Top Resources For Entrepreneurs To Experiment With New Business Ideas

How To Come Up With A Business Idea T... Breaking Down The Three Engines Of Gr...

Top Resources For Entrepreneurs To Experiment With New Business Ideas

On FourWeekMBA, I gather the most useful resources that entrepreneurs can use to help them cut through the noise. In this article, I want to highlight a few critical resources you might want to start with throughout your entrepreneurial journey.

Unlearn fist
[image error]The Cycle of Unlearning is a three-step approach to individual and collective growth, which goes through unlearning, relearning, and breakthrough.

When starting a new venture, mastering the right mindset is critical. Thus, before you dive into this journey with all your energies, it might make sense for you to unlearn the things that might have worked in the past, but that are holding you back today.

That requires you to go through the cycle of unlearning to come up with a new mindset and get ready with your next businessventure!

I interviewed the major expert on the topic so that you can get started on this mindset shift:

Master “Unlearning” To Build A Successful Business With Barry O’Reilly [Interview]

Fall in love with the problem

Entrepreneurship is about solving problems for a group of people. If that group is large enough to enable you to build a company so that you’re in business. While that might sound trivial, Ash Maurya reminded us to focus on finding what he calls problem/solution fit.

Indeed, many entrepreneurs fall in love with the solution, its features, and technology behind it. This makes them lose sight of the most important thing, the problem they need to help people solve!

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I interviewed Ash Maurya to help us find the way toward problem/solution fit:

Lessons On Running Lean With Ash Maurya [Lecture]

Digital transformation starts from very few essential elements

When I interviewed David Rogers, I was impressed by the framework he had put together to help companies of any size to make sense of digital transformation. This is a topic that can easily fall into a buzzword. However, David Rogers has consulted for decades organizations to make sense of the digital revolution that started in the 1990s, and it is still going.

It goes through five key elements that have changed in the digital era:

Customers
Competition
Data
Innovation
Value

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From the interview, I had with David Rogers you can learn the most critical aspects of digital transformation and how to deal with them:

Breaking Down Digital Transformation With David L. Rogers [Lecture]

The real disruption? Focus on the customer value chain

Disruptive business models also fall into the buzzword category. Where we all talk about it but a few really make sense of it, or understand this phenomenon. That is why I decided to interview HBS professor, Thales Teixeira. The research from Thales is so straightforward, in-depth, and insightful that it helps you understand the nuts and bolts of what disruptive business models stand for.

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For that matter, you can read the full interview:

A Guide To Disruptive Business Models With Thales Teixeira [Lecture]

The dominating business model

I spoke to dozens of authors, experts, and entrepreneurs, and they all seem to agree that the dominating business model of this era is the platform business model. This is another term which often gets misunderstood in the business world.

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That is why I brought in the author of Modern Monopolies to explain is what’s that makes those platform business models special:

Dissecting Platform Business Models With Nick Johnson [Lecture]

To make sure, you don’t need to build a platform business model to be a successful entrepreneur. Quite the opposite. Initially, you might want to start small and build a linear business instead.

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If you aim to scale up, then, you might want to consider to build a platform business model.

Also, as most of the largest companies that dominate today’s digital era is comprised of platform business model, it might be useful to understand how those businesses work so that you can ride the wave of those successful companies to build your own small enterprise.

Need for speed? Then it is time to Blitzscale

Blitzscaling is a model explained by Reed Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn:

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This is a model in which speed becomes critical. To make sure, this model is not suited for all scenarios, and it’s not a size-fits-all. Quite the opposite. This is a model that you might want to consider if you need to survive in a competitive landscape that has quickly changed.

That’s because in some circumstances the survival of your business might depend on its ability to scale faster than the competition. This is where Blitzscaling comes handy:

[image error]In all other scenarios, you might want to rely on more traditional tools.
Must-have startup tools

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The business model canvas comprises nine building blocks:

Key partners
Key activities
Value proposition
Customer relationship
Customer segment
Key resource
Distribution channel
Cost structure
Revenue stream

Those can help you understand how an organization works. You can also use the value proposition canvas to define and draft a compelling value proposition that holds together your business model.

However, if you’re building up a startup, you’re still in the process of understanding how to solve a fundamental problem. For that matter, the lean startup canvas might be a better-suited.

Alternative business tools

The tools above are some just of the tools available to entrepreneurs. The primary purpose is to have a simple, straightforward way to help businesspeople make clarity, understand their assumption, design business experiments, and run those experiments quickly and cheaply.

In this way, they can gather critical feedback to get the business off the ground before the money runs out, as Steve Blank points out.

For that matter, below other tools are highlighted:

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How To Design A Winning Business Model With Adam J. Bock [Interview]

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Discussing Business Model Innovation With Felix Hofmann [Lecture]

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Pretotyping: How To Find The Right Idea To Avoid Business Failure With Alberto Savoia [Lecture]

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The FourWeekMBA Business Model Framework

Business resources: