Founders' Book
Founders' Book
Intro to Entrepreneurship

Intro to Entrepreneurship

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Introduction to Entrepreneurship

// Our attempt to simplify the art of starting up and building a value loop. A startup is born when dreams, demand and dedication converge.

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Hey Future Founders 👋🏻

Simplified Entrepreneurship is an honest attempt to encourage more people to start founding, unlock self-potential and build your "NewCo." This tiny guide reveals the secret of starting up with less than $100 to make upwards of $1000 motivating you to build and launch tiny moonshots 🚀 fuelled by your passion, creativity, time, imagination, discipline, and juice, of course.

Purpose of Simplified Entrepreneurship;

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" The idea is not to build a unicorn but to spark the habit of watching the space, experimenting and collaboration that may lead to building a unicorn 🤞 Our goal is to help first-time, Solo founders, Indie makers, or anyone who has an idea and plans to launch their startup to identify opportunities to grow, validate ideas, build an MVP, get early users, and scale their customer acquisition channels. "
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3 Y's of Simplified Entrepreneurship

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🧑🏼‍💻 The Important Y - You (Founder/Maker)

Founder Mindset - Pre-requisite

When you are working towards building something the world has never seen, boy! it takes a lot of adventure, service and high levels of persistence. Having a Growth and Founder mindset will set you up foreseeing both the greatest and the steepest.

Simply, a calm brain behind crazy ideas!

More on how to change to Founder's mindset;

Catalyst/mediums that give your idea way, shape and form:

  • Technology: Leverage the value of the current technology landscape. We are living in a very fortunate time many founders spent their lives building cool stuff that made future platform building so accessible and easy to use
  • Tools + Platforms: There are many tools especially no-code tools which eliminated the efforts to building something ground up and uncomplicated the venture building process
  • Partners: Identity channel partners who not only turn into sales engines but also bring their expertise to help you build amazing products
  • Service Providers: Partner with existing/similar service providers (if any). If their operations are manual, you/your product can help them automate end-to-end. Your product now has a competitive advantage and testimonial to support your growth

💼 The value-generating Y - Your Company

Your offering can be a Product / Service or a Productised Service.

Don't have an Idea?

Read this!

Want inspiration for ideas?

Sign up for these!

Catalyst's that drive your company's growth:

  • Business Model - Don't complicate. Simple, the better.
  • Value-Driven: Direct value to your customer whose head is on fire.
  • Build a feedback and value Loop.
  • Focus on a "job-to-be-done" rather than going through the whole process of problem discovery.
  • Run behind the value, not valuation. The best investment is always from customers.

Questions to ask your customer and yourself before building it. Is our solution;

Desirable: What's desirable from a human, environmental and organisational perspective?

Viable: What can we do that is sustainable now and into the future?

Feasible: What's technically possible?

Ethical / Impactful: Just because we can should we? Does it truly achieve the outcomes we need to see?

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Steps you can take to verify that the solutions you are working on to solve your target customer’s key challenge or pain points.

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Step 1: List out one key/primary Job or challenge you are trying to solve for a particular target customer group. These are their pain points. Your research, immersion, and interviews will give you the required information for determining what challenge you are trying to solve. This will heavily depend on the specific target customer group you are focusing on, which you need to identify. Step 2: What benefits or outcomes will flow to this target group if you can successfully solve their challenge. From your target customer’s perspective, what benefits or outcomes they can expect from you – what’s is in it for them? Step 3: How do you measure the benefits or outcomes you intend to provide to your target group? What are the KPIs or SMART measures of success are you seeking to achieve? (keep it simple - 2 KPIs per outcome) Starting with the end in mind, what should your investors or stakeholders expect from you? Step 4: What strategies will you consider and adopt to deliver on the measures of success – as the saying goes, what gets measured, gets done. Your strategies must link to your KPIs, which is your success metric or criteria your define in your head. Step 5: List down all possible actions or action steps needed to deliver on each of your high-level strategies. You may also identify what assets you need to build like a website, mobile apps, databases, wiki's etc Step 6: Evaluate your options and prioritise your work plan. Some solutions may not be feasible at this moment. Step 7: Build based on your action plan and prioritisation. As a founder, it is your responsibility to stick to the plan and meet KPI's as defined. OKR's play a key role in keeping you aligned.

🦸🏻‍♂️ The paying Y - Your Customers (it's all about them)

  • Customer obsession is key
  • Build a community-driven business. A community may convert to a customer base if their every input is valued, quick turnaround on error resolution, feature prioritisation and much more. Communities are so powerful that 5 years ago "Community Manager" job didn't exist.

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🥷🏻 The significant M - Mentors!

Mentors! Mentors! Mentors!

  • Mentor driven value: Mentors not only give you a direction, but they also bring a lot of value in terms of educating you (not everyone is good at everything) and showing you a path to find the right acquisition channels to seek further validation and grow your startup hence achieving product-market fit. You need to be mentorable!
  • Mentor driven growth for startups: Mentors has the highest ability to increase your network by introducing you to their own. All you need is dedication and commitment. Deliver value and there are good people out there to support you always.

Bases in Simplified Entrepreneurship

// Each base contains all of the information you need for a particular section or collection.

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Bases

Great article on how to build a SaaS business on your own! Don't forget to watch the Youtube video at the end.

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Life in entrepreneurship is never linear, but by educating ourselves and taking advantage of the available tools and resources, we can at least try normalising it.

The only way to get better at something is by addressing the challenges and finding every possible way to overcome them, leading to success.

I personally believe every future or current founder should have "Imagination" and "Discipline". Imagination is a great power to create something futuristic and fuels commitment to dedicate.

Peace ✌️

Acknowledgement

✏️ Illustrations & Graphics - DrawKit, AbstractLab and Canva

📥 Forms - Chilipepper

📊 Page Analytics - Notionlytics

📋 Canvases and Templates - Stratezyger, Board of Innovation and Lean Stack

😇 Inspiration - Catalysr and YCombinator's Startup School

Sources to images and their descriptions are provided next to or below every image/framework or methodology.