Welcome to the Entrepreneurship Crash Course, where innovation meets action and dreams transform into reality! In this dynamic journey, we will explore the exciting world of entrepreneurship, equipping you with the essential tools to navigate the challenges and seize the opportunities that come with building your own business.
Entrepreneurship is more than a career path; it’s a mindset—a relentless pursuit of creating value, solving problems, and forging your own path. Throughout this crash course, we will delve into the core principles that drive successful entrepreneurs, from identifying market needs to developing a sustainable business model.
Get ready to embark on a transformative experience where you will not only gain insights into the entrepreneurial mindset but also learn practical strategies for turning ideas into thriving ventures. Whether you’re a seasoned business professional or a budding entrepreneur, this course is designed to empower you with the knowledge and skills needed to navigate the dynamic landscape of entrepreneurship.
So, buckle up and prepare to unleash your creativity, resilience, and business acumen as we dive into the fundamentals of entrepreneurship. Let the journey begin!
Here is a high level overview of the course:
- Lesson 1 [Mindset]: Learn how to think like a Business Owner
- Lesson 2 [Inspiration]: Get inspired by the possibilities of online entrepreneurship
- Lesson 3 [Bootstrapping]: Get started as an online entrepreneur
- Lesson 4 [Success Stories]: Find out how successful startups made it
- Lesson 5 [Product]: How to validate an idea and build your product
- Lesson 6 [Productivity]: Optimize your workflow and boost your productivity
- Lesson 7 [Marketing]: Learn how to get the word out for your product or company
- Lesson 8 [Social Media]: Leverage social media platforms to grow your business
- Lesson 9 [Growth Hacking]: Turbo-boost your business’s growth with clever hacks
- Lesson 10 [Accounting]: Financial information that every entrepreneur should know
- Lesson 11 [Web Properties]: Make money online by building web properties
- Lesson 12 [Blog Hosting]: How to Start a Blog with WordPress (Step by Step Guide for Blog Hosting)
- Lesson 13 [Wrap Up]: Putting all the puzzle pieces together
Please remember, this is not going to be a “be-all and end-all” entrepreneurship guide, but it will be enough to give you a “nudge” towards the correct direction. Some of the material we are going to provide will need quite a time to properly digest. For this reason, make sure to bookmark this post for future reference.
Lesson 1 – Mindset
Getting started with the Entrepreneurship Crash Course, we are going to discuss the proper Mindset to have. Adjusting your mindset for success is one of the most important steps to take. We have compiled a list of great articles which will give you a close look at how successful entrepreneurs think.
Let’s get started!
The reason we like best for becoming an entrepreneur is that you are extremely passionate about an idea and believe that starting a new company is the best way to bring it into the world. The passion is important because entrepreneurship is hard and you’ll need it to endure the struggle, as well as to convince other people to help you.
Believing that starting a new company is the best way to bring it into the world is important to ensure that resources, including most importantly your own time, are being put to the best possible use. If the idea is best brought into the world by an existing team, then it is tautologically optimal for the world for it to happen that way. Of course, not everyone is actually trying to optimize their impact, but many entrepreneurs are, by their own admission, and it is important for those people to consider this angle.
Money of course isn’t everything. Not by a long shot. Where your definition of success is concerned, money may rank far down the list. Everyone’s definition of success is different. Here’s mine:
“Success is making those that believed in you look brilliant.”
For me, money doesn’t matter all that much, but I’ll confess, it did at one time (probably because I didn’t have very much). So, let’s say money is on your list. And let’s say, like millions of other people, that you’d like to be a millionaire. What kinds of things should you do to increase your chances of joining the millionaire’s club?
Most people don’t think in terms of EV, and it’s costing them a lot of money.
If you’re not familiar with EV, you’re probably asking, “okay, what is EV, and how can I use it to make more money?”. Even people who are familiar with EV have sent me emails asking how they can apply it to business to make more profitable decisions.
The goal of this post is to help you think about how to use EV to easily make the correct decision. Situations that used to seem difficult to make should become much clearer. Deals that you never would have looked at in the past because they seemed “risky”, may have been great opportunities that you won’t miss again in the future. All of this leads to a much more profitable future for you. If you can correctly understand EV, and apply it to all of your financial decisions, you will make substantially more money.
