Month 3: Venture Focus

In the last month, you will expand your attention from the product to the business, and work on how to build the venture itself. A product is just a product, it is not a whole venture. How do you transition into this very difficult environment, stand on your own, and be successful outside the very nurturing MIT bubble?

You will be working on the financial side of the venture, building knowledge about your economic buyers, champions, influencers, end users and veto powers. You will build a sales process around how they make decisions. You will build out a go to market strategy and develop a pricing model. You will work out the unit and overall economics.

At the same time, you will need to have deep conversations with your team about each person’s goals and aspirations, and commitment to the venture moving forward. You need to develop a game plan to take your venture out into the wild. You need to be able to pitch this venture for support.

Prepare

Download a template for the daily standup meeting here.

Download this mentor meeting preparation template to structure your conversation in the most productive way.

Set up a 1-1.5 hour session with the team to discuss what each person’s goals, aspirations and constraints are, and discuss each person’s plans and commitment to the venture after the end of the month.

Learn

Watch these short videos to review Disciplined Entrepreneurship, Themes 3-6 (everything about making money and building a venture).

View the following videos to learn skills relevant for this month.

Check out these masterclasses on topics particularly relevant to MIT startups.

Build

Based on your customer’s decision making process (DMP), create a sales process including awareness generation and outreach to capture the customers and nurture them through the sale funnel to become paying customers.

Design a business model using this worksheet.

Use this worksheet to develop a pricing model.

Consider the lifetime value (LTV) and cost of customer acquisition (COCA, also known as customer acquisition cost, or CAC) for your product, and ensure the long term LTV/COCA ratio is at 3 or above.

Model the revenue for your venture for the next three years, then create a pro-forma profit-and-loss statement for the same duration to model the overall financials for your venture.

Think about the major milestones for the next 1-2 years, then think about what skillsets you need to round out the team. Think about who you need to hire and how you will design the organization to integrate these new hires.

Consult the pitching section of the Orbit Knowledgebase for tips on how to create and deliver a compelling venture pitch.

Reflect

Complete the rubric for Month 3, and reflect on what you achieved, what you did not, what you learned, and how that informs what you will do beyond these three months.

Use this worksheet to take inventory of what you have learned as an entrepreneur – and think about how that informs what you do and how you do it in the future.

Complete the DE canvas for your venture. Identify where your venture is weak and develop a game plan to work on those areas.

Watch this video to hear the story of BioBot Analytics, a delta v alumni team.

Use this template to frame a retrospective for all three months, and help you plan for the future.