Get the Heck Out of the Building in Founder’s 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“.

Founders School

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

  • get to know your customers
  • devise ways to test your hypotheses
  • glean insights from what you learn outside the building
  • get, keep and grow customers

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

  • 0:50: There are No Facts Inside Your Building — Get Outside
  • 1:28: Using the Business Model Canvas
  • 1:49: Use Customer Development to Test Your Hypotheses
  • 2:44: What is a Pivot?
  • 4:24: No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers

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

Listen to the blog post here [audio http://traffic.libsyn.com/albedrio/steveblank_hplewis_140318_FULL.mp3]

Download the podcast here

7 Responses

  1. Most awaited content. thanks Steve!

    Passion, enthusiasm & creativity are complementary NOT substitutes for experience, expertise & skills.

  2. Steve

    We should have direct contact.

    Unfortunately, the staff at Kauffman are, and have always been, academics and not business owners or venture focused investors.

    Arthur

  3. Wow thanks to the Kauffman Foundation. The video quality is great…but lets get real– Steve this is really just an excuse to show off your awesome office isn’t it?

  4. Thanks Mr. Blank! Here in Brazil, listen customers still hard task to make the founder understand! 🙂

  5. […] in Japanese. It is an important concept in the Toyota production system, and is also known as “Go out of the building” in the lean start-up philosophy. The “go out and see” principle is an important part of the […]

  6. I’m a graphic designer and after decades of being a commodity generalist, I am listening hard.

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