What’s the alternative to getting a job? The alternative is to remain happily jobless for life and to generate income through other means. Realize that you earn income by providing value, not time, so find a way to provide your best value to others, and charge a fair price for it. One of the simplest and most accessible ways is to start your own business.
Whatever work you’d otherwise do via employment, find a way to provide that same value directly to those who will benefit most from it. It takes a bit more time to get going, but your freedom is easily worth the initial investment of time and energy. Then you can buy your own Scooby Snacks for a change.
I started with $2,000, lost money in the first two months, became profitable in the third month and just kept reinvesting profits into the company.
But the upside is total 100% ownership and a company that is built around my lifestyle, which means that it never ever feels like “work”.
This is important to me. I’m a lifestyle entrepreneur. Mindvalley was built around my passions, meditation, personal growth, play, culture, travel and epic interior design (our offices are magical). Having total ownership means I’m not pressured by partners, boards or investors to deliver something that I’m not passionate about.
7 Lessons from Building a $15-Million-a-Year Lifestyle Business with No Loans, VCs or Angel Money
Lesson 2 – Inspiration
In the second lesson of our Entrepreneurship Crash Course, we are going to share some stories of “hot” ventures and the story behind them.
With these, you will get introduced to various business models and ways to monetize a web property (like a blog).
Most importantly, we want you to get inspired and pumped up by the potential and success that an online venture can achieve.
Let’s kick it!
For some reason, people love to make excuses about why they haven’t created their dream business or even gotten started. This is the “wantrepreneur” epidemic, where people prevent themselves from ever actually doing the side-project they always talk about over beers. The truth of the matter is that you don’t have to spend a lot of time building the foundation for a successful business. In most cases, it shouldn’t take you more than a couple days.
We made the original product for Gambit in a weekend. “WTF?!” Yes, a weekend. In just 48 hours, some friends and I created a simple product that grew to a $1,000,000+ business within a year.
How to Create a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend (Examples: AppSumo, Mint, Chihuahuas)
I’ve grown to love the concept of a family business over the past few years. Operationally speaking, they’re the same as any other business. But philosophically, they’ve made decisions about how to run the business such that it benefits & reflects the values of the family running it. I like these businesses because they tend to treat their customers much better than traditional growth-focused businesses.
We don’t really have a concept of family owned software businesses yet, but I do think we can try to emulate the best parts of them. What would that look like?
My specialty is modeling success. I analyze what works and ask: what recipe can I find that others can use?
In this post, we’ll dissect five successful online businesses. Some of them (e.g. GoldieBlox) are now grossing $300,000+ per month… and it’s the founder’s first company! One (Fresh-Tops) has gone from 1 to 20 employees in six months. Some of the other stats are even more impressive.
The highest monthly sales by a contestant in the FIRST two months of starting, excluding any pre-existing businesses, was $196,811. How would that change your life?
Case Studies: How to Build Online Businesses That Gross $250,000+ Per Month
It’s so easy to think that all of the best ideas have already been thought of, but then each year something else comes along that makes you go “why did’t I think of that?” Whether it’s Pinterest, Snapchat or even Flappy Bird, it’s amazing that new ways to communicate and play are still being “invented”. One such example that I want to share with you today is simply about giving crack to Facebook users and becoming rich because of it.
Not actual crack, of course, but crack in the form of content that they just have to share with their friends on the world’s most popular social network. What’s more amazing is that your website can look terrible, you don’t have to get any of your own images or write any of your own content, and you can be up and running with traffic in the next 12 hours. Don’t believe me? I have more than one example. Let’s go…
Though Slack officially launched just over a year ago, the app has seen truly remarkable growth in that time. At launch, in February of 2014, Slack had around 15,000 daily users. By August of 2014, Slack’s daily active users had grown to 171,000, and that number had swelled to 285,000 by November.
By February of 2015, the app boasted over 500,000 daily active users, with “tens of thousands” of new users added week over week, representing a thirty-threefold growth in just a year. Not only that, but Slack users are collectively sending 300 million messages every month, and users are actively engaged with the app for more than two hours every day.
