes

• 0:47: Get, Keep and Grow Customers
• 1:00: Create Customer Demand
• 1:46: Customer Archetypes: Getting to Know Your Customers
• 3:35: Matching Archetypes to Acquisition
• 5:28: Growing Customers: The Lifetime Value
• 7:35: The Biggest Mistake in Customer Acquisition