Foundational Skills of Tech Entrepreneurship – 15 hours of intensive bootcamp spread across 5 evenings
// TECH ENTREPRENEURSHIP BOOTCAMP
Hosted by Rob Fitzpatrick, The Startup Toolkit
With workshops & lectures by a selection of expert guest speakers
Have you spent months sitting on a great idea or been fleeced by outsourced programmers? Have you worked hard on something nobody cared about or failed to take advantage of a big opportunity?
This course is built on the belief that only the market can decide whether your idea is valid. Everything else is just an opinion.
Through this course, you’ll gain the tools needed to test your idea against the market (and start making money) as quickly and cheaply as is humanly possible.
Different skills for a different place
In the silicon valley, everyone’s friends & family seem to have $200k laying around to get them started.
The rest of the world is different. Great investors certainly exist, but you need to begin succeeding on your own.
This course is about gaining the skills to get to that first big milestone and continue growing beyond it.
Dates & location
This course runs in 3 hour sessions across 5 evenings, totalling 15 hours of in-person instruction, plus homework assignments. All classes take place from 6-9pm and are hosted at Ravensbourne, just beside the O2 Arena.
- Tuesday, February 21st
- Tuesday, February 28th
- Thursday, March 1st
- Remaining dates tbc
Topics & curriculum overview
Marketing-driven startups
This is a hands-on topic, with workshops & homework exercises covering:
- Reliably driving traffic
- Building an audience
- Using traffic, funnel, and cohort metrics
- Running A/B tests
- Improving conversion rates
This is the core skill of all marketing-driven start-ups, including ecommerce, SaaS, and the vast majority of other B2C businesses.
If you don’t already have a site, we’ll help you set up a blog to experiment on.
Sales-driven startups
This is a group workshop topic, with experts brought in to facilitate exercises covering:
- Talking to (and learning from) customers
- Establishing a repeatable sales roadmap
- Making the most of advisors and friendly experts
- Asking useful questions
- Effectively pitching your company.
This is the core skill of all sales-driven startups, including enterprise software, service companies, and any B2B business with solutions priced above $10k.
Startup literacy – business models, funding, and roadmaps
This is a group & individual workshop topic, with experts facilitating workshops about:
- Understanding other company’s business models
- Explaining your own business model
- Awareness of early stage funding options
- Deciding how to attack your business risks.
This is a general skill which is crucial for understanding the activities and possibilities in your space. We will be analysing businesses both large and small, chosen by the attendees’ goals. Attendees will also document and clarify their own business model (or come up with a business which matches their goals).