How Slack Became the Fastest Growing B2B SaaS Business (Maybe) Ever
Lesson 3 – Bootstrapping
In the third lesson of our Entrepreneurship Crash Course, we are going to actively delve into the world of entrepreneurship.
We will see what is like to start a business, grow it and monetize it. Are you pumped already?
Let’s do it!
No joke. This is going be a bullet FAQ on starting a business. If you’re a lawyer, feel free to disagree with me so you can charge someone your BS fees to give the same advice.
If you can think of anything to add, please do so. I might be missing things. If you want to argue with me, feel free. I might be wrong on any of the items below.
There are many types of business. Depending on your business, some of these won’t apply. All of these questions come from questions I’ve been asked.
The rules are: I’m going to give no explanations. Just listen to me.
The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Starting And Running A Business
A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of “exit.” The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.
If you want to start one it’s important to understand that. Startups are so hard that you can’t be pointed off to the side and hope to succeed. You have to know that growth is what you’re after. The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place. Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face.
Does it take money to start a business?
Well, it can, but usually it does not. I don’t mean usually like 51% of the time, it’s closer to 99% of the time. And if your first thought is, “I’m probably the 1% that does need money to start”… you’re not.
There’s an extreme misunderstanding with beginning entrepreneurs that they need capital to start a business. As you’ll learn from this post, you do not need money to start a business.
In some sense, you already have capital in the form of sweat equity, you’re just lighting it on fire by not using it. Instead of using the capital you do have, you’re waiting for paper money to come rescue you from inaction. The only action you’ll take once receiving is to light that capital on fire as well, because the lack of knowledge in execution will have you putting it towards the wrong things.
Writing a business plan may sound difficult and dull — and by “may” we mean “definitely” — but it doesn’t have to be. Yes, we know you’re eager to dive right in on that world-changing business idea, but having your strategy on paper is critical.
In many ways, your business plan can act as a map in an entrepreneurial landscape full of potholes, dead-ends and uphill paths. With a business plan, potential investors can clearly see what they’ll be getting into, and you’ll be better prepared to explain exactly why they should be a part of your vision.
This following is THE most comprehensive guide on how to Start a Startup. It includes a lot of material so make sure to take your time with it. Here is the description from the site:
CS183B is a class we’re teaching at Stanford. It’s designed to be a sort of one-class business course for people who want to start startups.
Videos of the lectures, associated reading materials, and assignments will all be available here. There will be 20 videos, some with a speaker or two and some with a small panel. It’ll be 1,000 minutes of content if you watch it all.
We’ll cover how to come up with ideas and evaluate them, how to get users and grow, how to do sales and marketing, how to hire, how to raise money, company culture, operations and management, business strategy, and more.
Y Combinator’s How to Start a Startup (Stanford CS183B class)
5 resources to guide you on how to launch your own startup. As we mentioned, the last course is huge, so you studying it will take some time, be patient.
Lesson 4 – Success Stories
In the fourth lesson of our Entrepreneurship Crash Course, we are going to study the best of breed of entrepreneurs. We will take a close look at how successful companies made it to the top of their industries.
For this reason, we have collected some e-books that you can download. Grab them now and you can read them later on at your own pace.
Let’s have a look!
 | Hacker Monthly – Startup Stories This special issue features 9 true stories of struggles and triumphs of running startups. Handpicked from Hacker News top submissions and written by the founders themselves, this edition is one you won’t want to miss. Hacker Monthly is a print magazine version of Hacker News, a social news website popular among programmers and startup founders. |
 | Hangry: A Startup Journey Hungry and tired one night, Mike wanted a pizza, but getting a pizza delivered was a pain in the neck. He didn’t want to call a million restaurants to see what was open. So, as an avid coder, he created GrubHub in his spare bedroom to figure out who delivered to his apartment. Then, armed with a $140 check from his first customer and ignoring his crushing college debt, he quit his job. Over the next decade, Mike grew his little delivery guide into the world’s premier online ordering website. |
 | Display of Power: How FUBU Changed Fashion In this book, Daymond John gets to the heart of his unlikely run to the top of the fashion world, and shines compelling light on what it takes to succeed-from the dizzying street corners of his old neighborhood to the dazzling corner offices of corporate America-and what it takes to harness and display the power that resides in us all. |
 | Against the Odds: Startups that Make It Become an Entrepreneurial Leader who combines the opposing natures of the entrepreneur and the leader. Why have so many entrepreneurs found innovative enterprises, only to find themselves failing as leaders once the business gets off the ground? Because, according to Derek Lidow, being an entrepreneur is fundamentally different from being a business leader. |
Lesson 5 – Product
In the fifth lesson of Entrepreneurship Crash Course we are going to examine how to properly validate a business idea and then create a product based on it.
