Is your idea gathering dust because you are waiting to get get started?
We spend too much time analyzing, or planning, or making excuses for not starting — we wait to first write a business plan, or find investors, or take a crash course on marketing, or coding or…
There is no shortage of training courses and books out there, which is both a blessing and a curse.
On the one hand, we can learn almost anything today. But on the other hand, if you don’t quickly apply that learning, it simply rolls off your back. And you never feel ready enough to start.
Entrepreneurship is like a martial art or learning to play golf.
You need to balance learning with doing.
This, of course, is more easily said than done.
That is why we built the Innovator Roadmap.
"A battle-tested approach to building companies that matter."
Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup
What is the Innovator Roadmap?
The Innovator Roadmap is a battle-tested curriculum that helps you avoid the number one reason why products fail.
Do you know what that is?
Take a look at any list on startup failure, and you’ll find something like this:
|
1. No money 2. Poor team 3. Poor product 4. Bad timing 5. No customers 6. Competition |
7. Lack of focus 8. Lack of passion 9. Bad location 10. Not profitable 11. Burn out 12. Legal issues |
You might be able to nod your head, but these reasons aren't very actionable.
The Number One Reason Why Products Fail
At the heart of all these reasons is one core reason:
We simply build something nobody wants.
All the others are secondary manifestations or rationalizations of this brutal reality.
Why does this happen?
I attribute the entrepreneur’s singular passion for their solution as the top contributor to this failure. This is the Innovator’s Bias that causes us to fall in love with our solution and makes “bringing our baby to life at any cost” our sole mission.
But a build-first approach is backwards. It’s backwards because you can’t brute-force a solution without a pre-existing problem.
How Do You Avoid Innovator's Bias?
It requires internalizing some counter-intuitive mind shifts which are covered in the foundation section of the roadmap.
Here’s a sampling of what you’ll learn:
- How to avoid the Innovator’s bias where we prematurely fall in love with our solutions versus the customer problem.
- How to achieve 10X growth by deliberately slowing down at the beginning to go even faster later.
- How to test your ideas quickly through small, fast experiments without drowning in a sea of data.
The other 2 sections walk you through the process of deconstructing your idea into it’s component pieces, identifying your riskiest assumptions, and systematically validating and growing your idea from ideation to scale.
Here’s a sampling of what you’ll learn:
- How to find early customers with a product or minimum viable product (MVP).
- How to pitch your idea using a compelling story.
- How to test whether your idea is worth pursing using a quick 5 minute back-of-the-envelope calculation.
- How to measure your idea using one metric.
- How to get early customers to want to pay you.
- How to build an automated continuous feedback loop with customers.
- How to systematically uncover your engine of growth and double down on it.
"A clear roadmap for entrepreneurs."
David Skok, General Partner at Matrix Partners
How is the Innovator Roadmap Delivered?
The Innovator Roadmap is delivered as a series of bite-sized video lessons right within the LEANSTACK online platform. Lessons are interspersed with exercises that help you apply a key concept as you learn it. Instead of overwhelming you with a ton of theory, you learn a key concept, then apply it to your idea, to unlock the next lesson.
Where Did the Innovator Roadmap Come From and Who's Using It?
The Innovator Roadmap was created by Ash Maurya, author of 2 best-selling books and the creator of the Lean Canvas. It synthesizes learning across hundreds of workshops, thousands of products, and his cult-classic books: Running Lean and Scaling Lean.
Unlike a book which is hard to change once published, the Innovator Roadmap is continually updated with new content and case-studies.
The Innovator Roadmap has already been deployed across hundreds of startups, enterprises, accelerators, and universities. While each of these segments may seem quite different, the common job across all them is that of “launching a new product or vision under conditions of extreme uncertainty”.
It doesn’t matter whether you are taking an entrepreneurship class in school, launching a new startup, or an innovation project at your company.
It’s the same job… and the Innovator Roadmap helps you get the job done.
