Bootstrapped Giants

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Andrew Warner

Mixergy + Bootstrapped Giants

Shaan Puri

Founder of Milk Road, My First Million (500K+ subscribers)

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If you are :﻿✔️ An aspiring entrepreneur who wants to build a world class technology product✔️ An existing founder who wants to maximize their runway✔️ A startup founder who is building a tech startup but lacks technical background✔️ A startup founder who wants to explore outsourcing This is the single most valuable resource for you. In my career spanning 17+ years I have been fortunate to have played the role of a startup founder who wants to build his MVP as well as of a technology consultant who works with startup founders to help them bring their startup dream to fruition. I have used this unique mix of experience from both sides of the table to assist multiple startups successfully traverse their 0 to 10 startup journey. I have now distilled all of this experience in to a concise and actionable learnings in the form of this course. This course is specifically built keeping in mind the needs of a new startup founder who if bogged down with huge amount of content telling them the theory of building their startup and MVP but does not provide them the tools and actionable items which they can start using immediately. Once you have completed this course you would have learned how to : 🏆 Clearly define a truly lean and minimal MVP.🏆 Get feedback from your ideal customer profile without needing to write a single like of code.🏆 Take key technical decisions about your product which have the potential to make-or-break your startup.🏆 A framework to identify the correct partners for you, be it hires or outsourcing agencies.🏆 Avoid common mistakes/gotchas that could end up as a huge drain of your time, money and effort.🏆 Have complete ownership over your IP while working with multiple third parties🏆 Actionable checklists, frameworks, templates and references to jumpstart your startup journey. I want you to immediately get to work towards building your startup MVP as soon as you finish this course. That is the guiding principal of how this course has been designed.

Jumpstart your startup journey by building your MVP the right way. 

Provide a brief description for each module as a way to sell the value of what students will be learning throughout the course.

First Module

Second Module

Third Module

Course syllabus

The course will be conducted over a span of 2 days with 4 hours sessions on both the days.

Thursday and Friday

The next cohort goes live on Oct 3rd 2024 and will start at 8:AM EST

Oct 3, 2024

We will practice all that we learn, as we learn, in the form of a do-along case study. In this we take existing popular, complex startup product and go through the complete journey of building the MVP together.

Do-Along Case Study

Course schedule

Aspiring entrepreneurs who want to build a technology product by do not know where to start.

Existing startup founders, bootstrapped or funded, who want to maximize their runway.

Non technical founders who want to build, manage and scale a successful technology product.

Dreamers who are planning to build their startup soon.

Who is this course for

What you’ll get out of this course

This course is much more than explanation of concepts and dos and donts. My goal is to equip you with tools that you can start using the very same day to start building your dream startup. I will provide you with actionable checklists, frameworks, legal templates and contacts.

Get actionable checklists, frameworks, legal templates and references to supercharge their startup product building journey

What used to take weeks can now be done in days (any many times hours) using the powers of GenAI. I will tell you how you can use AI tools to significantly speed up your MVP development without breaking the bank

Use GenAI to significantly speed up all aspects of MVP development

You will not have to wait for the final MVP to be built before you can get feedback from your target customers. I will teach you how you can build prototypes quickly so that you can collect valuable feedback quicker and course correct faster. Without writing a single line of code

Learn to get feedback on your idea without spending a single dollar on development

Converting ideas in your mind to actionable specs is an art that I have perfected over the last 17 years. I will teach how you too can build specs that are extremely cost and time efficient and will be loved by your designers, developers, contractors and you.

Convert ideas to actionable specs faster without ambiguity. Specs that your developers and partners will love.

A new founders journey is full of decisions, all of which can make or break the startup. I will teach you the framework using which you will maneuver decisions like which contractors to choose and how to hire your team making sure that you do not lose valuable resources and time.

Learn to Identify the correct partners to build your startup. Make informed decision on whether to hire devs or find agency.

Working with others is hard. Its even more challenging when you are a new fonder with not enough time and funding. I will simplify and codify the process for you so that you can ensure a smooth working relationship with partners while maintaining complete indemnity and onwership

Learn to avoid the common pitfalls when working with third parties, safeguard your IP and avoid unnecessary hiccups in your startup journey

MVP is just the beginning. You want to build a product that will scale with time as you grow. Something that will make prospective investors comfortable when choosing to invest.

Build a scalable and investable business.

I will teach you how you can maximize your capital efficiency by simply tweaking some product development decisions and significantly improve your runway. This is even more crucial if you are a bootstrapped founder.

Increase your runway significantly

Leverage GenAI to fulfil your startup dream by learning to validate your idea, translate idea to MVP & find right partners for your startup

Akhil Gupta

Cohort 2

Cohort 3

Most people think that corporate partnerships are about selling and pitching, it’s really about listening, planning, and collaborating. Position your startup to work with corporates and win that first pilot, proof-of-concept, or deal.

Stop pitching and start listening

<ul><li>Knowing who is the customer is not always as easy as it seems and picking the right markets to focus on is life or death for your startup.</li></ul>

What markets do you want to reach?

<ul><li>You'll be able to identify key decision makers in your target customer and tailor your message to speak directly to them. </li><li>﻿You'll practice finding and listening for keywords that point to their biggest pain points which keep them up at night.</li></ul>

How do you map stakeholders?

<ul><li>See what it takes to get people over the hump and try before they buy. </li><li>Find ways for you to introduce new concepts and behaviors into a big company culture.</li></ul>

De-risking your solution

<ul><li>Demonstrate the case studies or proof points you need to keep growing and eventually scale!</li></ul>

Get the social proof to scale

Let's plan to test, learn, and iterate right away in your business.

Weekly projects

Course Schedule

Founders and CEOsYou want to be more strategic in your approach when identifying the best markets and industries.

Business DevelopersYou want to find the right decision makers and establish traction by partnering with big companies.

Marketers and Product ManagersYou want to make progress even if you don't have product-market fit. We'll focus on how to get going.

Key outcomes

Be more strategic when it comes to market size and sectors, find the best industries and decision makers who need their products, then understand how these prospects think.&nbsp;

Get the right strategic footing

Conduct world class customer development. Everyone's got problems in big companies. So are you good at identifying them? That's the secret to great customer development that makes your product better and creates new channels for your business.

Solve Valuable Problems for your Future Customers

How do you ask people to take a bet on you? I'll share the importance of building a pilot program. Together, we'll go create one. You will de-risk your startup's product/service for decision-makers so they will advocate for you.

De-Risk your Solution for Decision Makers

You'll need social proof to succeed. Turns that first win into a compelling case study for others to follow

Develop Results that Produce Momentum

Discover the secrets to influencing decision-makers and designing a pilot program that gets a YES. (Now in a one-day workshop).

Vijay Rajendran

20+ years of investing in and supporting entrepreneurs on their journeys

Cohort 7

Cohort 8

Creating lovable email programs is a much more complex problem to solve than regular email campaigns and flows. There are many scenarios to consider to ensure your program has real legs and is not simply a soft echo of your core product experience but adds true incremental value. The most thoughtful email programs are perceived as product features (not marketing fluff) and can&nbsp;improve retention, engagement,&nbsp;and&nbsp;monetization. Not to mention overall product sentiment. After taking this course, you will be able to make a truly informed decision on how to choose your north start 'why' and what the actual lift will likely be. Not just to get the program off the ground, but to maintain it over the long haul if it truly is successful. You will also learn what an email is capable of from a personalization and dynamic content standpoint. Grammarly Insights, for example, is mostly automated but has over 56 possible live-text scenarios over the course of 8 weeks. Not to mention various content rules based on which user persona is receiving the email. I will walk you through backend and front-end decisions. Many brands want a personalized digest similar to the one we shipped at Grammarly (nearly 10 years ago) and either underestimate the lift and/or underdevelop their MVP. I'll share frameworks for strategy, insights on development cycles, &amp; discuss potential impact. I'll also detail the front-end and back-end realities. This course will be useful—not just for CRM &amp; Retention folks—but also for x-funtional partners on the product, data &amp; technical side. Building a versatile and impactful email program is not for the faint of heart, but if you are passionate about creating something wonderful, the TLC will be worth it. The bottom line is that you must set a high bar to build world-class product experiences your customers will love. I can offer a reality check before you go down this road.

More App than Email

Class times are optimizing for accessibility for students spanning from the EU to North America. All sessions will be recorded. And recordings will be available to download in the student portal w/in 48 hours after each sessions take place.

We will meet on Tuesdays & Thursdays back to back for 2 weeks

The final 15 minutes of every class session will be for Q&amp;A. You will not hurt my feelings if you leave at the 1-hour mark and don't partake. There is also an optional dedicated Q&amp;A session on the final Friday (see below)

Q&A Opportunities

This is an opportunity to bring up any remaining topics or questions, like an office hours session.

Final (Optional) AMA Session

This course is more lecture &amp; deep case study focused than excercise focused. That said, I will provide a prompt at the end of each session for you to bring into the next class. This is to lay the foundational strategy in place for your brands potential digest.

A Note on Projects & Homework

Lifecycle, CRM, Retention, and Email Marketers. Brand-side or agency side, B2C or B2C, and any vertical who wants to build a digest.

Technical engineering, growth, or product team members who will drive or support the development of an email digest.

Data scientists or analysts who will support the pipeline and/or data schema requirements to drive your personalization.

Gut-check the level of effort to stand up a scalable personalized email program that truly adds value for your users.

Learn new ways to automate dynamic sections of emails so they are more persona-driven.

Determine your own north star 'why' for your brand's strategy as well as an overall content strategy to deliver on this promise.

Learn from Grammarly's triumps and tribulations for mantaining this program over the last 10 years.

Make an informed decision on whether to go down the development road or not and also where to handle in-house vs. external partners.

Improve monetization, engagement, and sentiment from a highly-personalized, data-rich email program. 

Drew Price

Lifecycle Marketing Advisor & Mentor

Consumer subscription apps are easy to launch but hard to scale. This explains why there are hundreds of thousands of them in the Apple and Google app stores, but fewer than 50 that have ever reached $1B+ valuations, and fewer than 10 that are publicly-traded with companies with $10B+ market caps. These businesses face several fundamental challenges:1. Lack of control over distribution2. Overdependence on paid acquisition3. High subscriber churn rates4. ARPU is often low and hard to grow However, the best consumer subscription apps overcome these headwinds by doing two things:1. Building their businesses on a core value promise that provides enduring value.2. Harnessing their value promise to drive a compounding Subscription Value Loop that increases LTV/CAC and accelerates the Payback Period through three steps: - Value Creation: Quickly connecting new users to the app’s core value promise and offering enduring value that keeps them coming back - Value Delivery: Cost-efficiently distributing the app to users organically through word of mouth and SEO, as well as through sustainable paid acquisition - Value Capture: Converting free users into subscribers, which generates revenue that can be reinvested into the business to strengthen the rest of the loop I developed this framework after leading the product growth team at Quizlet and talking to executives at dozens of other category-leading consumer subscription apps. After I wrote about it in Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter, he said "If you’re building a consumer subscription app, this post is your new bible." I've also spoken about the framework on the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings and the Sub Club podcast by RevenueCat, and taught a previous version of this course on Reforge that was taken by hundreds of professionals and rated one of the top courses in the company's catalog with an average NPS of ~74%. In this four-week cohort-based course, you'll learn how to apply the Subscription Value Loop framework to maximize the growth of your consumer subscription business. This includes four live 90-minute events with featured guest speakers from top consumer subscription businesses like Tinder, Grammarly, Strava, and Ladder, as well as 10+ hours of self-paced, asynchronous course content. It also offers permanent access to templates like the Subscription Value Loop Calculator, a tool for benchmarking your company's most important growth metrics vs. other consumer subscription apps in your category, and a private Slack channel for course communications and Q&amp;A.