It is crucial to validate a concept before you go on and build a product, because if the market is not interested in it, you will have lost both time and money.
Read the following articles on how to test the waters and, after finding a viable concept, how to build and launch your product.
The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they’re something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.
Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.
Ryan Hoover did what almost every startup founder could benefit from doing: he built an audience and an initial market for his product before designing a single screen or writing a line of code. Let’s dive into what makes this approach so smart.
With Product Hunt v1, Ryan had built a new, engaging way for people to discover and discuss interesting new products. Since both investors and product people are inherently interested in such matters, the initial community he’d built BEFORE writing code naturally gravitated to his new app.
What Nearly Every Startup Can Learn From Product Hunt’s Brilliant Go-To-Market Strategy
This is a 3-parts series, make sure you check out all posts.
Which guy would you rather be? Jim, who spends a year creating a membership website for a certain niche that he believes would love his product; Or Jeff, who spends a month testing his niche market, only to find out his idea for a product would have totally bombed.
I choose Jeff. Why? Because when doing any kind of business, there’s a HUGE difference between what you believe, and what you know. And here’s the ugly truth: what you believe means nothing. Your gut feeling can only take you so far. Jim’s beliefs may or may not turn out to be profitable for him. Jeff knows his idea is not going to work, so he’ll move on to the next until he finds one that does.
So how do you know for sure if your idea will be successful or not, before you begin investing a significant amount of time creating your product?
How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 1
This is a presentation, you can download it for offline reading too.
1. Can’t grow without product/market fit
2. Products should grow themselves
3. Measure growth the right way
4. Free is a growth strategy
5. Growth takes time
Finally, the best course we have found on validating an idea, achieving product-market fit and launching a business on it, is Steve Blank’s free Course on Udacity.
This is a lengthy course, so make sure to take your time, do the recommended exercises and let the information sink in.
In an introduction to the basics of the famous Customer Development Process, Steve Blank provides insight into the key steps needed to build a successful startup.
The main idea in this course is learning how to rapidly develop and test ideas by gathering massive amounts of customer and marketplace feedback. Many startups fail by not validating their ideas early on with real-life customers. In order to mitigate that, students will learn how to get out of the building and search for the real pain points and unmet needs of customers. Only with these can the entrepreneur find a proper solution and establish a suitable business model.
Building a startup is not simply building an execution plan for a business model that the entrepreneur thinks will work, but rather, a search for the actual business model itself.
You have a lot of material to digest, so be patient.
Lesson 6 – Productivity
The sixth lesson of the Entrepreneurship Crash Course will be slightly different. Here, we will focus on productivity and creating an optimized workflow where you can get things done.
As an entrepreneur, you will need to allocate enormous amounts of time and effort. As a consequence, being productive and effective is of top priority.
For this reason, we have collected some articles to study and some free e-books that you can download. Grab them now and you can read them later on at your own pace.
Let’s see what we have!
After attending a few seminars on the topic of productivity and time management and reading a couple of books on the subject, I was introduced to some profound concepts and made some great realizations about the way I used to work. With this new knowledge, I completely redesigned my workflow framework something that lead in a tremendous boost of my productivity.
I would like to share with you the most important tips that will help you boost your productivity, increase your overall output and, perhaps most importantly, free you time to spend in other activities.
Note that the following tips can be applied to both personal and professional aspects, the principles are essentially the same.
The way we are working isn’t working anymore, and hasn’t been for some time. Checking email in bed the moment we awake, chugging too much coffee, hour-long commutes twice each day… they all take a toll on the quality of our work and our lives.
