Startups are not very easy to actually start, run and make profitable. If you intend to be a founder of a startup or an entrepreneur, you will obviously realize that it isn’t so easy to find a clearly direct way of doing things. What to expect is that you will make a lot of mistakes when you start a business or a company in any field. Those who went before us made the same mistakes with their startups, some of the mistakes were costly and the startup probably failed, other mistakes were easier to get out of and these became lessons for those founders and business people. It is important to realize that it’s the same way in business and founding a company every single time. Online Startup Classes are important in this period?
When you haven’t done it before you probably get into business with a lot of doubts about where to go and what to do. However, today you don’t have to go through a very difficult period of time wondering what to do anymore thanks to a few brave people who have made it possible for you to know what to do, when and at what stage of your company through provision of online lessons for free. These startup classes will teach you a lot about what to do when you are starting out until when you are actually making some income:
1. Y Combinator’s How to Start a Startup
Sam Altman, the famous founder and president of Y Combinator has put together 20 sessions to teach startup founders and other prospecting entrepreneurs how to go from just an idea to a sound business. The 20 sessions include inputs from other influential experts like Peter Thiel, Aaron Levie and Reid Hoffman. In these sessions you discuss 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.
This is an actual class at Stanford. However, you can access all the materials at Sam Altman’s website where the videos have been uploaded and it’s several hundred’s of minutes worth of lessons some with an actual speaker and others without. If you are intending to found or co-found a startup or already have, you might want to check out this course to find out what you can learn from it, but i’m guessing you will learn a lot.
2. How to Build a Startup
Udacity has this startup course they are offering for free. The tutor, Steve Blank, gives an insight into the key steps needed to build a successful startup. The main idea in this lectures is to learn how to develop and test your ideas fast by amassing great amounts of customer and market feedback. We have seen several startups fail before because they didn’t validate their business ideas early on in real life using customer and marketplace feedback. In this lesson, students are taught how to stop the continuous building of a product and get outside into the real life to get the first users of a product. It is only when you find feedback for your product that you can create a viable final product, and a sustainable business model.
This lessons teach you more about the business side of a startup, getting customers and creating a sustainable profitable model. So ideally, the intention is to teach you the business skills it takes to bring your idea from conception to market. These are 8 lessons you probably don’t want to miss.
3. Startup Engineering
Stanford in conjunction with Coursera have a free engineering lesson on Startups and how to build a tech startup successfully. This has restrictions to the tech field and is probably not for every business person to learn basically because it has a lot of stuff on computer science. However, for all those looking to launch a tech startup,business or company with a modest background in coding and programming languages, you should check it out. This course focus on the engineering skills needed to build a tech startup. Just a heads up: This course requires you to have familiarity with basic programming at the level of Stanford’s CS106B. Some exposure to HTML, CSS, and Javascript will also be helpful.
4. Platzi Startup Class
This includes 7 lessons that teach you a lot about startups in general. Some of the courses may be divided into two or three parts. The topics include How to use messages to turn sign ups into real customers, Develop web apps in node.js and sail.js, Git and Gitlab Workshop, How to build and grow online communities by Product Hunt and more. Generally these are lessons worth trying out as well. You never know what you could learn.
Do you know any other startup classes we forgot to mention? Let us know in the comments section below.