Validate Your Startup

1st April 2024

28th March 2024

✓ Have an early-stage tech startup idea
✓ Fully committed to the learning process
✓ Not afraid of receiving critical feedback

What Makes Our Program Unique?

The majority of first-time startup founders skip the problem validation and customer validation stages because they're convinced their idea will succeed. They invest between $50k-$200k of their own money, only to find out later there's not enough demand to scale the business.

Our program was specifically designed to help you avoid this mistake.

Faster Time-to-Market
at Significantly Lower Cost

See your startup vision become a reality in just 8 weeks. Accomplish more in less time and with less money, regardless of your experience and technical knowledge.

Personalized 1-on-1
Coaching & Feedback

Have individual coaching sessions with industry experts, get all your questions answered, and be held accountable while accelerating your startup journey.

Use Tools & Methods to Deliver Outcomes, Not Outputs

Use a step-by-step framework with practical activities based on the Lean Startup methodology to rapidly validate and test the riskiest assumptions about your business.

No-Code MVP
Development & Testing

Work on practical activities designed to teach non-technical founders how to develop and test a no-code MVP without needing to hire a developer or designer.

Get Your First
Paying Customers

Test your idea with the market, get feedback from real customers, and chart a course toward monetizing your business within just 8 weeks.

Forever-Access
to All Online Materials

You'll forever have access to our online curriculum — including training videos, templates, activities, and any hosted experiments you've run.

Check If You're A Good Fit For The Program - Book A Free Consultation

We've Worked with Hundreds
of Startup Founders

Valeria Oliveira has always been an entrepreneur at heart. She's passionate about solving problems and obsessed with empowering people. Her favorite thing is to create safe communities where people can become the best version of themselves: creative, innovative, and driven while collaborating to make a positive impact.

After a long and diverse career as an ESL Teacher and Head of Studies, she felt that the skills she gained through her personal and professional experiences could make a difference in the world—so she decided to deep-dive into entrepreneurship.

Her first startup project was an immigration SaaS business that failed because she invested time, effort, and money into all the wrong things. She didn’t spend enough time validating the idea and the market properly. Through this journey, Valeria started informally coaching other founders in a startup accelerator program and realized it was her calling to help other founders avoid the same mistakes that she had made.

Nowadays, as a full-time coach for startups and entrepreneurs at Validate Your Startup, Valeria helps tech startup founders get their ideas off the ground faster.

Ryan MacCarrigan is a Lean Startup coach with more than a decade of experience working with startups. Prior to founding his consultancy LeanStudio, he was on the leadership team at several high-growth startups including Lean Startup Machine, Advisor, and CoreStream. He also teaches semester-length courses at UC Berkeley including "Innovative Business Models for Entrepreneurs" and "Design Thinking & Prototyping".

Ryan has facilitated hundreds of entrepreneurship-focused trainings and workshops across the U.S., Europe, and Asia—helping thousands of entrepreneurs, product leaders, and corporate innovators validate and launch new products faster. This includes engagements with companies like SanDisk, Lowe's, Unilever, Panera Bread, Epson, Disney, LG, Fujitsu, CBRE, and Singularity University; as well as numerous projects with consultancies like Mind the Product, Philosophie, and Kromatic.

Ryan is passionate about building agile, cross-functional teams that can apply the core principles of Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and Systems Thinking with the goal of breaking down silos, running experiments to de-risk assumptions, and delivering outstanding products and experiences.

"Ryan is an organized instructor who develops strong relationships with his students. He helped me develop my own project from scratch in the Bay Area. His teaching concepts and topics in Lean Startup and entrepreneurship are exceptional."

Benjamin Levy, Chief of Staff at Orange Business

"Like all great teachers and consultants, Ryan meets everyone where they are at with usable insight, critical thinking and empathy. His deep understanding in consumer behavior and decision-making shines through at both the strategic and tactical aspects of startup founder coaching."

Suzanne Shade, Founder & CEO at Bare Hands

Personalized 1-on-1 Coaching is Our "Special Sauce"

We strongly believe that every first-time startup founder deserves a top-quality coach, no matter their financial circumstances. We know from experience how vital coaching and mentorship is to any early-stage business. That's why our pricing model reflects a wide range of budgets and needs.

You get to decide how much coaching you receive over the course of our initial 8-week program. If you'd like to learn more about the coaching process, feel free to schedule a consultation and we'll answer your questions. We're excited to hear your story and help you begin your startup founder journey.

Still Have Questions About the Program?

info@validateyourstartup.com

Apply Now to Join the Next Cohort

"Ryan ran a very intense session on Lean Startup. His subject knowledge was excellent, but most importantly, he made sure we left with plenty of new skills."

Ed, Former Student
Google Design Director

"The program was beyond what I expected. They helped us prioritise what we needed to do for our startup. I've never seen it done like this before."

Ian, Former Student
Hacker Exchange

"Ryan has an incredible gift to control the emotions and learning phases of the individuals that participate in his courses, and he is naturally at home commanding the respect of global thought leaders."

Dave, Former Student
WUKA Co-Founder & COO

Program Overview

The 8-week program offers a mix of video-based lessons, audio lessons (podcast format), practical activities, group workshops and 1-on-1 coaching sessions with highly experienced startup coaches.

The curriculum is divided into six key areas, each of which contain multiple learning modules.

Unit 1:
Startup Mindset

Course Introduction
Growth v. Fixed Mindset
Evidence-Driven Mindset
Key Personality Traits
Reframing the Fear of Failure
Tools & Frameworks to Stay Organized

Unit 2:
Entrepreneurship Fundamentals

Intro to Lean Startup methodology
Discovering Customer Needs
Focus on the Riskiest Assumptions
Overview of Research Methods
Intro to Business Model Design
Intro to Hypotheses & Experiments
Intro to Metrics Frameworks
Expanding Your Toolkit

Unit 3:
Problem Validation

What does a "Good Idea" Look Like?
Overview of Ideation Methods
Provisional Customer Personas
Generative v. Evaluative Research
Research Methods Part 1
How Much Research is Enough?
Validating B2B v. B2C

Unit 4:
Market Validation

Analyzing Market Trends
Competitive Landscape
Synthesizing Market Data
Testing Your Value Proposition
Research Methods Part 2
Types of Customer Validation
You've Validated Your Problem & Customer...Now What?

Unit 5:
Business Model Design

Lean Canvas v. Biz Model Canvas
Types of Business Models
Desirability, Feasibility, Viability
When to Pivot Your Business Model
Spotting New Opportunities
Turning Risky Assumptions into Testable Hypotheses & Experiments

Unit 6:
Running Experiments

Fostering Evidence-Driven Culture
Avoiding Bias in Decision Making
S.M.A.R.T. Experiment Planning
Experiment Methods Part 1
Experiment Methods Part 2
Building Your 1st No-Code MVP
MVP Objectives & Key Results

Apply Now to Join the Next Cohort

READY TO BEGIN YOUR STARTUP JOURNEY?

VALIDATE YOUR STARTUP IDEA IN JUST 8 WEEKS

Apply Now to Join the Program