Not to mention that when we get to the office, many of us are often marginalized and overworked. Our efforts and ideas are ignored during 50 or 60+ stressful hours each week. Some of us are treated more like numbers than people, as companies choose stack ranking systems over weekly conversations and gathering employee feedback. But all is not lost, the movement toward people-centered leadership is well under way.
4 Scientifically Proven Methods To Increase Your Productivity
Life is busy. It can feel impossible to move toward your dreams. If you have a full-time job and kids, it’s even harder.
How do you move forward?
If you don’t purposefully carve time out every day to progress and improve without question, your time will get lost in the vacuum of our increasingly crowded lives. Before you know it, you’ll be old and withered wondering where all that time went.
As Professor Harold Hill has said “You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.”
Every 7 years our body will change completely. This means that each and everyone of your cells will have been renewed and exchanged for another one that your body has produced. I was always amazed by this. And science suggests that this gives us a unique chance to change and erase any mistakes we’ve made in the past. How? Through a focus on the food we eat.
Fortunately we don’t have to wait 7 years. Day-to-day changes to our diet can have a massive impact on our productivity. Something like this:
“Adequate nutrition can raise your productivity levels by 20 percent on average.” ~ WHO
On top of these, here are also a few books with some neat tricks!
 | Productivity Tools There are personal productivity tools available for planning, scheduling, task prioritizing, monitoring, and much more. Some of these tools are technology-based whilst others need nothing more than a pencil and paper. From this eBook, you will learn: How to perform ABC Analysis and Pareto Analysis to prioritize tasks, The advantages of a closed to do list and when to use one, How to integrate productivity-boosting software tools into your work practices, Why you should consider monitoring software to control productivity killers. |
 | Overcome Procrastination Almost everyone is guilty of procrastination occasionally. High priority tasks are usually difficult or time consuming and it is often easier to find straightforward, less important tasks to do instead. In this book you will learn: The psychological basis of procrastination and why it is so difficult to overcome, Why quick fix solutions to this problem never work, To identify the seven triggers that cause people to put off important tasks, To isolate the origin of procrastination on a case-by-case basis, Practical and useable tactics to beat this productivity killer. |
 | Managing Interruptions Interruptions are a major productivity killer & it can be very difficult to protect yourself from them whilst maintaining a good working relationship with your colleagues and partners, for example customers and suppliers. You will learn: How to develop a strategy for dealing with incoming calls including cold calls, How to “close out” phone calls politely once they have achieved their purpose, The importance of body language in dissuading people from interrupting you, Why constant email checking is a problem & how to tackle it, The importance of dealing with your outbound calls & emails methodically. |
 | Successful Delegation One of the fundamental problems that people have when making the step up to management is the inability to delegate effectively. This free eBook provides a practical guide to boosting your own and your team’s productivity through successful delegation. You will learn: Why delegation is one of the most important management skills you can master, How to decide whether or not a task is suitable for delegation, The ten rules of successful delegation that will motivate and empower your team, How to accurately monitor delegated tasks and avoid the over-reporting trap. |
Awesome! After studying this material and following the recommended practices, you will see your productivity soar and you will be able to achieve more in less time. Download these now and you can read them going forward.
Lesson 7 – Marketing
In the seventh lesson of Entrepreneurship Crash Course we are going to focus on marketing your product, acquiring users and generating sales.
In this crowded world, you will need to have a solid strategy in order to spread the word about your product or service.
Let’s dive into it!
One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don’t scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available, and if you’ve made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist.
Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.
It’s the same system Starbucks and McDonald’s have used to corner the coffee and hamburger markets. It’s the same system Amazon uses to dominate ecommerce. It’s how Best Buy, Beach Body (selling workouts like P90X) and Sports Illustrated have become household names.
This system works for small and enterprise level businesses. It works for mom-and-pop shops and billion dollar retailers. It works whether you sell traditional products, digital products or services.
This system works because it exploits each and every aspect of the irrefutable law of business growth put forth by legendary marketer Jay Abraham…
Customer Value Optimization: How to Build an Unstoppable Business
The idea for our campaign was built around our belief that the most powerful and effective way to be introduced to our new company was through a credible referral. Thus, we focused on building a campaign that helped people to spread the word to their friends.
