How The Entrepreneurs platform is organized
At the highest level, we want anyone who accesses our platform to come away with one or more valuable and practical insights about how they could be a successful entrepreneur. We deliver these insights as short and easily digestible snippets of information and exercises that we call sprints, and every sprint can leave you with a clear actionable improvement path.
Because everyone’s entrepreneurial journey is different, we have designed sprints to be digested in any order that makes the most sense for you.
Every sprint is self-guided. We do not tell you what to do, we lead to think through what you need to do next. We cannot promise that you will decide to do anything differently, but we do promise that spending just a few minutes reading or listening to a sprint and thinking about what we have to say will not be a waste of your time. No matter what it will get you focused on what you need to do next.
We have architected our platform to be able to deliver all the insights and exercises contained in our sprints for free! To fund the costs associated with maintaining our platform, creating more materials, answering your questions and further supporting you, we have created a low-cost membership model with various offerings that we describe later in this blog.
The overall organization
As of our launch date, we have three different categories of sprints. Think of them as: 1) About Deciding, 2) Shaping Ideas, and 3) Leading a Startup. In the next few weeks we will add a fourth category focused on Planning, Strategizing and Funding What’s Ahead.
About Deciding is incorporated into sprint 1 and helps you decide if being an entrepreneur is a good idea for you. Entrepreneuring is not for everyone and don’t waste your time and money and jeopardize relationships if it is not for you.
Shaping Ideas is embodied in sprints 2 through 6. Sprint 2 explains how you can tell a good idea from a bad one and how to think up good ideas. Sprint 3 leads you through how to realistically test an idea so you are not fooled into thinking an idea is good just because you think so. Sprint 4 leads you through how you can refine your understanding of who would be the best subgroup of potential customers to focus your efforts on. In sprint 5 we lead you through realistically estimating how many of these targeted customers you can attract with your initial efforts. Sprint 6 helps you understand what they may be willing to pay for your product or service. These 5 sprints enable you to both significantly reduce the risks associated with developing a product or service and to estimate how much initial revenue you might capture when you launch.
Leading a Startup encompasses sprints 7 through 17. Sprint 7 focuses on what you need to understand about yourself to make good decisions under the pressure of creating and growing a startup. Sprint 8 explains the skill of relationship building. The next sprint focuses on how to apply the skill to being a good communicator, while sprint 10 drills down, using examples, into how you use the skill to meet strangers and improve any relationship that is important to you.
Sprint 11 describes how to motivate people to want to help you. We then describe how to lead people to want to change in sprints 12 and 13. This is tricky because people naturally resist change, yet startups are about continuous change. Sprint 14 get into the basics of how value is created in a startup, which leads to sprint 15 about how startups need different types of leadership as they mature. Sprint 16 focuses on how to work productively with a co-founder, friends, family or other teammates critical to your success. Finally, in sprint 17 we help you pull all these leadership insights into your personal strategy to leverage the strengths we’ve helped you identify and mitigate the weaknesses that could derail you.
Future build out
Every week we will post a short discussion of what we are working to add to our platform. Our aspiration is to add several new sprints every month. As I write this, the next section we plan to create will focus on Planning, Strategizing and Funding What’s Ahead. In this category we will produce sprints on how to 1) simply create an initial startup strategy, 2) think about branding, 3) prepare a financial plan and 4) how to position yourself to be able to fund it.
Of course, we will be closely monitoring your feedback to set our actual build out priorities, which you can easily input through our contact form.
Our membership model
We do need funds to keep this platform running, and to be useful and vibrant. To do so, we offer a $99/year membership. We offer the following premium support to our paying members:
Community Chat
We have created a communication channel where members can ask questions and share insights with one another. Ben and I will moderate and facilitate the channel to keep it relevant to everyone. At some point we expect to have enough members to offer special interest channels.
Webinars and online discussions
At least twice a month we will deliver webinars or events on topics relevant to our members. At these webinars and events we will always provide time to answer your questions.
One-on-one time with Ben or Derek
Members will have the opportunity to sign up for 15-minute meetings to ask questions and get individualized feedback from either Ben or Derek. These 15-minute sessions will be billed at the discounted rate of US $90/session. To make these sessions as productive and cost effective as possible, you’ll be asked to provide in advance a short synopsis of what you’d like to ask, cover or discuss.
Your ability to shape our direction
We will release prototypes of our new sprints and other materials to members to get their inputs and suggestions before posting to the general public.
Our mission
Our mission is to help you be successful. We have both already been wildly successful, so we are not launching this platform to make even more money. We are investing our time and resources to provide you startup insights that are not opinions but are tested. And we deliver these insights in formats that fit into your time constraints and how you live your lives. Our joy comes from seeing you succeed.