How to Start a Startup — From Idea to First Customers
Find a problem worth solving, build the smallest thing that solves it, and get people to pay.
A founder’s course built around the two things that actually kill startups: building something nobody wanted, and running out of money before finding out. You will talk to real potential customers in week two, ship something in week six, and spend the rest of the course learning whether anybody will pay for it — plus the legal and funding groundwork nobody explains properly.
- Customer conversations in week 2, before you build anything
- A shipped MVP by week 6, using AI to build it alone
- LLCs, C-corps, option pools, cap tables and fundraising, explained plainly
- Length
- 10 weeks
- Lessons
- 68
- Projects
- 5
- Language
- English
Recorded lessons · frameworks and financial models · live founder sessions
$19$199
Founding price · lifetime access
Nothing is charged today. The lessons for Start a Startup are still being recorded — join and you keep this price and get first access when it opens.
- 68 recorded lessons, lifetime access
- Customer interview scripts and analyzis sheets
- A financial model template you rebuild yourself
- Founders’ agreement and ESOP explainers
- Pitch deck structure with a worked example
- Live founder sessions every Saturday
- Private founder community
- Every future update to this course, free
Price includes tax, in US dollars. Paid securely — we never see your card.
Rises to $59 on 1 October 2026 · 4 days away
This is for you if
- You have an idea and no idea what the first step is.
- You have no idea yet and want a method for finding one.
- You are technical and need the business half, or non-technical and need the building half.
- You are about to quit a job for this and would like to make that decision on evidence.
This is not for you if
- You want funding without customers. This course will keep telling you no.
- You will not speak to strangers. Module 2 is thirty customer conversations.
- You want a business plan document to show somebody. That is not what this produces.
Outcomes
What you will be able to do
Written as capabilities, not results. Every line is something you will have done at least once by the end.
Find and validate a problem by talking to thirty potential customers without leading them to the answer you want.
Size a market from the bottom up, using numbers you can defend rather than a slide claiming a $50 billion opportunity.
Build and ship a working MVP alone, using AI tools, in weeks rather than months.
Get your first ten paying customers by hand, and know why the eleventh is a different problem.
Read and build a simple financial model: runway, burn, unit economics, break-even.
Incorporate correctly — sole proprietorship vs LLC vs Delaware C-corp — and know what each one costs to run and to unwind.
Understand a cap table, an ESOP pool, dilution and a SAFE well enough to negotiate rather than nod.
Build an investor deck around evidence, and know precisely when you are not ready to raise.
Why this course and not a playlist
Customers before code
Week two is thirty conversations, with a script designed to stop people politely telling you your idea is good. Most founders skip this and spend a year building the wrong thing.
Build it alone, with AI
A non-technical founder can now ship a real product without a co-founder or an agency. Module 5 shows exactly how, including where that approach genuinely breaks.
The legal and paperwork side, plainly
Forming an LLC or a Delaware C-corp and which one your situation actually calls for, an EIN, a registered agent, founder agreements, vesting, the 83(b) election and the thirty-day window that makes it worthless if you miss it, and the annual filing calendar — costs included.
A financial model you built yourself
Not a downloaded template with your name on it. You build the model, so when an investor moves one assumption you can see immediately what happens.
Fundraising without the theater
How angels and seed funds actually decide, what a SAFE really costs you, what dilution looks like over three rounds, and the honest case for never raising at all.
How to fail cheaply
A module on killing an idea early and well. Most founders lose two years to a decision they could have made in month three with better evidence.
The full syllabus
10 modules, 59 lessons
Every module ends in something you physically have. Open any one to read its lessons.
Tools you will use
- Notion
- Figma
- Supabase
- Next.js
- Stripe
- Google Sheets
- Claude
- Framer
- Stripe Atlas
- QuickBooks
- Google Analytics
Where a tool costs money, the course says so and shows the free route through the same task.
What this course does not promise
This block is on every course page and it is never removed to make the page read better. It is what makes everything above it believable.
- Most startups fail. This course improves your odds and shortens the time to find out; it does not remove the risk.
- It will not raise you money, introduce you to investors, or write your product.
- Module 2 requires you to speak to thirty strangers. If you will not do that, the rest of the course cannot help you.
- Legal content is explained plainly for a founder; it is not a substitute for a company secretary or a CA, and the course says so at every point where it matters.