Ahead of our launch, Andy and I spent a couple of months meeting friends, entrepreneurs and virtually anyone else who would listen to us talk about Harry’s. Whether or not they were interested in razors, we tried to interest them in our story. That list of people was probably a couple hundred long by our launch, and we created the campaign to help that group of people publicly share in the excitement of our launch.
Online marketing moves at the speed of light. To keep up, you need a strong foundation with the judgment to think critically, act independently, and be relentlessly creative. That’s why we wrote this guide, to empower you with the mental building blocks to stay ahead in an aggressive industry.
There are plenty of guides to marketing. From textbooks to online video tutorials, you can really take your pick. But, we felt that there was something missing, a guide that really starts at the beginning to equip already-intelligent professionals with a healthy balance of strategic and tactical advice. The Beginner’s Guide to Online Marketing closes that gap.
Those are some great articles and tutorials on how to market your business and ultimately generate revenue.
Lesson 8 – Social Media
In the eighth lesson of Entrepreneurship Crash Course you are going to study how to leverage social media in order to promote your business, connect with customers and generate more sales.
The huge social media platforms (like Facebook, Twitter etc.) provide an enormous opportunity for entrepreneurs to grow their businesses.
Let’s see how to grab that opportunity!
So how do new social media accounts do it? How do you gain your first 1,000 followers on social media or grow an account from dozens to hundreds?
Follower count is one of those metrics that has tons of meaning, both for the confidence of the social media manager and for the distribution of the content you share. If you want to grow your followers, there are tons of useful tips to try. Here are some key learnings I’ve drummed up about how to get that first initial batch of followers on each of the six major social media networks (specifically Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Google Plus, and LinkedIn.
How to Get 1000 Followers (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc.)
But you need a strategy that works, which is exactly what I’m going to give you in this article.
You’ll learn: The one reason why most blogs fail to generate significant traffic from social media. The social media networks that are best for your business. How to understand and engage your audience on social media. How often you need to post and how to do it with minimal effort. How to drive more traffic than you’ve ever have before.
The topic of social media is huge. For this reason we have also collected some free e-books that you can download. Grab them now and you can read them later on at your own pace.
Let’s have a look!
 | Top 10 Trends in Email, Mobile & Social Marketing Discover the top trends, challenges and opportunities facing digital marketers over the next 12 months. This white paper discusses developments in technology, such as social media, mobile usage and cloud services and offers practical advice on how to take advantage of these upcoming trends and ensure marketers are at the forefront of multi-channel strategic marketing planning. |
 | A Blueprint To Help Companies Fully Capitalize On Social Media Investments You’ll learn how to expand brand awareness and brand-building activities on social media, strategies for diving deeper into social media’s capabilities in both research and direct customer engagement and how to use data and analytics to both understand customers and measure social media impact and performance gaps. |
 | Getting Started with Social Media Marketing For Dummies When it’s done right, social media marketing can increase brand awareness, cultivate a network of influencers and loyal customers, and impact online reviews. Thus, modern marketers need to be especially aware of this channel and its potential effect not only on product sales, but on attracting and retaining customers too. |
 | Successful Social Selling In the following pages you will learn best practices, insights and specific strategies for your business to find prospects, build a bigger sales pipeline, close more business and accelerate both word-of-mouth and referrals for your business using social media and content marketing. The social media world is evolving quickly, but many of these best practices are universal and will help you take advantage of new networks and opportunities that evolve in the coming months and years. |
Lesson 9 – Growth Hacking
In the ninth lesson of Entrepreneurship Crash Course we are going to study a special kind of growing your business’s user base named “growth hacking”. This is a concept geared towards igniting growth for your product and was utilized by many famous companies.
Let’s see how you can do the same!
These days, it seems like some tech companies go from zero to a million users overnight. The growth of these firms (Airbnb and Uber might service as recent examples) can seem magical… but it’s not. What’s the so-called magic sauce for these companies?
To attain this kind of rapid growth, it’s imperative to look outside of typical, run-of-the-mill marketing strategies like paid advertising and to start thinking creatively about how to engage users and spread the word about your site. Below are some examples of growth hacks that have helped some of the country’s largest tech giants get where they are today.
9 Iconic Growth Hacks Tech Companies Used to Boost User Base
Growth Hacking is just a good way to describe how marketing is done at a startup. It’s not a magical new technique, it’s just a term to describe tactics that many startup marketers have been using for years.
In this deck you will find 21 different areas of startup marketing where you can employ growth hacking tactics. Little tricks of automation or hackery that help you squeeze more out of your customer / user acquisition strategy. It’s an extension of a previous deck I created, with a bunch of new content and has been well received at startup events I’ve presented it at.
We all know about the Paypal, Hotmail, and Airbnb growth hacks. Here are 28 new growth hack examples to help you market your web and mobile apps.
“Growth Hack” is a buzzword that describes the clever methods web and mobile app marketers use to grow quickly. The problem is, if you look for growth hacking examples, the same ‘ole Paypal, Hotmail, and Airbnb examples always come up.
I figured it’s time for some new examples. So I looked around and put together a list of 28 web and mobile app growth hack examples you’ve probably never seen.
So what is the role of a growth hacker?
Different from marketers, who traditionally are less technical, growth hackers have one objective, to grow the company. This is done through a variety of tactics called (for lack of a better word) “hacks”. These hacks generally are inexpensive (commonly free), and they are aimed at increasing the viral coefficient.
In this post, we’ll give a thorough overview of growth hacking, hiring growth hackers, resources on growth hacks, and additional helpful resources.
Learn Growth Hacking: 35 Resources to Help You Become a Growth Hacker
Those are some actionable articles on how to “hack” growth for your business.
Lesson 10 – Accounting
In the tenth lesson of Entrepreneurship Crash Course we are going to get our hands dirty with accounting. This might sound boring and tedious, but it is really crucial to be aware of the key financial metrics of your business as an entrepreneur.
Here are some resources to introduce you to Accounting.
If you can read a nutrition label or a baseball box score, you can learn to read basic financial statements. If you can follow a recipe or apply for a loan, you can learn basic accounting. The basics aren’t difficult and they aren’t rocket science.
This brochure is designed to help you gain a basic understanding of how to read financial statements. This brochure will explain how to read the basic parts of a financial statement. It will not train you to be an accountant, but it should give you the confidence to be able to look at a set of financial statements and make sense of them.
Most small-business owners don’t have financial or accounting backgrounds, yet they rely on a few critical numbers to help their companies survive and thrive. They’d rather make a terrific product or provide outstanding customer service than have to review their financial statements or analyze their company’s financial reports.
But while your company may still be too small for you to hire a full-time CFO to manage the financial aspects, knowing your numbers is a necessary evil that comes with owning your own business.
There’s an old adage about business that “cash is king” and, if that’s so, then cash flow is the blood that keeps the heart of the kingdom pumping. Cash flow is one of the most critical components of success for a small or mid-sized business. Without cash, profits are meaningless.
Many a profitable business on paper has ended up in bankruptcy because the amount of cash coming in doesn’t compare with the amount of cash going out. Firms that don’t exercise good cash management may not be able to make the investments needed to compete, or they may have to pay more to borrow money to function.
We have also selected some free e-books that you can download. Grab them now and you can read them later on at your own pace.
Let’s have a look!
 | Accounting Principles This eBook explains all of the basic accounting concepts and terminology you will need to understand the three primary financial statements that appear in every organization’s reports. You will learn: The precise meaning of the essential accounting terms, The purpose of the income statement, balance sheet & cash-flow statement, The differences between cash based and accrual based accounting, How depreciation and bad debt are allowed for. |
 | Cash Flow Analysis This skill is an integral part of making financial decisions that increase a firm’s economic value or the capabilities of a nonprofit organization. You will learn: How working capital is generated and why it needs to be actively managed, The purpose of a cash flow statement and how it complements the other key financial reports, How to analyze an indirect format cash flow statement to see the true financial status of an organization and more. |
 | 5 Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing Acc. Software Selecting the best accounting system for your organization is a critical business decision. It takes plenty of resources, including dollars and time. But with this complimentary, fact-filled information kit, this guide from Sage Software, it just became a whole lot easier. With over 25 years of experience and 4.7 million customers worldwide, we know what it takes to help businesses succeed in today’s competitive market. |
 | Sales and Use Tax Compliance for Dummies In any economic environment, your goal for your business is to increase the bottom line, and you can do that in two ways: by increasing sales or by reducing costs. One of the hidden costs of doing business is the cost of effectively and accurately charging and remitting sales tax. Learn: The difference between sales and use tax and how to comply with complex regulations, How to manage exempt sales to avoid an audit and more. |
Lesson 11 – Web Properties
In the eleventh lesson of Entrepreneurship Crash Course we are going to examine how to make money online by building web properties (websites, blogs etc.).
