How to Validate your Startup Idea

Starting a new business begins with an idea that needs to evolve through experimentation, iteration and interactions with people. This course is for existing and potential entrepreneurs who are looking for guidance and support to make their ‘great idea’ a reality. In addition to reviewing the basic principles of entrepreneurship, this course guides you through the process of actively validating your idea in the market. We encourage you to identify and communicate good opportunities and to create and capture value from these opportunities. By working through the course and completing the activities you’ll learn how to get feedback that systematically tests different parts of your business idea. You will learn how to do this through interacting with potential customers, suppliers, partners and investors outside the course. Along the way, you will also become more confident in pitching your idea. By the end of the course you should have a validated business idea that you can start right away.

• How can you learn entrepreneurship?
• In the first week, you'll be learning about some basic concepts in entrepreneurship. Specifically we're going to introduce the business canvas and the lean method, two key frameworks that will be used to structure your activities throughout this course.
• How is your idea valuable?
• This week you'll learn to articulate and test your value proposition by drawing on three concepts: the strategy canvas, persona and minimum viable product (MVP). The strategy canvas emphasizes the uniqueness of your value proposition. The 'persona' represents who you think your typical customer is, which is useful for identifying real customers. The MVP is a simple prototype, which is a key tool to to get feedback from potential customers about the value you are providing them.
• How will you reach more customers?
• This week we'll help you think beyond your first customers, to scaling up your business across multiple segments of customers. The core concepts for this module are the diffusion of innovation and developing partnerships.
• How profitable is your idea?
• This week is an introduction to financial literacy. We'll show you how to build an income statement, how to develop financial models and financial forecasts. We'll also introduce you to some metrics to track the viability of your business that complement the traditional accounting metrics.
• Is investment capital right for you?
• This week you'll learn some basic investment capital strategies for new ventures, illustrated using a simple capitalization table.
• How will you pitch your idea?
• This week pulls together all the elements and evidence of your business idea so far to develop a coherent and succinct business pitch