Entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs alike are learning how to start, build, and grow their startups in 2014 with 50 almost-weekly lessons from Launch This Year. And the teachers include AngelList’s Naval Ravikant and KISSmetrics founder Hiten Shah.
“This is going to add structure and be a compass as you’re building your company,” Launch This Year founder Mikael Cho told me this morning. “Our focus this year is people who have done this before … we want to convey the thing that inspired them.”
20,000 entrepreneurs have already signed up.
Cho is the founder of exclusive invite-only marketplace Ooomf, where entrepreneurs find developers and designers to work on their startup ideas. The problem that he was seeing, however, is that building your service, your site, your app, or your company is only the first step.
“They have other questions: How should I market, how should I handle press, how do I raise money?” Cho says. “Launch This Year gives them a super-simple way to handle each of those items … each curated by someone who has done it before and done it recently.”
The lessons, some of which are videos, some of which are worksheets, and some of which are articles, will come out roughly once a week in a logical order for an entrepreneur to follow. The result will be a large knowledge base for founders, but one that isn’t as intimidating a full book with all the lessons all at once.
Instead, there’s a just-in-time flavor to Launch This Year.
Above: AngelList founder Naval Ravikant
KISSmetrics founder Shah’s lesson, for example, will be on the lean methodology you should adopt as you’re building out your product in the very beginning. Ben Yoskovitz, who literally wrote the book on Lean Analytics, will focus on the exact metrics you should track. And AngelList founder Ravikant will focus on the life-blood of a startup: cash.
“Naval’s lesson [is] on fundraising, and it’s not general … it’s super-granular with actual takeaways of what you should do and not do,” Cho says.
The first lesson, on the things you should think about before starting your business from author and web designer Paul Jarvis, is live now. VentureBeat readers can get early access.
Simply follow this link to Launch This Year.
“Each lesson is an actionable item,” Cho says. “That’s the key to help you move forward.”
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