Tech startups have changed the way we think about and do business. Once-scrappy companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Uber and Google have reached incredible heights, disrupting the way most of us live our daily lives.
Not surprisingly, the possibility of making money, changing an industry, and “making a dent in the universe,” as Steve Jobs put it, has driven thousands of entrepreneurs to start their own software businesses.
But for every Facebook, there’s a MySpace or a Friendster—failed companies that couldn’t maintain their dominance—and countless others we’ve never even heard of.
So how do you make it to the promised land and avoid being one of the many, many flops?
That, indeed, is the big question, and it’s one that our community (that is, you) has asked us over and over again. In fact, it’s Foundr’s entire reason for existing!
The truth is, there’s no one path to startup success. Every journey will be different. But we have found that there are certain reliable processes that successful tech startups follow, making it much easier for them to create viable product ideas and launch new businesses around them, and fast.
However, we’ve never come across one great resource that covers that journey from idea to launch—especially one that allows you to develop a concept, validate an idea, and get your first paying customers, all within 60 days.
So with guidance from one of the most successful tech entrepreneurs to come out of Australia, Foundr decided to devote our next big course to compiling one, definitive resource that documents such actionable and battle-tested processes in a single location.
Introducing 60-Day Startup: How to Launch & Grow a Successful Tech Product in Record Time
Entrepreneurs are a unique kind of people. They are often highly innovative, creative, motivated, and eager to disregard the status quo.
These personality traits, while critical to success, can also be detrimental to achieving it. An innovative and forward-thinking attitude can lead one to overlook some of the core systems that lead to business success.
In their eagerness to be at the cutting edge, they end up drinking whatever tech Kool-Aid is in the zeitgeist. Some people rush to Silicon Valley in hopes of miraculously finding a co-founder and raising funds. Others quit high-paying jobs, blow their savings, and sacrifice years of trial-and-error and wasted development resources to launch their tech startups.
But success in tech goes well beyond location, money, or hacks from the latest self-proclaimed gurus. These things may help, but they are not the things that matter.
What matters is that you work on the things that, well, matter:
- Focusing on securing early validation for your idea
- Building the minimum sellable product (MSP) that gives you early feedback
- Launching to the right audience (or that you launch to an audience to begin with)
There’s no one way to do it, but if there were a reality-based system that could make it easier for you to validate, launch, and land your first customers, everything would be a whole lot easier.
Oh, and it would be even better if you could do all of this in 60 days or less, to avoid wasting months or even years kicking around a business concept that might not even work.
To be clear, the development of a tech product itself will likely take longer than 60 days to build, along with its ongoing iterations and maybe even pivots. But we wanted to create a clear, effective resource on the startup development process (validation, MSP, beta launch, customer acquisition) that could be done in just two months.
We’ve pulled together a lot of great courses over the years, but that is a tall order, even for us.
Fortunately, we ended up finding just the right instructor to help us show our readers this kind of proven approach, one that he has used to launch not one, not two, but eight startups, and advise countless other high-growth companies such as Drift and Airtasker.
This instructor isn’t just a talker, a philosopher of the entrepreneurial arts, or a blogger. He’s a proven master of starting tech startups.
Without further ado…
Meet Your Instructor: Mitch Harper
Mitch Harper is an eight-time startup founder with over $200 million in sales under his belt. He’s most famous for co-founding BigCommerce, one of the leading ecommerce platforms in the world.
He completely bootstrapped the business until 2011, when he raised nearly $220 million in venture capital. In the first three months of its existence, BigCommerce generated 3,000 paying customers with only a tiny marketing budget.
The system Mitch teaches is the same step-by-step startup framework that he used to build BigCommerce into a nine-figure ecommerce powerhouse, and to grow many of his other startups from scratch.
Mitch has been building software companies since he was 17, and in this course, you’ll learn his entire A-to-Z process that’s worked for him, time and time again.
Not only that, but through his experience as an advisor for dozens of other startups over the past 18 years, Mitch has developed deep knowledge of both bootstrapping and raising funds for high-growth tech companies.
Who Is This Course For?
Our 60-Day Startup course is perfect for an aspiring entrepreneur who wants to start a tech startup, SaaS company, marketplace or app. You may already have an idea and want to know if it’s the right one to monetize, or maybe you’re starting from a blank canvas.
This course is also perfect for existing entrepreneurs who’ve already tried to start a business in the past (tech or otherwise) and want to branch out into tech products.
The main thing is, it’s for anyone who is looking for a proven process and step-by-step framework, with guidance from someone who’s done this multiple times, to guide you on your own journey.
What Do I Get From 60-Day Startup?
Our in-depth course is just under five hours of content and includes 45+ videos and actionable lessons, based on proven tactics Mitch has learned over the years.
This course is filled with in-depth, tactical advice. It comes with templates, cheat sheets, scripts, and systems that you can plug-and-play for your own business.
It’s not just theory or opinion based on anecdotal luck or individual success stories. This has worked for Mitch multiple times, and he advises dozens of other startups in a private capacity in the same way.
