Startups: A Guide to Entrepreneurship (MBA ASAP)

You are motivating many! You are inspiring many! You are adding great value to many! Thank you Nicole I am a big fan of your books, which make all these difficult topics really easy to understand. This is excellent work. Adnan A startup venture is a series of hypotheses about who's a customer, what makes your product or service attractive to these customers, and so on. The Business Model Canvas and the Lean Startup Methodology provide a rigorous framework that you use to prove or disprove as many of these hypotheses as possible at as low a cost as possible. This method helps bring objectivity to the process so you don't delude yourself into thinking that the feedback is all necessarily positive. These approaches complement each other and can be used to converge on insanely great products and services that meet customer needs and wants. Congratulations, you are on your way to reducing risk and upping your chances of creating a very promising Startup! The process of creating successful startup companies has transformed over the past few decades as the reality of what works, and what is just an exercise, has sunk in. We used to think of startups as mini versions of existing companies and entrepreneurs as mini versions of CEOs. The exercise always began with lots of top-down research into markets and elaborate detailing of products and services. All this work was codified into the Business Plan and it was the sacred document the encased how things were gong to be executed. Its credibility was directly related to its heft. All of this work would be done at a desk and in a conference room and amazingly would usually not include interactions with potential customers. Few read these plans and they crumbled in the face of the first customer interactions. As a famous boxer said: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face". In the past ten years or so, thanks to the efforts of Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Alexander Osterwalder Tim Brown and others, an entirely new way of thinking about and planning startups has emerged. It has been a paradigm shift in thinking about reducing risk and navigating a viable path toward making something customers want. It is based on the scientific method and proving up guesses about aspects of the business model. Because at the beginning all you have are guesses and admitting that and dealing with it is the discovery. We make our guesses, test them against customers, and course correct based on the feedback we receive. It seems simple and obvious now. All significant breakthroughs seem obvious after the fact. This book is about the different aspects of this new thinking and how they work together. It is meant to jump start you understanding and awareness of these different strains and tools and point you toward further study. This book can also act as a way to step back and take stock of the fundamentals as we all can sometimes get caught up in arcane details and eddies. It can help get back into the mainstream and flow. There are no groundbreaking new ideas in this book. This is a summary of the work of others. I am definitely standing on the shoulders of giants. I have written it to bring together a number of strands so you can quickly and effectively grasp the different threads that make up the new paradigm of entrepreneurship. I want to share this work because it has been so helpful to me and has been a revelation on my entrepreneurial journey. It also represents the key points that make the light bulbs go off in my students when I teach this subject. Think of it as a ladder up to your place on those giant's shoulders. Entrepreneurship is an incredibly important subject and set of skills to develop, own, and implement. Besides helping individuals gain agency and control in their lives, the products and services created that help customers can make an immense beneficial impact on society.