What is Lean Essentials Sprint?
Lean Essentials Sprint (LES) is an accelerator designed to help founders starting innovative, scalable companies discover their customer, validate that customer, establish the value proposition, and work through many other key components needed to launch and scale a successful business.
The Lean Essentials Sprint is based on the "lean start-up" methodology; an approach that favors experimentation, customer feedback, and iterative design with concepts such as "minimum viable product" and "pivoting," rather than traditional elaborate planning, intuition, and design perfected before implementation.
The course is designed to accomplish three basic objectives:
- Entrepreneurs must let go of their precious “ideas.” Ideas don’t make money, business models with customers make money, and teams that execute make money.
- The answers are outside the building. Entrepreneurs must go get primary data directly from potential customers and partners in order to truly get insights into the idea, the model, and the viability of the business.
- Business acumen matters. Startups must have a basic understanding of business models, pricing, costing, margins, market capacity, and product/service capacity in order to make good business decisions.
Course Structure
- Class 1 : Business Model Canvas
- Class 2 : Product Positioning & Value Proposition
- Class 3 : Customer Interviews
- Class 4 : Customer Interviews, Relationships & Minimum Viable Product
- Class 5 : Market Research & TAM SAM SOM
- Class 6 : Finance
- Class 7 : Funnels, Channels & Metrics
- Class 8 : Pitching & Mission & Vision
- Class 9 : Demo Day, Class Presentations and Insights
Pre-Readings (to be completed before the first session)
Download pre-readings, required to take the course.
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Please contact sbdc@sandiego.edu for more information.
The LES course allowed us to tackle and confidently formulate/iterate a customer-focused business model through customer interviews in a short period of time. It’s also the best way to learn how to fail fast so you can win big, fast!
The LES course really accelerated my ability to steer the ship at ChargeNet.With other startup founders and CEOs, I gained a broad perspective and learned how to lead, to direct, and how to frame what I’m doing for the future.
Our Partners
Funded in part through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Funded in part through a Grant with the California Office of the Small Business Advocate; all opinions, conclusions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the California Office of the Small Business Advocate.
The Accelerate California: Innovation Hub Program (Accelerate CA) is funded by the State of California and administered by the California Office of the Small Business Advocate (CalOSBA).