Our courses provide real world, hands-on learning on what it’s like to actually start a scalable business. Many courses are about writing a business plan or getting your financials right on paper. These courses or hands-on workshops. Startups are not about executing a plan…startups are temporary organizations that exist to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.
We’ll get into the basics of Steve Blank’s famous Customer Development process, where entrepreneurs “get out of the building” to gather massive amounts of customer and marketplace feedback, and then use that feedback to continuously iterate and evolve their startup business models, improving the chances of success at every step.
Our goal is to create an entrepreneurial experience for you with all of the pressures and demands of the real world in an early stage start up. This course is intensely and deliberately experiential to develop the mindset, reflexes, agility and resilience an entrepreneur needs to search for certainty in a chaotic world.
Why Take This Course?
You’ll learn the key steps of the Customer Development process: how to identify and engage the first customers for your product, and how to gather, evaluate and use their feedback to make your product, marketing and business model far stronger.
What do you I need?
Prior knowledge or experience are not required. Passion, tenacity, and a willingness to work hard are essential. Ideally, you’ll join the class with at least a rough idea of the business model of the startup you’ll work on step-by-step through the course of the class.
The highly experiential and evidence-based entrepreneurship curriculum developed by the father of Lean Startup, Steve Blank is being taught at Berkeley and Stanford. The Lean LaunchPad curriculum is available with a 1, 5 and 12 weeks syllabus depending on scope, depth and educational goals.
Find out more about the Methodology, Target Audience, Example Program and Instructors .
Seminars & workshops
Lean Startup Crash Course
This seminar will give you an comprehensive understanding, also for non-entrepreneurs, of what the Lean Startup is and how to apply the methodologies in your life and work. It’s divided into theory and hands on practice. Complete with certificate of participation.
– What we now know – The Past vs The Status Quo
– What is Lean Startup and where does it come from and what does it all mean for you
– Learn to use the Customer Development Methodology, find product-market and problem-solution fit without programming a line of code or building a single prototype
– Master Business Model Generation instead of Business Plans
– What is a Minimum Viable Product, how to define and build it
– Innovation Accounting & Metrics, what to measure and how to measure it
– Applying the Lean Startup methodologies outside of the startup
Seminar Corporate Entrepreneurship
This seminar is aimed at decision makers and will give you an executive-level introduction to what the lean startup methodologies and the whole startup revolution mean to the corporate world, what we now know about the difference between a startup and a corporation; what works for both and what doesn’t – and how the game of growth and innovation has changed and how you can use this new knowledge for innovation and growth in your organization.
“Execution has beaten innovation out of the corporation.” – Steve Blank
In the last decade it has become clear that companies are facing continuous disruption from globalization, technology shifts, lower barriers to market, rapidly changing consumer tastes – you name it.
Business-as-usual management techniques focused on efficiency and execution no longer serve as a viable and credible response.
The old game of growth used to be about the market capitalization – owning the market. The new game of growth – of innovation – is about continuously creating new markets and owning their market caps – But corporations are still trained, organized, staffed and managed for the old game and they keep on doing the same things that do not work.
The continuous disruptive innovation that is needed in today’s market rarely emerges within large corporations. Instead, we see innovation thrive in smaller organizations like startups.
While large companies excel at executing and administrating existing business models, they have a poor track-record of finding and managing new business models. Why is this?
– Finding a viable business model is not a linear, analytical process that can be guided by a business plan or executed by standardized processes.
– Finding a viable business model requires iterative experimentation, talking to large numbers of potential customers, trying new things, taking risks, failing on a regular basis, continually making adjustments.
– Discovering a new business model is inherently risky, and is far more likely to fail than to succeed.
– Lack of direct responsibility and accountability (it’s always the other department’s fault or the strategy’s fault)
– The enterprise’s aversion to failure and lack of room for real experimentation sets it up for failing to truly innovate.
A new systematic approach is needed to enable large corporations to search for new and viable business models to create new markets.
We call this Corporate Entrepreneurship.
Targetted workshops
We offer several workshops specially developed for corporate executives, consultants, agencies and startups. If you want a workshop that fits to your own needs, please contact us and we do a fully customized workshop.
Additional workshop
Lean Startup Crash Course (1 Day, adapted for corporate and organziational employees)
This seminar will give you an comprehensive understanding, also for non-entrepreneurs, of what the Lean Startup is and how to apply the methodologies in your life and work. It’s divided into theory and hands on practice. Complete with certificate of participation.
– What is Lean Startup and where does it come from and what does it all mean for you
– Learn to use the Customer Development Methodology, find product-market and problem-solution fit without programming a line of code or building a single prototype
– Master Business Model Generation instead of Business Plans
– What is a Minimum Viable Product, how to define and build it
– Innovation Accounting & Metrics, what to measure and how to measure it
– How to apply these methodologies inside an organization instead of a startup
Additional Workshop #2 (optional in-depth workshop, Pre Startup Days,
This workshop will provide more in-depth practice of the theories introduced in workshop #1 based on the participants actual business ideas. Complete with certificate of participation.
