Welcome

Entrepreneurship is, before it is a way of making a living, a way of looking: seeing a problem and asking who would pay to solve it. This course gives you the method to go from that question to a business model with the numbers worked out.

What you will find

• Topic 0. Entrepreneurship as a way of life. What entrepreneurship means beyond setting up a company, how the course is organised, and which three myths about the entrepreneur are worth leaving behind before you start.
• Topic 1. Business organisation: how companies are structured. How a company is structured internally: what management does, which departments support it and which face the customer, who is accountable for each one and which indicator measures its work.
• Topic 2. The customer: the starting point. The customer as the starting point of any business: how to understand their needs, how to segment the market and choose a niche where you can build strength, and how to describe the person who uses, decides and pays.
• Topic 3. The value proposition: what can we do for the customer?. What you can do for the customer: how to formulate a value proposition that explains why to choose you, check its fit and its viability with the SWOT and TOWS matrices, and identify the activities and resources needed to deliver it.
• Topic 4. The value chain: how is our product acquired?. How to break a company down into the activities that generate value, using Porter's value chain, to know which to protect and which to simplify; and how the product reaches the customer: partners, channels and relationship, using the case of a neighbourhood bakery.
• Topic 5. Revenue streams and cost structure: how do we make money?. How much market there is, how you charge, how much it costs to serve the customer, and from what volume the business sustains itself. And the lesson that has closed more profitable companies than any other: profit is not cash.
• Topic 6. Financing and legal aspects: the back room of a business. Where the money to get started comes from, with debt or with partners, and what each asks for in return. And the legal back room: legal form, taxes, the boundary between tax avoidance and tax evasion, and patents and trademarks.
• Topic 7. Strategy: scaling the value proposition. How you decide where the company is heading and how it competes: vision, mission, objectives and goals; the diagnosis with SWOT, TOWS and Porter's five forces; and what it takes to grow without running out of cash.
• Topic 8. MARCOM: winning customers. How to build a brand that the customer chooses and how much it costs to win each customer: marketing according to Kotler, positioning, price, name and communication, and the acquisition funnel with its two basic metrics.
• Topic 9. The business model. Osterwalder and Pigneur's Business Model Canvas brings together on a single sheet everything worked on in the course. You build yours from start to finish and test it against customers and numbers.

How you will work

Each lesson opens with a short introduction and, below it, several pills: short pieces that explain a single idea and end with a case or something to do. Read them in order the first time; afterwards you can go back to the one you need.

Where you see an interactive practice, do it before reading on: it is there for you to decide, calculate or classify, and the explanation comes afterwards. It does not save what you write, so copy whatever you want to keep.

Each topic ends with an exam of six questions. Every answer comes with a comment, including the wrong ones: failing and reading why is part of the method.

At The Singular Academy you learn by solving real cases. If at the end of a lesson you do not know what you would do differently tomorrow, go back over it.