Has this all been a waste of time?
That’s the question that ran through my mind in the summer of 2012. I had just hung up the phone with a startup team that had recently attended one of my workshops.
This particular team had been very engaged during the workshop and had demonstrated the biggest transformation in thinking. I had reached out to check up on them and was amazed to find that even though they still positively referenced many of the key takeaways from the workshop, they were hardly applying any of them.
I was now really curious and decided to follow up with other past workshop attendees.
Same.
The core tenets from the workshop weren't sticking.
That’s when it dawned on me: The challenge for adoption wasn’t a lack of knowledge, or skills, or even motivation, but overcoming old habits.
A bootcamp was born.
That’s when I had the idea of running an immersive 10-week bootcamp. I would recruit the most motivated early adopters and lead them through a high-touch coaching program. My logic was that if I couldn’t get motivated early adopters to apply this framework successfully, there’s no way it would work with more mainstream entrepreneurs.
Based on the results from just the first cohort, I doubled down.
I ran over two dozen bootcamps over the following six years with hundreds of startup and corporate teams spanning the globe — all delivered virtually from Austin, TX where I live. Each bootcamp built on the previous one and underwent many iteration cycles and lots of experimentation. Along the way, I got to see what worked and what didn’t, patterns emerged, and more tools got built.
The end result is 90-Day Startup.
90-Day Startup is about mindset change.
Seeing the world in a new way, searching for problems worth solving, and building products that matter.
90-Day Startup is a place where you can learn by doing and grow fast — with safety and confidence.
This is an opportunity to teach you to think big and draw a line in the sand.
To challenge your assumptions and test what's riskiest versus what's easiest.
To overcome setbacks and challenges with a team that has your back.
A way to improve your critical thinking and decision making in the face of extreme uncertainty.
Most of all, it’s about the search for better.
Imagine learning to be both an artist and an innovator at the same time — having a vision and acting with speed and purpose.
90 Day Startup isn’t about the test or the certificate. Instead, it offers a training ground where you and a community of like-minded pioneers push each other to discover and build something that matters together.
I hope you’ll consider it.
Over the next several emails, I'll give you more details into the inner workings of the program, what you'll learn, why we do things the way we do, etc. My hope is that you'll have more insight after this email series on whether you're ready to leap. If you have any questions along the way, just hit reply. All replies go directly to me.
Cheers.
Ash
P.S. The next 90 Day Startup runs from September 7th to December 7th, 2021. The early decision deadline to apply is Tuesday, June 8th. The final application deadline is Tuesday, July 6th. Learn more here.