– Customer Development
– Which customer segment to interview, how to select
– How to get the first actual 50 customer interviews
– How to define pass/fail criteria for my tests
– How to interview customers, the techniques
– How to evaluate and filter customer input
– How to track results using tools
– Business Model Generation
– What does my current business idea look like in a Business Model Canvas
– What other value propositions could I offer
– What other customer segments could I serve
– What other revenue sources could I add
– Which of the elements in my business model are facts, which are guesses
– What are the most critical assumptions, what needs to be correct for me to have a business
– What are my competitors and my unfair advantages
– How big is this market, is the size of this opportunity big enough for my organization
– How to track the business model iterations using tools
– Minimum Viable Product (MVP) & Innovation Accounting
– What are the differnt types of MVPs, landing page, concierge, smokescreen, wizard of oz, piecemeal
– What is the most critical assumption in my current business model
– What is the minimum can I build and release in one day start testing my most critical assumptions
– How to perform the test, multivariable A/B testing and cohort analysis
– What to test, defining KPIs for your tests
– How to measure how the MVP is performing, the tracking tools and dashboards
Workshop: Lean Startup for Agencies and Consultants
– What are the lean methodologies and how can you use them in your business, how do you help your cusomers become more entrepreneurial and how can you use them to develop your own products minimizing cost and risk.
In this workshop you will to be brought up to speed about the lean methodologies and best practices, how you can use them in your company to save time and money (and headaches) and then getting hands-on, putting them into practice on either your company’s own existing product or business idea or one you will create during the workshop. It’s divided into two parts: Theory and practice – with lunch in between.
Because of the unique combination of Vidar Andersen’s extensive experience working for and with agencies for over 18 years and startups, Vidar has been approached by many of his colleagues in the industry asking him to explain what this whole new Lean Startup buzz is all about:
What do the Lean Startup methodologies mean for the business? How and what new services can you sell to new and existing customers? How do you structure projects, quotes and pricing in more lean and agile ways? How can you validate what to build – or not – without first actually building it, saving time and profitability?
And most agencies would like to add a product-based revenue source to their existing business model of exchanging hours for money. And a lot of agencies already have a bunch of truly great projects and ideas laying around on their desks – but they rarely ever have the time to get them started and off the ground because of either constraints in resources or hesitancy often due to the lack of experience in building and taking products to market that can survive on their own out there.
So how will the Lean Startup methodologies enable you to find and validate the next big product within your company using your existing talent and resources? How can you realize some of your product potential? How can you minimize cost and risk? He will help you find an answer to that question during this workshop.
Startup Days (2 days, additional program after workshops 1+2)
In this workshop companies and organizations get to unleash their intrepraneurial potential; For twho whole days they get to be entrepreneurs, talk to customers, solve problems, build prototypes and change the world with the help of active mentorship of serial entrepreneurs. The program is based on the immensely successful Startup Weekend format and the corporate innovation program at Qualcomm. The goal of this program is to reinforce the core concepts and methodology for innovation and entrepreneurship in a risk-free environment outside of everyday work and inspire and to stimulate and encourage entrepreneurial thinking and actions back into the everyday work setting.
Day 1
9:00 Registration Starts, Coffee and mingle
10:00 Welcome & Keynote
11:00 Pitches of ideas start
12:00 Idea voting & Team building
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Get in to your rooms and start working!
Coaches available from 14:00. Open end.
Day 2
9:00 Opens, coffee
9:30am Call for help (if you need it)
10:30pm Mentor Booking & Call for needs and skills
12:00 Start prepping for presentations
13:00 Lunch
15:00 FINAL PRESENTATIONS
17:00 Judging & Awards Ceremony
17:30 Wrapup & Diplomas
Pitching Course
The aim of this course is to heighten the quality of (startup) pitches by providing intensive training. Pitching is doing a short and convincing presentation for an audience of entrepreneurs, press and investors. All participants get a one hour intensive crash course on pitching and after a rapid-fire elevator pitching session, they get an additional four hours of individual pitch training. At the end of the individual training sessions there’s a competition where the participants/entrepreneurs present the pitch they’ve prepared to their fellows and an audience of entrepreneurs and investors.
Startup Marketing
How does the marketing of startups work? Many of them spend zero euro on marketing but get a lot of press anyway? How do clients find you without investing in advertisement? In this course we learn about the strategy and process of startup marketing including tools like social media, video, newsletter and blogs. We’ll get into bits of growhthacking, content marketing and into the tech blogs as well.
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All Courses and workshops:
♦ Lean Startup Crash Course
♦ Seminar Corporate Entrepreneurship
♦ Additional Workshop 1
♦ Additional Workshop 2
♦ Workshop Lean Startup for agencies and consultants
♦ Startups Days
♦ Pitching
♦ Startup Marketing
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