Content Outline
This section will introduce you to many of the terms, phrases, and concepts that you'll encounter while building your venture. You'll learn about what we mean by a "startup," the different types of ventures you can build, the stages you'll progress through while building, how to construct a minimum viable product, and finally, the importance of the Lean Startup.
There is perhaps no term more over-used and under-defined than the word "startup." In general, there are two ways that people tend to interpret it:
Any Early-Stage Venture
In this sense, a "startup" is any venture (be it a tech company, main street business, nonprofit, or side hustle) that is in its earliest stages. It is quite literally, starting up.
High-Growth Companies
This definition refers to a specific type of venture: those that are suited to grow both rapidly and extremely large. In this sense, startup is used to mean only ventures that are targeting a super large market, are aiming to grow quickly, and will likely use venture capital to do it.
The second definition is highly prohibitive, limiting the "startup" phase to just high-growth companies. In reality, in the earliest stages, most people don't even know what type of venture they are building, much less if it's going to be a venture-backed unicorn.
Our definition leans more towards the first one, encompassing all early-stage ventures. But just because a company is young doesn't make it a startup - so what's the difference? Here's the best definition we've found:
<aside> 💡 A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model
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This definition is great because it captures the fundamental essence of building any type of venture. In a startup, there are still a ton of questions to answer, such as:
Definition of a startup
A company, on the other hand, has most of these questions answered. They have a defined product that solves a defined problem. They know what they sell, who they sell it to, when they sell it to them, and how much they sell it for. In essence, companies have a scalable and repeatable business model, where as startups still need to answer many of these fundamental questions. The purpose of this program is to help you do that!
When you have an idea, you often don't know what final form it will take. Maybe it will become a tech company, a consultancy, or a nonprofit - at the start, it's hard to know what the best business type will be for your idea.
So for the purpose of this curriculum, we use a catch-all term that encompasses all different types of entities. We call them ventures. While some people think that venture = venture-backable companies = high-growth startups**,** venture is often used as a catch-all term for any manner of things that you might be building.
There are many types of ventures, but there are three overarching categories that you'll often encounter: