1. Business Model Validation Lab

2. Right now Frame the Lab + Success for this week
Schedule for the week + rules of the game
Questions
Introductions + Orientation
This slide just helps entrepreneurs understand what will be covered in the first 2 hours of the Lab. It is always important for entrepreneurs to know where you are taking them, even for just one workshop in the larger context of a day.

3. Why are we here? Building a venture is hard work
This progression of slides just helps entrepreneurs to know what problem the Lab is solving

4. Why are we here? Building a venture is hard work
The path forward is uncertain and full of unknowns

5. Why are we here? Building a venture is hard work
The path forward is uncertain and full of unknowns
There is no clear job description of an early-stage entrepreneur

6. Challenges
Entrepreneurs don’t know exactly how to prioritize what to focus on in the early days of their venture
Entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time in market
Entrepreneurs underestimate how fast they can learn
These are challenges that all entrepreneurs face

7. ‘A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable model’
Steve Blank
This quotation is an important quotation that helps frame the primary mission of an early-stage entrepreneur: to search. Throughout the course of the Lab, it will be very important for entrepreneurs to search for that repeatable model through interacting with customers.

8. Validation is a function of... searching discovering validating
repeating
This slide reinforces the idea of searching and the iterative nature of this work.

9. Your Job
Make a Website
These slides show an entrepreneur what not to do in the very beginning - even if so many entrepreneurs tend to do these things. It’s humorous in some ways but it proves a point that often entrepreneurs confuse the order of operations.

10. Your Job
Make T-shirts

11. Your Job
Build a Logo

12. Your Job
Trademark
your name

13. Your Job
Buy 5,000 sq. of
warehouse
space

14. Your Job
Build a perfect
product

15. Your Job
Write beautiful
code

16. Your Job Unknowns → Knowns
This is a concept that will be drilled home again and again and again throughout the course of the Lab. Take an unknown and convert it into a known through increasing your rate of confidence in that thing being true. How do you increase your rate of confidence? You get feedback from customers.

17. Building your job description as an early-stage entrepreneur
This Week
Building your job description as an early-stage entrepreneur
This is another theme that is brought up over the course of the Lab: early-stage entrepreneurs simply don’t know what their job description is, as evidenced by getting the order of operations wrong (they spend hours trying to get their logo just right before they go out and see if they actually have a business), and so this Lab is designed to help an entrepreneur get clear on what their job description is: meaning what they should focus on first, second, third.

18. Business Model Validation Lab
Customer Discovery
Customer Validation
Mentor Feedback
Mentor Feedback
This slide just shows the oscillating nature of the Lab. In classroom time followed by time out in the market, then back to the classroom, then time in the market, and so on and so forth.I
Identify Assumptions
Rapid Prototyping
Mentor Prep + Cost Assumptions
Strategic Planning
Keep Momentum

19. Takeaways
Completed a Lean Canvas identifying the foundational assumptions of the business
Learned a repeatable methodology for how to do customer discovery
Built 1-2 prototypes of a key element of their venture
Tested prototypes with real customers
Learned a methodology for how to build and maintain mentor relationships
Met and received feedback from mentors
Conducted a break-even analysis of their business and identified the key cost and financial assumptions of their business
Built out a basic budget and financial model
Created a 6-month operating plan
Increased their confidence level about the foundational assumptions underpinning their venture
These are the deliverables that entrepreneurs can expect to get out of the Lab

20. This Lab will NOT.. Solidify once-and-for-all your business model
Be a forum to sell actual products or services to customers
Be a forum to raise capital
It’s also helpful to couch things in the negative and share what they won’t accomplish in the Lab as well

21. You are in the driver’s seat as the entrepreneur
You are in the driver’s seat as the entrepreneur. It’s your job to follow up with mentors. It’s your job to take advantage of the resources we put in front of you.

22. Entrepreneur = main actor
Our Team = supporting actor
This is an alternate metaphor to express the same sentiment as “being in the drivers seat.” If it feels repetitive, feel free to delete this in your copy of the presentation.

23. Questions?

24. Feedback
We want it!
This is a slide that invites entrepreneurs to provide feedback to us

25. Orientation Rock - Paper - Scissors Two truths + one lie
60-second pitches
This is the slide that has the orientation games on it