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- How to create must‑click landing pages
As opposed to a full-blown professional website, a landing page is a single page with a highly specific target: getting visitors to click through to your end goal. When done well, a good LP can hugely up your chances of success.
- Step 1
Break down your content into manageable steps. Use videos, images, and text to explain your main points, and set clear expectations and goals. You can also include files and audio as additional resources. Consider adding a questionnaire to ask participants what they hope to take away from the experience, or a quiz to test their understanding before getting started.
- Introduction
Start off your program by giving some basic information about what participants can expect to learn. Introduce the topic and provide a basic outline of what's to come using videos, images, and text.
- Introduction
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- Pop Up Startup Studio
For participants in our Popup Startup Studio. We find amazing spaces, cities, people and companies then partner with them to run a 12 week program to help early stage founders build and launch crazy ideas!
- Embrace Failure
Embracing Failure Helps You Succeed 1. It sets you on a new path When you fail, it could be a sign that you shouldn’t have been going in this direction, to begin with. This, of course, is if you recognize clearly that your goal or vision for what you wanted isn’t exactly what means the most to you. Failing should hurt, but you should only proceed in a different direction if you don’t feel it within your core to go forward in your initial direction despite that failure. This means that your vision of success has to be compelling enough to drive you forward, even if it is hard. 2. It reaffirms your previous direction When you fall and then get right back up towards that same direction and goal you send yourself a message that you still want it even though you are going through pain and devastation to get there. This strengthens your investment and your will to win. If you are willing to fight for your goal even when you have been put through pain and struggle then you tell yourself and the world that this is a worthwhile goal. 3. You tell yourself that you are worthy of the goal by fighting on Fighting on despite disappointment shows you that you still believe in yourself. It shows that despite irrefutable evidence that you can’t do it, you will still strive to win. This action itself is communication to yourself that you will win. When you have the opportunity to affirm the belief you have in yourself despite all the negative feedback, the judgment of others, and what happens to you in life, this can allow you to become more resolute in your goals. This is really a gift of failure. 4. The challenges are what cause you to grow Failure is just a sign for you to understand that you need to grow more. What some people have a difficult time in comprehending about failure is simply that it will mold and shape you into a person that can reach your destiny. When you are sharpened by the challenges thrown your way and the despair of failure, this allows you to grow and become a better person. Look beyond the immediate pain and realize that it is only through the failures we face that turn us into the person that we really want to become. 5. Your failure leads to a compelling story Through our biggest obstacles, the most incredible stories can be told. These are stories of you overcoming your biggest challenges and becoming the person you wanted to become. These are stories that shape your life and inspire others. It would be sad to look on one’s life after having lived it only to realize that they had never failed. This likely would be a life of comfort and mediocrity. Without having failed then one wouldn’t have many great stories to tell or any noteworthy accomplishments to talk about. 6. How you respond to failure inspires others What you do in the face of failure will inspire and motivate others. How you show up when faced with the ultimate defeat will impact the lives around you. It can help them to achieve their biggest goals and this can drive you even further. Your fans and your critics are watching to see what you will do in the face of failure. It’s not important to pay attention to your critics or even that you will fail because you will, but it is more important how you will show up in the face of such disappointment. When you take failure for what it is and strive on further towards your goal, others will notice and you could very well be the cause that inspires someone else to greatness. Looking at failure in a different way can be one of the most profound changes that you will make in your life. The moment of failure sucks, but what you can gain from it might just transform your life. Know that you are interested in the long-term rewards of becoming the person you want to become. Find joy in failing because the knowledge of such a thing means that you are even closer to your goals. Anything worth doing or any goals worth having are worthy of failing at. If you can’t fail at something then likely it is an uninspiring and fruitless path. What I have found is that the fails lead to your greatest successes. Fail more today so that you can succeed tomorrow. Look back at your life and notice how just after you have failed, then came your biggest accomplishments
- Understanding Risk
