Based on decades of experience ideating, validating, creating, growing, and funding startups (from both sides of the table), my partners and I are developing a framework to help entrepreneurs with the first critical steps of their journey.

Our goal is to help founders build upon the traditional business plan and ideation tools out there to focus on executing what matters: acquiring and retaining happy, paying customers.

To practically support new founders as best as possible, we’ve baked this framework into a collaborative online tool (currently in private beta) and a comprehensive book project.

As you can imagine, each step of the framework has a significant number of sub-steps and talking points to leverage industry best-practices.

Here are some highlights:

• Founders should plan to create and grow their business before considering external funding. This is one of the most universal points of feedback (and frustration) from angel investors and venture capitalists around the world.  As the Lean community highlights well, an idea should be smartly and vigorously tested and validated before time is invested to create the product and business.
• That being said, overly focusing on Lean principles can lead to climbing small hills when there’s a scalable mountain in the other direction. This often happens when founders pay too much attention to feedback from a small sample size. Casting a big vision to your team and customers is still important.
• The operations involved with actually creating your product is always a chaotic mess. We’ve found that intensely debating an “Overview Story” and “UI Spec" before writing code or building wireframes speeds up product development by a factor of ten or more.
• Founders who start operating a business without building a solid financial model (from scratch!) are flying blind. Along with the back-of-napkin financial analysis during the validation stage, building a robust financial model is an absolutely critical step.

You get the idea…read more about the details here.
Below are a couple early screenshots of the product to help teams collaborate on their business as they work through the framework.
If you’re interested in joining our friends in the private beta, click here to jump in the queue and we’ll hook you up.
Author’s note: FYI, I’ve written up the first set of articles outlining details within the initial framework steps. Feel free to subscribe to my newsletter and I’ll let you know when I get new content up. Thanks!