Thinking about starting a business? Learn how to get your first 10 customers - Without spending thousands of dollars or wasting months on a business idea that won't sell * Do you want to avoid debt from spending all your money on a startup doomed to fail? * Do you want to finally join the ranks successful entrepreneurs who live on their own terms?Start up Action Plan is the guidebook you have been waiting for. Getting these first potential customers is the hardest thing to do for business owners, and I'm going to teach you the easiest, fastest way to do it. Best of all you are going to find your customers BEFORE YOU EVEN HAVE A PRODUCT TO SELL * I will show you how to get 100's of prospects in your target market for less than $50 (Chapter 1) * Destroy your fears of speaking to your market and develop a value giving mindset (Chapter 2) * Learn how to pitch your potential customers properly on your business idea (Chapter 3) * Create a battle plan for calling potential customers and pre-selling them on your business idea (Chapter 4) * Learn the strategies to guarantee you will have a list of customers eager to buy your product when it's finished (Chapter 5) * Gain confidence in the quality of your business idea-Create a product customers are EAGER to buy (Chapter 6)If you want stay a comfortable wantrepreneur working the same boring job you have your entire life, DON'T READ THIS BOOK. However, if you that BURNING DESIRE to build a dream business that makes you money, this is book is for you.Are you ready to take action?

What if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career was not to create and scale a new start-up, but rather, to be able to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? Suppose the better--and smarter--solution is simply to remain small? This book explains how to do just that. Company of One is a refreshingly new approach centered on staying small and avoiding growth, for any size business. Not as a freelancer who only gets paid on a per piece basis, and not as an entrepreneurial start-up that wants to scale as soon as possible, but as a small business that is deliberately committed to staying that way. By staying small, one can have freedom to pursue more meaningful pleasures in life, and avoid the headaches that result from dealing with employees, long meetings, or worrying about expansion. Company of One introduces this unique business strategy and explains how to make it work for you, including how to generate cash flow on an ongoing basis. Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. Instead, he now works for himself out of his home on a small, lush island off of Vancouver, and lives a much more rewarding and productive life. He no longer has to contend with an environment that constantly demands more productivity, more output, and more growth. In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can find the right pathway to do the same, including planning how to set up your shop, determining your desired revenues, dealing with unexpected crises, keeping your key clients happy, and of course, doing all of this on your own.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

A practical guide to effective business model testing 7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder’s global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas. Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments. Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to: Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.

An essential guide to building supportive entrepreneurial communities "Startup communities" are popping up everywhere, from cities like Boulder to Boston and even in countries such as Iceland. These types of entrepreneurial ecosystems are driving innovation and small business energy. Startup Communities documents the buzz, strategy, long-term perspective, and dynamics of building communities of entrepreneurs who can feed off of each other's talent, creativity, and support. Based on more than twenty years of Boulder-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist Brad Feld's experience in the field?as well as contributions from other innovative startup communities?this reliable resource skillfully explores what it takes to create an entrepreneurial community in any city, at any time. Along the way, it offers valuable insights into increasing the breadth and depth of the entrepreneurial ecosystem by multiplying connections among entrepreneurs and mentors, improving access to entrepreneurial education, and much more. Details the four critical principles needed to form a sustainable startup community Perfect for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists seeking fresh ideas and new opportunities Written by Brad Feld, a thought-leader in this field who has been an early-stage investor and successful entrepreneur for more than twenty years Engaging and informative, this practical guide not only shows you how startup communities work, but it also shows you how to make them work anywhere in the world.

Writing a business plan should be simple, dynamic, and straightforward. More importantly, it must be a FUNCTIONAL tool that advances you forward towards your goals -- rather than holding you back due to endless tinkering and perfecting of your plan without taking action. Enter the 24 Hour Business Plan Template, your functional tool to get you there as efficiently as possible. This is a complete guide that includes a downloadable pre-formatted business plan template and cash flow spreadsheet to help you get started. In the book, I lay out the method I personally used to plan my own business - and in doing so, leave my full-time job and start my business on a full-time basis within seven months. My plan itself was constructed in under 24 hours on January 1, 2015 as my new years resolution; the remainder of the time spent was executing this plan over time. In the book you'll learn how to do the same, or close to it at the very least - and you'll begin to understand why this efficiency in the beginning is so important. To reiterate, it's important to get to the action-taking phase as soon as possible. This cannot be overstated enough. Successful entrepreneurs and authors like Eric Ries, Gabriel Weinberg, and Justin Mares tout this very principle in their books The Lean Startup and Traction -- the simple fact is, it's much easier to make progress by taking action and adapting over time vs. trying to get everything perfect the first time around. Too much time can be spent getting stuck in your head due to information paralysis or perfectionism, only to wake up one day realizing you've actually done nothing concrete at all to advance your goals. Don't be this person! Get up out of your chair and take action to make your goals happen. Realize that it may take several iterations of creating a business plan, or cycling through various ideas, before you feel confident in moving forward with one in particular. This is okay -- and in fact, it's the exact reason why you need to be efficient during the initial planning and evaluation stage. Much better to spent one or two weeks cycling through 5-10 ideas than an entire year getting nowhere. In this book, we'll cover the following topics: -The importance of validation, and how to validate your business idea. -The key elements of designing an amazing cover page for your business plan. -How to write an executive summary, and why it must be written last after everything else. -The proper elements that make up your Company Objectives section. -The right approach to laying out your Products & Services section. -How to setup a target customer profile including the right questions to ask. -Websites and tables that will greatly simplify your industry and competitor analyses. -Several possibilities for getting started with sales and marketing, and the difference between each. -The key elements that will comprise your operational plan and any business logistics. -What roles need to be defined in your Management section. -The preferred formats and metrics to use in your business capitalization (initial funding) section. -How to lay out your financial plan, both for your business and your personal finances. Please know fat was trimmed from every section of this book to ensure you can get through it and understand the key principles quickly and move on to actually creating your own plan. Only the critical elements were left in, with additional explanation added at key junctions to ensure comprehension. Whether you're venturing out for your first time as an entrepreneur, or you're a seasoned veteran looking for a no-nonsense way to manage the planning process for your next venture, 24 Hour Business Plan Template belongs on your tool belt.

From award-winning entrepreneur, inventor, and business owner Stephen Key comes the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestseller One Simple Idea Stephen Key is back, and he’s delivering a proven, straightforward process for starting, growing, and running a business—without the need for an MBA or millions of dollars in funding. Key draws on his own experience as a billion-dollar inventor to offer how-tos and other takeaways you can use to get off the ground and into the black. Case-studies of his most successful students and other innovators further underscore “key” principles from the book, while strategies for testing, protecting, and marketing a product make it easier than ever for you to follow achieve your business and life dreams. Stephen Key has successfully licensed more than 20 simple ideas that have generated billions of dollars of revenue. The course he teaches has attracted more than ten thousand students around the world.