USC and Techstars Startup Weekend

Market research: How to Understand Your Customers: This provides a framework for thinking about the actual problem you’re solving as you begin customer validation.

Brex

Brex is an all-in-one financial stack, offering a founder-friendly corporate card, business account with FDIC insurance up to $6M and high yield through money market securities, expense management solution, and financial modeling software. Startups from incorporation to IPO use Brex to manage their finances.

Techstars Startup Weekend founders get 30,000 points after spending $1,000 on their Brex card, $5,000 AWS Credits, access to $150K in SaaS discounts, and Empower essential for free. Participants must open an account with Brex and apply for the offer. Participants must open an account with Brex and apply for the offer. Brex welcomes international founders and only requires US Incorporation and an EIN. See here for more details about the requirements.

Other tools and services that might come in handy during the weekend: 

• CRM: Hubspot

• Market Research: Think with Google, AYTM

• Keyword Research: Google Keywords, Wordtracker

• Legal: Founders Legal SmartUp, legalzoom, RocketLawyer, UpCounsel

• Videos/Presentations: Prezi, Google Slides

• Automation: Zapier

• Finances: Expensify

• Communities/Local Events: Eventbrite, Meetup

• Women Focus: Switch the Future, Girls in Tech

• Design/UI Tools: Whimsical, Lucid Chart, Miro

• Dev Tools: Google App Maker, Aptana, Google Chrome

• Email Integration: Sendgrid 

• Domains: GoDaddy Registry

• Hosting: Heroku, Github

• Educational: Codecademy, Udacity, Appsumo

• Task/Project Management: Asana, Podio, Todoist, Trello

• Mailing lists/groups: Google Groups

• Forms/Surveys: Google Forms, Survey Monkey

• Personal Storage: Dropbox, Google Drive

• Social Media/Marketing: Unbounce, Google Analytics

• Social sharing: ShareThis

• Ad Promotion: Google Ads, Meta Ads 

• Business Cards: Moo.com

• Email Marketing: Mailchimp, iContact

Business Model

• Is it a unique idea?

• What is their key value proposition?

• How do they plan on making this a successful business?

• Have they thought about competition, how to scale, acquiring customers, and their revenue model?

• Have they identified a specific target market?

• How will they acquire their first 100 customers?

Customer Validation

• Did the team talk to customers?

• Who will be their users, who will be their customers, and are they different?

• How many users have they interviewed?

• Did they target the correct people to interview?

• What did they learn from their customer interviews?

• What are the core needs of their users?

Execution and Design

• What feedback did they get to inspire the development of their Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?

• Did they build a prototype? (Any medium is fine)

• How effective is their MVP for the purpose of the weekend? 

• How functional is their technical demo, if applicable?

• How easy is it for the user to navigate and use their product?

• Were they able to incorporate customer feedback into the solution?

• Persona: A fictitious customer profile based on first and second-hand research that helps determine who you should be directing your marketing efforts towards

• Problem/Solution Fit: When you have established through customer interviews that you have found a problem people have and that people are interested in the solution you have for it.

• Product/Market Fit: Once your product is out in the market and has real users, this is when you’ve gone beyond problem/solution and are building demonstrable traction for your product.

• Pivot: When you encounter a challenge with your assumptions about the problem, the customer, or perhaps the market itself, and you have to make meaningful and fundamental changes to the product strategy.

• Lean Startup: From the Eric Ries book, this can most simply be described as the process of constant iteration through the idea of “build, measure, learn”.

• Customer Development: Steve Blank’s framework of talking to your potential customers to validate the hypotheses you have around their problems, and solutions that might solve those problems.

• Unique Value Proposition: a clear statement that describes the benefit of your offer, how you solve your customer's needs, and what distinguishes you from the competition.

• Prototype: Anything that conveys the value proposition of your solution, but doesn’t have to be a functional product.

• MVP: The most bare-bones and essential product you can possibly build while still providing the value proposition.

• Go-to-Market: Strategy built on a mix of sales and marketing, tested to see what channels and tactics will most effectively convert customers to your product.

• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): The cost of getting one more customer to buy/join your product.

• LTV (Lifetime Value of a Customer): The average revenue generated by a customer. (This must be more than your CAC!)

• B2B: A business model where your company creates products for other businesses. B2C: A business model where your company creates products for consumers.