Supercharge the growth of your consumer subscription business

Module: The Subscription Value LoopCase Study: TinderFeatured Guest: Revi Mehta (former Tinder CPO) Learn how Tinder built a unique core value promise and used innovative Value Creation, Value Delivery, and Value Capture tactics to become the world's most popular dating app.

Tuesday, January 21st

Module: Value CreationCase Study: LadderGuest: Greg Stewart (Ladder CEO) See how Ladder became one of the world's fastest-growing fitness apps and grew subscribers &gt;500% by combining a unique group coaching product with an innovative user acquisition strategy on TikTok.

Tuesday, January 28th

Module: Value DeliveryCase Study: GrammarlyGuest: Yuriy Timen (former Grammarly Head of Marketing) Hear how Grammarly adapted its user acquisition strategies as it evolved from a student web app to a prosumer subscription product to a B2B SaaS platform selling to large teams.

Tuesday, February 4th

Module: Value CaptureCase Study: StravaGuest: Jason van der Merwe (Strava Director of Growth Engineering) Learn how Strava optimized subscription pricing, packaging, paywalls, and trial strategy to capture more value from subscribers and accelerate the growth of its business.

Tuesday, February 11th

Founders and execs: Consumer subscription CEOs and product and marketing leaders who want to maximize growth for their businesses.

People managers: VPs and directors managing cross-functional teams responsible for subscriber acquisition, retention, and monetization.

Senior individual contributors (ICs): PMs, marketers, and other ICs working on growth teams at consumer subscription companies.

Who this course is for:

Learn how category-leading consumer subscription apps like Netflix, Spotify, Duolingo, Grammarly, Tinder, Strava, AllTrails, and Calm drive compounding growth through proven tactics for maximizing Value Creation, Value Delivery, and Value Capture.

Learn and apply the Subscription Value Loop framework

Understand the most important growth metrics that drive consumer subscription businesses and compare your company's performance vs. overall industry benchmarks and peers in your category using the Subscription Value Loop Calculator, a tool built on data from &gt;30,000 other apps.

Assess the growth of your consumer subscription app vs. industry benchmarks to identify your biggest growth opportunities

Learn how to create value for subscribers by building a unique and enduring core value promise, connecting new users to this value promise as fast as possible, emphasizing premium features to convert users into subscribers, and using motivation tactics to keep them coming back.

Improve your premium product experience to create compounding long-term value for subscribers
 

Review strategies and tactics for cost-efficiently delivering your product to users and subscribers by maximizing the performance of paid marketing campaigns and driving more organic user acquisition through a combination of ASO, SEO, and viral word of mouth.

Leverage proven paid and organic strategies to drive cost-efficient user acquisition

Explore techniques like Conjoint and Van Westendorp analysis for optimizing subscription pricing and packaging, as well as best practices for fine-tuning subscription paywalls, making payments easy, and leveraging strategic discounts to maximize subscriber conversion and LTV.

Optimize your paywall, pricing, packaging, payments, and promotions to maximize subscriber conversion and retention

This cohort of the course will feature case studies on Tinder (with former CPO Ravi Mehta), Ladder (with CEO Greg Stewart), Grammarly (with former Head of Marketing Yuriy Timen), and Strava (with current Director of Growth Engineering Jason van der Merwe).

Apply these lessons to real-world case studies with featured guests from some of the top consumer subscription apps in the world

Build and execute a playbook to accelerate the growth of your consumer subscription business

🔥 Featured in Lenny's Newsletter! 🔥

Phil Carter

The Winter 2025 cohort of Consumer Subscription Growth will run from Tuesday 1/21 to Tuesday 2/11.

Lightning Lessons

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