Playbooks
Professor Jack Derby, Founder and Chief Coach of Derby Management, is providing free access to his e-book on business plan development.
Professor Jack Derby, Founder and Chief Coach of Derby Management, is providing free access to his e-book on delivering winning presentations.
Templates
Customer acquisition templates include a buyer persona map that helps you clearly articulate the differences between everyone who plays a role in a "buy" decision: the economic buyer, the champion, the end user, the influencer, the veto power and more.
Explore templates for creating a customer research protocol/ project plan as well as a template for interview notes.
For first time entrepreneurs without financial training: Check out two Excel files that provide a template for
- A 5-year pro-forma profit and loss statement (also known as an income statement)
- Multiple simplified models for forecasting revenue for different types of businesses including hardware, software, service and more
For corporate innovators and entrepreneurs, they need to understand not only the venture creation process but also how to navigate within their organization, build strong alliances, create coalitions of support and align personal and organizational interests. It is both harder and easier than building a standalone startup but the payoff is immense if an internal new venture creation effort takes off with the power and might of an existing organization with budget, reach and resources.
Some of the things a corporate innovator need to work on include:
- Identifying assets and obstacles within their organization
- Identifying and mapping stakeholders
- Mapping and aligning interests with stakeholders and with the company's strategy
- Metrics and governance for new ventures
- ... etc
Pitching your venture, especially in a pitch competition or at the Demo Day of a mainstream accelerator such as Y Combinator or TechStars, is a peculiar art form. This folder contains templates that helps you deliver elevator pitches and 5 minute pitches in the 2021 style. Enjoy.
Metabeta (a company founded by Marius Ursache, the illustration artist for Bill Aulet's "Disciplined Entrepreneurship" book and maintains the DEtoolbox.com website) has a good article on how to formulate a good problem statement. A copy of the problem statement canvas that Marius provides may be found in the following Google Drive folder.
In Lean Startup methodology, hypothesis testing takes on a very specific format, and the framework is very helpful in defining and running experiments that helps a new venture team decide to persevere or pivot.
Check out our templates for team process as well as accountability. Templates include the following and more:
- Roles and responsibilities worksheet (RACI)
- Daily, weekly and monthly accountability templates (modeled after the Agile software development process)
- Retrospective and planning worksheets (modeled after the Agile software development process)
- Mentor meeting preparation worksheet
There are many tools of the trade that product managers use to define a product. Some of them include:
- The Moore's Positioning Statement - the #1 tool to help you frame your product's reason-to-be and unique value proposition in 1 page.
- The competitive 2x2 - thinking about the competitive landscape in the mindset of your customers and/or economic buyers and not in the context of the product category or technology platform that you play in
- The persona - product people have a love-hate relationship with personas but at the end of the day, a simple 4-quadrant format such as the one provided can save a new venture team a lot of time by helping them communicate who they are solving problems for and what their needs, wants and expectations are.