Periodically I receive inquiries from people in the startup community who are exploring an idea or want an estimate on how expensive this particular idea may be to implement - as is common in the entrepreneurial community I’m happy to pay it forward (because I received help like this when I was just getting started too) and review a pitch deck, specification, or business plan and offer my advice if the person is someone I’ve interacted with online, in-person, or is referred through someone else I know. Most of these pitches are doomed from the start. It’s not because the idea is terrible (although many often are) or because there’s some impassable barrier to market entry. It’s because the founder has insufficient skin in the game and thus, they’re not going to behave successfully. Why is that? Incentives Matter Imagine three founders who set out to create a startup company together: Founder A - will go broke if the company isn’t able to make enough money to pay his salary within 6 months; Founder B - has enough in savings to go without compensation for up to 18 months; and Founder C - has another full-time job but is willing to contribute work on nights and weekends. Which founder is going to: Work as fast as possible to deliver revenue-generating results? Eagerly begin contacting and recruiting potential customers? Design a system to iterate as fast as possible in order to achieve business sustainability? Founder A, obviously - for the simple reason that he has the most exposure to the consequences of the company’s decisions. If the company fails to achieve break-even, he’s going to lose all of his savings and be left with nothing. Founder B will be out 6 months’ worth of savings - some skin in the game, but not a catastrophic loss. Founder C will probably drop out of the startup altogether because the company’s success or failure is immaterial - Founder C has very little financial exposure to any amount of downside and very little to gain from the startup achieving break-even success. The startup would have to be an overnight success in order for Founder C to join the company full-time. Most people who send me pitches are Founder C - people who think they have a great idea but aren’t willing to risk very much themselves to realize it. Therefore, their hope is that their idea is so good that someone with a skill they require would be willing to take on most of the delivery and implementation risk in exchange for worthless equity. In practice, this almost never works because ideas are intrinsically worthless - only through their implementation can value be realized. Skin in the game means having a personal stake in the desired outcome - exposure to both the upside and the downside. This exposure creates very different behavior on behalf of the actors in a given economic, financial, business, technical, or really any kind of decision making. Actors who have sufficiently high amounts of skin in the game are strongly incentivized to behave in a way that is more likely to create positive outcomes and avoid negative ones. Aligned Incentives Say you have a friend who strongly recommends purchasing Tesla stock and thinks it’s going to be worth 10x its current value in two years - would it make a difference to you if: The purchaser agrees to buy in at the same time and dollar amount as you; The purchaser holds a large Tesla position that is already very profitable; or The purchaser holds no Tesla at all and no future plans to do so. This information should influence your decision. Position 1 has the greatest skin in the game - they’re exposed the same amount of entry point and time risk as you. Position 2 has some risk, but they’re already sitting on a large and profitable position - if Tesla doesn’t make a significant upwards move from its current price then this person has no downside. Position 3 has zero skin in the game - your friend’s recommendation is useless in this scenario as they don’t believe in their own advice strongly enough to take it themselves. But it’s not just financial decisions that require skin the game - the same can be said for technical and product decisions too. Imagine if a technology company created a cloud service that it did not use itself for any production services - what kind of experience would you have? Well, this was exactly what Windows Azure was like inside Microsoft circa 2010 - product groups like Bing, Xbox Services, Office 365, and others didn’t build any of their products directly on top of the consumer-facing version of Windows Azure and as a result - Azure was largely unusable up until about 2014-2015. Compare this approach to Amazon’s early mandate that 100% of its internal services would communicate with eachother strictly through APIs, a practice which ultimately bred the practices and patterns that would lead to the creation of Amazon Web Services - the first product that really delivered “cloud computing” as we know it. AWS was built to run Amazon.com first and turned into a customer-facing product second. Amazon had a significant amount of skin in the game with AWS - which is why it was revolutionary and successful, whereas Azure stagnated for over five years until new leadership changed the model for how Azure would be developed and used internally. Skin in the game significantly changes the behavior of the actors involved because it alters their incentives; those incentives can be to mitigate risk, financial rewards, market leadership, or even to achieve a self-sustaining small business. You simply can’t trust actors who don’t have any skin in the game to overcome the hurdles of thankless drudgery, risk, or uncertainty that stand between coasting by and achievement - they’re not sufficiently exposed to upside or downside to make it.
- Do You Have Entrepreneur DNA?
What Makes a Good Entrepreneur? We have found many traits that correlate positively with entrepreneurship. Here is a sampling of the major traits: Bad Founder DNA Some traits can limit you as an entrepreneur. For example:
- START HERE
In this section you will be introduced to the Unstuck Method and go over some common mistakes to avoid for first time founders.