The information laid out in this course would typically be available in the form of one-on-one consulting with Mitch, billed at $5,000 an hour. There’s nothing out there like this in online course format, and definitely nothing that goes this deep.
Once you start the course, you’ll see there are eight modules:
Module 1: Starting Up The Right Way
Dig deep into the purpose and mindset behind your startup—a critical yet often overlooked part of the journey. You will also learn about the pros and cons of bootstrapping and raising capital, and much more.
Module 2: Finding a Painkiller Idea (Market Research)
Learn how to pick the right idea for your business that is virtually guaranteed to work, and one that people will pay money for. Then work to understand your idea, the market size, and the competition you’re facing.
Module 3: Product Validation
Discover the validation strategy that Mitch uses to decide whether to pursue a given idea, and lock in your first paying customers before the product even exists.
Module 4: Product Development & Design
Learn how to get your product built, the who and how of hiring your startup team, and how to properly vet and interview designers and developers who will bring your product to life—on schedule and under budget.
Module 5: Product Management
Master this often overlooked science that every tech founder must understand in order to succeed. You will learn different methodologies of product management and some of the challenges you will face along the way.
Module 6: Getting Your First 100 Paying Customers (Pre-Launch/Closed Beta)
Learn everything about your pre-launch—the steps you take before you open your product to the entire market. This will help you validate, test and iterate your product in the wild without risking the fate of your company.
Module 7: Proven Launch Framework
In this last module, you will discover some of Mitch’s favorite launch strategies to build up the right traction for your newly born business, regardless of whether you have a marketing budget.
Throughout this course, Mitch has pulled back the curtain on some of his deepest trade secrets, which he learned the hard way over the past decade. Some of these include:
- Funnel Hacking – Learn what it means to hack a competitor’s funnel so you can reverse-engineer their success.
- A Phone Script for Product Validation – Discover the exact script Mitch has used to call potential customers, uncover their pains and needs, and get them pulling out their credit cards to buy your product before it even exists.
- The 3 Key Team Members You Need – Starting a tech startup is a team sport. Learn what three team members Mitch recommends hiring to start your tech startup the right way.
- The 8 Product Management Roadblocks You Will Face (And How to Overcome Them) – No matter what you do, you will likely face some problems when managing the birth of your product. In this lesson, Mitch shares the most common problems he has faced with simple solutions to easily overcome them.
- A One-Page Beta Website Template – Before you launch your business, you want to have a simple website that you can use to attract your first few paying customers. In this lesson, you will get a simple template you can copy and paste to use in your own business.
- The Low- or No-Budget Launch Strategies — Launching is all about being strategic. Among the many launch frameworks shared by Mitch, this one stands out as being both effective and cost-efficient.
What This Course Is Not
This course is not for people looking to create digital products, like courses, magazines, ebooks, etc. If you are interested in this, we have created a different course with Nathan Chan, CEO of Foundr, that teaches a step-by-step process on how to create and sell content-based products and online courses.
The same can be said for people who want to start an ecommerce business (in which case you can check Start & Scale), or a consulting business (we have Consulting Empire for that).
This course is not for people who are just looking to make a quick buck and aren’t serious about building a real business they’ll run for the next 5+ years. Starting and growing a tech startup is not a short-term side hustle. It’s not like dropshipping or other shiny objects you can try and quickly move on.
It’s also not a course on tech product development, so we won’t be teaching you how to code or build your software. That’s a topic for another course.
This course will teach you how to develop a business—how to laser focus on a real pain point, validate demand, find paying customers before your product is even built, and know that you’re pursuing a money-making idea that you can grow into a scalable business for the long haul.
Finally, this course is not for those who like to collect courses. Let’s be honest: if you’re planning to watch a few lessons and leave this one on the shelf, then you’re better off not enrolling at all. This is a real commitment.
We want only serious entrepreneurs and aspiring founders who want to watch all the videos, take the steps laid out, and put in the work.
If that’s you, we look forward to seeing you in the virtual classroom.
Start Your Own Tech Business
If you are ready to start your own tech business once and for all, then we’d love to see you on the other side of the fence. By the end of this course, we can guarantee that you will learn how to:
- Develop your idea and validate if it will work
- Get your first paying customer in 60 days (or less)
- Use the money raised from the first 100 customers to fund the development of your tech product and business
- Get on a path to creating a successful business
Again, the actual product creation will take longer than 60 days, typically taking months or even a year to design and develop.
What we can guarantee is that you will have a validated idea, an audience willing to pay for it, and even your first paying customers. Keep working hard beyond the launch, and you can translate that foundation into a profitable, long-running business.
NOTE: The doors only open for a limited time throughout the year. Click here to learn more about the course and get on our Free VIP waitlist to be notified when we launch.
Do you have any questions or comments about this course? We’d love to hear what you have in mind! Leave a comment below or contact us directly at [email protected], and we’ll reach back as soon as possible.
