Curriculum Outcomes: What You Build in the Validation Sprints

The final demo week brings everything you have learned together into one strong presentation.

• Give your capstone demo and use the feedback from the past four weeks.
• Explain your traction and strategy in a way that gets investors interested.
• Show how your business went from early customer interviews to a product that makes money.
• Practice what you say after the pitch when someone wants to learn more.
• Leave with a presentation you can use in real investor and sales meetings.

An email list gives you a direct way to stay in touch with potential customers. This sprint helps you start building one.

• Learn why an email list can reduce your reliance on paid ads.
• Grow your list with useful content that gives people a reason to sign up.
• Group subscribers by their interests so you can send more relevant emails later.
• Set targets for list growth and track how many people sign up.
• Leave with a working system and your first 50 to 100 subscribers.

This sprint helps you create a strong offer and find potential customers.

• Use Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers to build an offer around the result you provide.
• Set a price that reflects the value your offer provides.
• Build a simple system for finding and qualifying potential customers.
• Map the steps a potential customer takes before making a purchase.
• Leave with an offer you feel good about and a growing list of potential customers.

Selling is a skill you can learn. This sprint helps you get better at selling without sounding pushy.

• Discover why selling can feel uncomfortable and how to help people make a good decision.
• Practice the basic skills that help you build trust with potential customers.
• Follow a simple sales process that moves a prospect toward a buying decision.
• Learn how to handle common objections about price and timing.
• Leave with a sales approach that feels natural to you and works with qualified leads.

Many founders can have a good sales conversation but still struggle to close the deal. This sprint focuses on getting the customer to say yes.

• Know when a prospect is ready to buy and make it easy for them to take the next step.
• Learn closing techniques that work for early-stage founders and use them ethically.
• Find out why a deal stalls at the end and how to move it forward.
• Use Go for No by Fenton and Waltz to see rejection as part of selling.
• Leave with a closing script and follow-up plan for your current leads.

Winning the sale is only the beginning. Good delivery gives customers a reason to stay and recommend you.

• Learn how good delivery can increase customer value over time.
• Create an onboarding process that sets clear expectations and gives customers a great first experience.
• Find the moment when a customer knows they made the right choice.
• Build a delivery process that works without you handling every step.
• Leave with a clear delivery process you can use for every new customer.

Happy customers can help you grow. This sprint shows you how to turn great customer experiences into more business.

• Learn why customers who recommend you are more valuable than customers who are simply satisfied.
• Find the moments that make customers want to tell others about you.
• Create a referral program that makes it easy for customers to recommend you.
• Collect testimonials and case studies that help new customers trust you.
• Leave with a system that helps your best customers bring in new business.

Moving from founder-driven revenue to sustainable growth is one of the hardest shifts in entrepreneurship.

• See why the habits that brought in your first sales stop working as the business grows.
• Use principles to set aside profit before you spend the rest.
• Learn which numbers show that your growth has become repeatable.
• Put systems in place so the business can grow without you handling every task.
• Leave with a 90-day growth goal that aligns with your vision.

Most of your customers will come from one or two channels. This sprint helps you find the channels that work best for your business.

• Learn about the 19 traction channels from Traction by Weinberg and Mares.
• Use the Bullseye Framework to rank the channels that could work for your business.
• Test each channel with a small budget before putting more into it.
• Find where your customers are easiest and cheapest to reach.
• Leave with a clear channel plan and your first test underway.

The second channel sprint helps you focus on the channels that bring in the best customers.

• Review your results and find which channels bring in qualified leads.
• Improve your message and targeting within your strongest channel.
• Learn when a channel stops producing results and when to try another one.
• Invest in content and community, which can take time to produce results.
• Build partnerships that can bring in customers over time.
• Leave with a 90-day channel plan and clear metrics for deciding whether to stay or switch.

The right numbers help you make better decisions faster.

• Learn which numbers matter and which ones only look good.
• Track customer acquisition cost to see what you spend to win each customer.
• Track lifetime value to see what each customer is worth over time, and watch how quickly customers leave.
• Build a simple dashboard that shows the numbers you need each week.
• Review your numbers each week and decide what you need to change.
• Choose the 3 or 4 metrics you will use to guide your decisions.

As your business grows, your decisions matter more than the hours you put in.

• Learn which biases can lead you to make poor decisions.
• Run a pre-mortem by imagining the decision failed and figuring out what went wrong.
• Use the Superforecasting approach to estimate the odds of different outcomes and update them as you learn more.
• Keep a decision log so you can learn from your results and avoid repeating mistakes.
• Leave with a system you can use for every major business decision.

The last Class 9 sprint helps you serve more customers without adding more hours to your workload.

• Learn how to grow delivery without simply working longer.
• Turn your service into a clear process that keeps quality high as you add customers.
• Use automation and delegation to handle more work.
• Create a delivery model that keeps the experience your early customers valued.
• Enter Semester 4 with a business that can grow and deliver consistently.

Class 10 starts by helping you build systems that let the business grow without relying on you for everything.

• Define capacity as serving more customers without adding founder hours at the same rate.
• Learn how to think like a CEO instead of handling every task yourself.
• Find the bottlenecks that would stop you from serving twice as many customers today.
• Document your processes so other people can follow them.
• Leave with a plan for the next 6 sprints based on what will have the biggest impact on growth.

The right technology can help your business handle more work as it grows. This sprint helps you build a tech stack that works for your business.

• Review your current tools and find gaps or duplicate tools.
• Learn what makes a technology stack work well together.
• Judge each new tool by the problem it solves and what happens if you do not use it.
• Plan the technology your business needs now and as it grows.
• Leave knowing which 2 or 3 technology investments will add the most capacity.

AI is becoming a useful tool for growing businesses. This sprint shows you how to use it without a technical background.

• Learn what current AI tools can do well and where they fall short.
• See how small business founders can use AI today.
• Judge an AI tool by the result it produces for your business.
• Find 3 to 5 tasks AI can handle faster or at a lower cost.
• Leave with at least one new AI tool in use and adding value to your business.

You move from trying AI tools to using them in your daily work.

• Learn how to write prompts that produce better results.
• Build AI workflows for tasks you do over and over.
• Connect AI tools to your current software to reduce manual work.
• Know when you can trust AI output and when you need to check it.
• Leave with 2 or 3 workflows that save you measurable time each week.

Advanced AI can do more than save time. This sprint shows you how to use it to give your business an advantage.

• Explore custom AI tools such as retrieval systems and agents that can take action for you.
• Use AI to support your team and help people make better decisions.
• Design an AI-supported version of one important part of your business.
• Learn why businesses that adopt AI quickly can gain an advantage.
• Leave with an AI system that gives your business a measurable advantage.

Class 10 closes by bringing your people and tools together so the business can run without you making every decision.

• Delegate properly by transferring context and decision-making authority, not just tasks.
• Document workflows so someone else can meet your standards without supervision.
• Decide where people can do better work and where automation can create leverage.
• Build an operating model that fits your team size and growth plans.
• Leave with a delegation plan that frees you to work on the business.