We need to design your life to support a startup. The first step to adding anything new is making room for it. This will require you to remove stuff (temporarily or permanently) from your life, which requires an initial audit. Next, we look at you. For your startup to be successful you’ll need to leverage your superpowers and unfair advantages - we identify them early so we can start learning into them.

Founders usually skip customer interviews entirely or do them incorrectly. Every founder starts Tacklebox by running interviews our way. You’ll speak with potential customers to learn what you should build and for who. We make the process straightforward - we’ll help you find people to talk to, schedule interviews, build a script with the right questions for your idea, synthesize the conversations you have, then scale that process with the best current tools.

It’s critical to pick the right first customer. We’ll teach you what you’re looking for in a customer and help you segment and evaluate the customers you’ve spoken with. We’ll use frameworks like Inflection Points and Categories to get deeper customer insight. By the end of Block 1 you’ll have a persona for your perfect initial customer.

You’ll choose your initial customer and figure out what you can do that’ll blow their mind. We’ll talk about Delta 4 step ups in value, Hole and Teleporter problems, and start figuring out the marketing language that will be irresistible to your customer.

Time to make this thing real and start to grow. We’ll pick a segment, pick a channel, build a landing page (or whatever method of outreach makes sense for your customer) and get something in front of them. You won’t have a full product yet, but we’ll teach you how to get something compelling in front of your customer so that we can gauge their “intent,” and start price testing.

Take what you learned from Intent Tests and start to deliver on it. We’ll teach you how to run marketing sprints — identify an assumption, pick a channel, push a test live, measure the feedback, make a decision. These could be digital ads, physical fliers, in-person events, content marketing, or a number of other methods to get your message in front of your customer. We’ll also start delivering value to your customer, with a partial or full product (less intimidating than it sounds).

We’ll zero in on what you need to build, how much you need to charge, and whether the whole thing makes sense as a business. You’ll build a “Skateboard Product” or a “Concierge MVP” to solve customers’ problems in an unscalable way. And you’ll flesh out a business model to evaluate future growth potential.

You’ll have at least a proxy of a product live, and we can decide what’s next, both for you and your business.

We’ll build a plan for you to quit your job and supplement your income (if necessary). We’ll also build a plan for your business and figure out what’s needed (team, advisory, possibly funding).

You’ve graduated.

Lots of businesses that go through Tacklebox won’t want (or need) VC funding, but for those that do, we’ve got a block that’ll take you through it.