The world is practically living online, and you can leverage this in order to create an online business based on web properties.
Let’s see how!
Most of the advice you’re getting about blogging is DEAD WRONG.
We know because we’re operating blogs in dozens of niches and we test EVERYTHING.
One of our most successful blogs, SurvivalLife.com, has grown to one million in sales.
That’s not annual sales. We generate one million in sales every month and growing.
Here’s my disclaimer: I obviously can’t promise that you will get these results. Your results will vary due to a multitude of factors.
Mashable, ProBlogger, and KISSmetrics didn’t reach millions of people by accident. Their founders were smart, or more importantly, had smart strategies.
In researching this article, I found out that Mashable wrote one article last month that generated more links and shares than 87 of their posts from 2013 combined. I found out how KISSmetrics systematically increased their weekly traffic by 18.6%. I also learned how unconventional strategies, such as building a blog in Asian languages, opened the floodgates to millions of visits in under six months.
How Six Blogs Increased Their Traffic to Millions of Visitors
This is the story of how this blog became a Technorati Top 100 Business Blog in just 1 year. I even took a month off!
Join me on my journey and I will share everything I did with you step by step over my shoulder!
I have managed to achieve quite a lot with the blog in the last year-
- 632,452 page views
- 31,715 hours/3.6 years spent reading my posts
- Won 5 major awards
- $73,334.09 profit
How I Built A Top 100 Blog In 12 Months & How You Can Do It Too!
In the next lesson we are going to show you how to get started with your own blog.
Lesson 12 – Blog Hosting
In this lesson of Entrepreneurship Crash Course we will show you how to start your own blog with WordPress.
Blogging has surged in popularity in recent years. Companies and individuals are using blogging in order to express their voices and connect with their audience. Most of this is performed on the popular WordPress platform.
We have prepared a detailed guide on how to set up your own WordPress site. Check the article here!
If you prefer to watch the relevant video, check it here.
Lesson 13 – Wrap Up
That’s it! You have made it to the end. The final lesson of our Entrepreneurship Crash Course.
You have gone a long way so far. We have recommended tons of material and hopefully you have followed along.
Undoubtedly, you should already be inspired and ready to launch your own business empire.
Here, we have gathered 3 video courses that will help you put the final pieces together and get ready to venture on your own. Enjoy!
 | Intro to Entrepreneurship: Get started as an Entrepreneur Starting your own business is scary. Really scary. How do you know if your idea is any good? Or if your customers will ever show up? How do you know. what you’re doing AT ALL? There’s no place, degree, or university that can teach you how to become a successful Entrepreneur. |
 | The Essential Guide to Entrepreneurship by Guy Kawasaki The hardest part of starting your own business is taking the first step. This course is designed for budding entrepreneurs of all backgrounds and experience levels. If you’re even remotely interested in becoming an entrepreneur or starting your own business, you can’t afford to miss out on this best selling video course. |
 | The Circular Economy Do you know what the circular economy is? And if so, are you ready to embrace the future of business? I invite you to join me in this course and embark with me on a circular journey. You will learn what the circular economy is, where to discover circular ideas, how business models are adapted to the circular economy and how to create value. |
We hope you enjoyed our free Entrepreneurship Crash Course.
We covered a lot of topics and have recommended tons of material. This might seem a bit overwhelming, so make sure to slowly go through it in order to properly absorb it.
We believe that with all this newfound knowledge you will be able to kick-start your own business venture and generate success.
We wish you the best of luck.
Cheers!
PS: If you liked our content, subscribe to our newsletter for all the latest trends in entrepreneurship, marketing and business growth.
