Today, Vancouver-based incubator Launch Academy announced a partnership with Startup Canada to help Canadian entrepreneurs prevent common mistakes as they build their early-stage ventures.
The two institutions are teaming up to launch LEAP Online, an online course designed to help entrepreneurs validate their ideas in a more scientific way. LEAP Online is the online version of Launch Academy’s Lean Entrepreneur Acceleration Program (LEAP), which, over the past three years, has graduated more than 200 aspiring entrepreneurs in Vancouver. The Next Big Thing, a charitable organization co-founded by Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes and serial entrepreneur Mereditch Powell, also runs their cohort of young entrepreneurs through LEAP.
“After mentoring 1,000 entrepreneurs and incubating more than 400 startups, we realized that most entrepreneurs make the same expensive mistakes,” said Alex Chuang, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Launch Academy. “And what we have discovered was a lot of these common mistakes can be easily prevented if entrepreneurs know how to design and conduct meaningful startup experiments. That is why we have condensed all of our learnings in the past four years into this online course so anyone can learn how to build a startup from anywhere.”
The online course covers a wider variety of topics including:
- Introduction to Startups
- The Fundamentals of Lean Methodology
- Introduction to Lean Canvas
- How to conduct a problem research
- How to construct a predictive persona
- How to design a startup experiment
- How to conduct a startup experiment
- How to launch your startup with limited resources
- How to measure the right key metrics
“There is an abundance of startup resources on the Internet today but many entrepreneurs don’t know where to start or how to start,” said Victoria Lennox, CEO of Startup Canada. “What LEAP Online has done is borrow the most salient knowledge from some of the world’s best startup experts and package it into a framework that entrepreneurs can apply for any type of startup idea they may have.”
