The mandatory foundation. What a startup is and is not, how it differs from a small business or an agency, the vocabulary of ownership and money, and the map of the whole journey.
Lessons
What actually is a startup? — A startup is not just a new company, and it is not the same thing as a small business, an agency or freelancing. The difference decides how you fund it, how fast you must grow, and what counts as success. (12 min)
Venture-backed or bootstrapped? — Two completely different ways to fund a company, with different risks, different speeds and different definitions of winning. Most founders never consciously choose. (12 min)
The words everyone assumes you know — Founder vs CEO, shareholder vs employee, customer vs user, revenue vs profit, valuation vs cash, equity vs salary. Twenty minutes here saves a lot of nodding along in meetings. (15 min)
The map of the whole journey — Problem → idea → customer discovery → validation → MVP → first users → product-market fit → revenue → growth → funding → scale. Where you are decides what you should be learning. (10 min)
What a founder's job actually is — Not building. In the first year the job is finding out what to build, getting the first customers, and not running out of money — in that order. (10 min)
Should you start a company at all? — An honest look at what it costs, what it requires, and the good reasons not to. Nobody else is going to ask you this. (10 min)