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Startups use their elevator pitch to quickly communicate their startup idea and value proposition in one or two sentences.

In our previous idea validation lessons, we focused on the importance of taking your initial idea and defining your problem, particular market, advantages, and customer needs. Now it’s time to refine those learnings into a polished Elevator Pitch and continue our startup idea validation.

The heart of every great Elevator Pitch includes 4 essential components:

ONE Nail The Problem

As we learned, great business ideas start with a well-defined problem and the ability to identify how painful that problem is. Now, we’ll concentrate on how to effectively articulate it in your elevator pitch.

TWO Explain The Solution

You’ve zeroed i...

Intro to the Customer discovery process

Up to this point, we’ve made sure that there is a problem in the market for your business idea to solve through idea validation research and notable experts have verified that you’re on the right path. Now we begin the last test of the business idea validation process — customer discovery.

We’re using customer discovery as a methodical approach to ensuring the product idea you’ve identified aligns with what potential customers actually want at a price they are willing to pay.

Key Takeaway

Use idea validation to confirm that the problem, solution, and revenue model aligns with what potential customers really want.

Customer Discovery

Customer Discovery centers around 3 critical pillars of your business model ...

Intro to using experts to validate your startup ideas

Now that we know there is an opportunity in the market for our startup idea, we want to get some expert advice on how to approach that problem, target market, and industry.

Think of this phase as asking your college professor what the answers to the idea validation test are before you ever start the course.

In almost every case there are experts out there that know many of the answers you're looking for and are willing to share that information with you.

The challenge is to find the right experts and present them with very specific questions about your business idea, and in return get highly specific feedback.

Their feedback can help shortcut the market validation process, market research, ev...

Before we spend a dime on building anything, we’re first going to learn how to assess the feasibility and viability of our startup idea to see whether we should forge ahead with confidence, pivot, or go back to the drawing board altogether.

This should always be the first step for every Founder who is considering pursuing a startup idea. Broadly, this process is called idea validation.

Intro to the Business Idea Validation Process

As a Founder, chances are you’ve experienced the “eureka” moment — that feeling of capturing lightning in a bottle when you suddenly strike upon an idea that has you running to tell your friends, family members, and baffled strangers you encounter on the street (but probably not your target audience).

Nine times out o...

What if you found out today you'd live twice as long — what would you do differently?

For many of us, especially young startup Founders, our issue isn't whether we're going to live longer but instead recognizing how young we really are, and by virtue of that, how much time we truly have in front of us.

Without a good measure of how much time we have in front of us, we simply make really amateur mistakes. We rush things, we create endless anxiety, and we create a false narrative that the world will implode if we somehow get to "30" without being a huge success.

The reality is our misperception of time is a huge impediment to our career. It's not until we properly calibrate our path that we can start building the future we want at a pace that...

What is Quiet Quitting and Why is it Important?

While it isn’t a new phenomenon, many of us might be familiar with the behavior but not have a term connected to it, that is, until now. You may have heard the term "quiet quitting" recently as the latest workplace trend, many thanks to influencers on TikTok, but it has been around long before social media ever existed. Generally, there are multiple definitions floating around as to what quiet quitting is, and what it means for the workplace. 

Upon first hearing the term, many might mistake quiet quitting as slacking off at work, but that is not entirely true. Some people define it as not taking on more work and setting boundaries with employers to avoid burnout, while others say it’s simpl...

Welcome to Phase One of a four-part Splitting Equity Series make sure to read Introduction - Early Startup Equity — Getting it Right before continuing on if you haven’t already.

Phase One - Startup Equity — Avoiding Early Mistakes ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

Phase Two - How Startup Equity Works

Phase Three - How to Split Equity

Phase Four - Equity Management

We are excited to guide you through your equity-splitting experience. Let's continue!

Before we make a single equity split decision about co-founders or any of our founding teams, please read this section carefully. Nearly every bad decision startup founders make in setting up their equity splits is contained here.

This lesson is a primer on splitting equity among two founders or more and how to have a...

Welcome to our four-part Splitting Equity Series. This is our Introductory piece and will continue to be split up into four phases:

Introduction - Early Startup Equity — Getting it Right ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

• Phase One - Startup Equity - Avoiding Early Mistakes 

• Phase Two - How Startup Equity Works

• Phase Three - How to Split Equity

• Phase Four - Equity Management

We are excited to guide you through your equity-splitting experience. Let's dive in!

We’re going to identify and isolate each of the key issues in splitting startup equity in a young company.  Then one by one we will lay out which options are available, how most startups address this problem, and what key decisions the team will need to make to split the founder equity fairly and ma...

Welcome to Phase Four of a four-part Splitting Equity Series. If you missed it, start your journey here: Introduction - Early Startup Equity — Getting it Right before continuing on if you haven’t already, and go in order from there.

Phase One - Startup Equity - Avoiding Early Mistakes 

Phase Two - How Startup Equity Works 

Phase Three - How to Split Equity

Phase Four -  Part 1 - Equity Management 

• Part 2 - Recovering Startup Equity ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

Let's do this!

When it comes to startup equity distribution, giving away a startup's equity is easy. How much equity do we get back? Well, that's a different story altogether!

An "equity clawback" is designed for early-stage startups to essentially reverse an equity grant based on a...

We can't win every battle, so sometimes we just need to live to fight another day.

I learned this lesson early in my startup career (the 90s), at a time when everything was going "up and to the right" for absolutely everyone. During the boom times, our biggest problems are staffing up, raising capital, customer acquisition, and scale.

And then one day they go the other direction. The markets dry up, "How fast can we staff up?" is replaced with "How do we make payroll?" and suddenly we're talking survival versus strategy.

When Survival IS the Strategy

We don't talk much about "survival" as a startup strategy, partially because it's not fun to talk about, and partially because we hope never to think about it. But lo and behold, if we plan o...