Playbooks

We’re going to go into this section with 0 customers and a lot of uncertainty and finish with a confident grasp of the tried-and-true formula for establishing our first customers.

We’ve all received (and deleted) an email newsletter before. Now let’s look at how to create newsletters that don’t suck and start engaging with our customers in a meaningful way.

It’s a given that our customers are on social media. Let’s make sure we are too, and that we’re starting the right conversations to help us expand our reach.

What’s the difference between Google Ads and Facebook Ads? How do they work? What’s a reasonable ad spend? Let’s find out together.

We’re going to take a hard look at the market we’re about to enter to determine if the problem we’re setting out to solve is worth solving while homing in on any other solutions that may already exist.

We’ll seek advice from subject matter experts, founders, and investors to identify which pitfalls to avoid and gain further insight into the probability of success for our startup concept.

By directly surveying our customers, we’ll gain a better understanding of how our solution fits into our market and learn if what we think our customers want gels with what they actually want.

From pitching investors, to securing partnerships, the Elevator Pitch is one of the most important tools in a Founder’s tool belt. We’re going to break down how to perfect this deceptively difficult summary.

Let’s discuss how early startup finance is all about building wild guesses around vague costs and values, using those assumptions to forecast for the future, and constantly iterating until we get close to something right.

In order to begin building a forecast for our business, let’s dig into the most important assumptions about our business — like how much customers will pay for our product — and make a reasonable guess as to what those values might be.

Forecasting is all about figuring out what calculations to make based on our assumed values and determining what we need to achieve to make our business actually work profitably.

Now that we’ve set up an income statement, let’s see how to manage it every month. Good news: startup accounting is like trying to manage our expenses when as a college freshman — we don’t really have that many to manage.