Enterprise Development

Class Details:

Class Number: EAEP 388
Credits: 3
Location: Dinsdale Learning Commons, East Campus

Class Description:

80% of new enterprises don’t survive the first year. That’s a scary statistic.

This class helps increase your odds of entrepreneurship success by setting up a framework to de-risk your new business ideas.

Not every new business idea is created equal. You will quickly start with ideation and evaluating to determine if an idea is worth pursuing or not. Don’t have a business idea? No sweat, we’ll help you find one.

The next big step is to see what’s out there. This is an opportunity to shadow similar business owners and build a map of the competitor landscape.

Finally, you will dive into the concept of customer discovery. Customer discovery is a massively valuable skill to learn early in the business. It can potentially save you thousands of dollars in investment and hours of wasted time.

Customer discovery, a term coined by startup guru Steve Blank, is essentially the skill of looking for a product-market fit for your new business idea. Before you spend a lot of time and money building your new product, get out of the building and talk to potential customers.

By talking to potential customers, you can quickly learn whether you are on the right track for our new business. Try to test assumptions like: am I solving a problem or meeting a need worth paying for? Is my target customer interested in my product? What are they willing to pay?

This testing framework is the key to building a business on solid ground, and not just a series of guesses. This class will push you to dig into the serious assumptions behind your business idea. You’ll not only leave with a well-tested business idea, but a framework to apply to your future entrepreneurial pursuits.