From Idea to Business. Create a Lucrative Firm From Scratch

The key to the success of your future business is having a reliable, well-thought-out plan. We’ll tell you how to formulate a business idea and prepare everything necessary for its further implementation. You’ll determine the direction of development of the project, specify the goals and define your priorities. As a homework assignment, you’ll fill out a checklist for your business, regardless of whether it is a working project or just in the embryonic stages of just an idea. Moreover, in the ‘additional materials’ section, you’ll find several methods for choosing a business idea, as well as a list of cognitive traps that prevent us from making the right decisions.

Before starting a business, you must evaluate its prospects and conduct a preliminary analysis of the market and potential competitors. In this lesson you’ll learn how to conduct a competitive analysis, evaluate your project and choose a suitable niche for its implementation. Furthermore, we’ll tell you about different types of business ideas. In the ‘additional materials’ you’ll find instructions for the effective analysis of competitors. Lastly, after completing your homework, you’ll have a complete evaluation of your target audience’s goals.

Let's start the first steps of implementing the idea - we’ll tell you what specific actions it’s important to start with to make your business successful. You’ll learn how to identify your target audience, independently evaluate your business idea, and finally profitably present it to the market.

Having completed your homework, you’ll have figured out whether your product meets the needs your potential audience, what’s good and what is bad, how much it’s worth, and what problems it solves. You’ll also need to outline you pitch in front of potential experts. All of this will help to take a critical look at the product, and ultimately achieve a better result.

All businesses carry an element risk. We’ll talk about the risks that beginners are most likely to face. You’ll learn what types of risks exist and how to avoid them. Moreover, we’ll tell you how to significantly reduce the risks when you encounter them. In the ‘additional materials’ for this lesson, you’ll find a checklist of common mistakes startups make, as well as a memo covering some simple ways to tackle stress.

Personal effectiveness is a valuable resource that helps you move quickly towards your goal. Today, we’ll do some exercises for its development. You will come to identify which skills you need to develop within yourself. Knowing your strengths and ironing out any weaknesses will help you work much more efficiently. In the ‘additional materials’ section, you’ll see the symptoms and stages of emotional burnout, a list for soft-skills assessment methodology, as well as 40 tips for improving your personal effectiveness. For your homework assignment, you’ll create a structured development plan for yourself and your company.

You already have a clear idea of your future business, and are emotionally ready to take on the challenge. Now, it's time to start drawing up a business plan. We’ll consider its main points, give you some valuable advice, and under our guidance you’ll make your first attempt at writing this important document yourself. For homework we suggest that you create your financial and business plans. You’ll find everything you need for this in our ‘additional materials,’ where we’ll provide you with instructions for conducting a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat) analysis, a scheme for a CANVAS model, and also a guide for calculating the unit economics of the project.

The success of a business is largely determined by its financial investments. Today you’ll learn how to find the source of financing for your business. Together we’ll calculate the necessary amount needed to launch the project and talk about how to attract an investor to the project who is ready to cover these costs. Supplementary to this lesson, you’ll find instructions on crowdfunding (raising money for a project) and a memo on MVP (A minimum viable product). Your homework will be to identify your sources of financing, plan your expenses, and enter this data into a table.

We move on to the key moment:starting your business. We’ll talk about the three existing launch strategies, discuss each of them in detail, and you’ll choose the one most suitable for your project. Step by step, we’ll incrementally prepare your business to be ready for launch: where we’ll go from choosing the right name to successfully running your own website. The homework will be to produce a one-page website using one of the design websites. By making use of our ‘additional materials,’ this process should be fairly straightforward because we’ve already prepared a ready made checklist you can use to create your own website, instructions for choosing the right name of it, the landing design, and its SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) promotion.

In this final lesson, we’ll show you what indicators you need to pay attention to at the very beginning of the development of the project. You’ll learn how to act when your business is already up and running, and how to build the right strategy for working with clients. By taking control of the many important indicators, you’ll reduce costs and improve the product. Remember – launching your business isn’t the end goal, in fact it is just the very beginning! Therefore, after this lesson, you’ll be able to create your own roadmap for the further development of your project. Our ‘additional materials’ will help you with this, where we’ll provide you with all the instructions you’ll need on the planning changes, a checklist for business analysis of the project, and 40 trusted marketing tools. We’ll also give you a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) checklist.