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Davidson College

Building a Lean Startup

Davidson College via edX

Overview

Turning your business idea into a company can feel intimidating and getting started may be overwhelming. This practical, hands-on entrepreneurship course is taught by a founder of multiple successful business startups and provides step-by-step guidance to go from concept to product-market fit and beyond. In one comprehensive, fast-paced startup course, you will gain tools and strategies employed to build some of the world’s most successful business owners. ****

We’ll start off by helping you learn entrepreneurship by building an entrepreneurial mindset to establish a foundation to thrive as a business owner and discover proven methodologies to identify problems as business opportunities. From there you will learn how to validate your new product or service by interviewing potential customers and testing an early version of your solution known as a Minimum Viable Product, or ‘MVP’. Once your product or service is in the hands of customers, you will learn how to measure its strengths and weaknesses to guide changes based on data and ultimately scale to a wider audience. ****

By leveraging the Lean Startup methodology, you will dramatically improve your odds of success by saving time, money, and resources while helping your idea go to market through customer feedback. What’s more, you’ll flip your assumptions on their head: Rather than writing a lengthy business plan, building a product, and then trying to find customers, the Lean Startup approach will help you position your concept as a hypothesis which you’ll learn how to validate and test on real customers. By the end of the course, you will have completed a comprehensive roadmap for your business’ launch. From there, the sky's the limit!

This course credits the work of Eric Ries who wrote, "The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses", a book describing his proposed lean startup strategy for startup companies. Ries developed the idea for the lean startup from his experiences as a startup advisor, employee, and founder.

Taught by

Rebecca Weeks Watson

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