Picture By Kahlil Corazo

Reverse Engineering the Lean LaunchPad Curriculum
August 2012
Here are the questions I answer when creating training plans:
  1. What are the learning objectives?
  2. How will they be accomplished?
  3. How will the learning be measured?

Steve Blank and team have been posting versions of their Lean LaunchPad curriculum across many runs. I thought I'd just "translate" it to my usual training plan format. I did not expect this exercise to be as mentally exhausting as it was. Here's the result. 

We are planning to organize a training based on this for the local startup community. Here's the training plan I prepared for it. This was easy after doing the exercise above. It's essentially the same as the original version. I tried to format the document to be more usable for organizers and participants. Email me at kahlil@corazo.org if you want the editable version.

This curriculum is actually a bit misleading. You have a lot of things to read and lectures to attend. But based on experience, I think the most of the learning actually depends of the following:
  • Getting out of the building. In the past weeks, I've been doing customer interviews myself for my startup. It's a lot of work and time and rejections (I obviously don't have sales experience). Getting and doing interviews--the heart of CustDev--can only be learned by experience.
  • Mentoring. How do you make sense of your interview data? Where do you pivot to? How do you make sure you're not doing vanity validation (props to Jabe Bloom)? You need an objective 3rd party with deep entrepreneurial experience. I also noticed that mentors not only open business model horizons; they open doors with their Rolodex.
  • Weekly reporting to a panel and to your peers. I underestimated the importance of this. CustDev takes a lot of work and for many of us, it's on top of ongoing work. The fear of disappointing / desire to impress your mentors and peers helps during those times when your long term startup vision is weakened by an insane amount of work. Plus, preparing to explain something is the best way to digest it.

How can these be replicated in local startup communities?
I think you need a minimum of orchestration:
  • getting folks to form teams (our survey shows that many are not yet in actual startups)
  • connecting to mentors
  • curating content
  • logistics for the weekly presentation
  • exams (I'm not too crazy about doing this but Steve Blank did this for professional scientists, so there probably is a purpose)

 These will fall under the role of the organizing team.

blog comments powered by Disqus
A Series on our D.I.Y. Lean LaunchPad

Musings on the Fundamentals

Goodies from Steve Blank
(A few months after we started, Steve Blank published online lectures and a recipe book for for running a Lean LaunchPad!)