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Steve Blank’s Lean LaunchPad course, which has taught thousands of entrepreneurs how to start a business, is now live and we’ve already seen plenty of exciting feedback from students. Students are already meeting online in the class discussion forum, where they are sharing ideas, feedback and skill sets as well as making plans to meet up outside of class to start their own companies.
At Udacity, we know the growing pains that come with creating a startup. Much of the advice that Steve gives in his class is advice we could have benefited from in our early days. To help other companies avoid the mistakes that we–and countless other startups–have made, we’ve spent the past three months working with Steve to convert his already-successful course to the Udacity format. The class is built around his Customer Development process–the foundation of the Lean Startup Movement–which has been guiding startups for more than a decade.
Steve teaches his Lean LaunchPad course at Stanford, Berkelely, Columbia, Caltech and Princeton, corporations around the world and now, Udacity. In 2011, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) adopted his Lean LaunchPad curriculum and has used it to train this country’s best scientists and engineers on how to start companies. Over 100 teams of NSF-funded scientists have gone through the NSF “I-Corps” program, which will train 200 more teams in the next year.
In Steve’s words, “the class teaches entrepreneurs that startups are searching for a business model. And unlike an existing company that’s executing, searching for a business model requires a ton of hard work testing hypotheses in front of customers.”
“I am thrilled to have partnered with Udacity and their world-class learning platform to bring the Lean LaunchPad to teams of entrepreneurs all over the world,” Blank says. And we’re thrilled to have him too!
The full, eight-session Lean LaunchPad curriculum allows you to learn and test your hypotheses on your own or with a team of co-founders. Each lecture comes with significant “homework” that drives you to develop and refine your Business Model Canvas, and then pushes you “out of the building” to talk to customers, gain their feedback about your product or service, and integrate that feedback into your company’s business model in real time. Have an idea you’d like to launch? You can start here today!
You can sign up for more free Udacity classes at www.udacity.com.
