Objective: Effective Learning Design for Entrepreneurs
In my role as Lead Educator and Instructional Designer at the social venture incubator, Groundswell, I redesigned and taught the BUILD Program curriculum, helping emerging founders develop entrepreneurial skills and launch impact-focused startups.
After a few years of running this program, the team was looking for ways to make better use of resources and get founders further along in the development of their ventures—all while maintaining the community-based, collaborative experience that Groundswell is known for.
After interviewing alumni, and working closely with the founding team and board members, I was able to map out the current systems and environment to identify the following areas to drive the greatest improvement:
- Enhance resource integration and accessibility. Groundswell had a vast network of partners, mentors, and alumni, as well as opportunities for founders that were largely unstructured, diffuse, and underutilized.
- Simplify curriculum, focusing on product-market fit. Distracted by less important concerns, founders in previous cohorts often relegated the search for product-market fit, resulting in large pivots late in the program.
- Increase accountability. Follow-through on difficult tasks was a challenge for most founders. There wasn’t a concrete system in place to set and track progress towards important milestones.
Given these challenges and opportunities, my goals were to:
- Design and implement a centralized system to connect founders to each other and to resources such as tools, funding opportunities, relevant information, and mentors (online and in-person).
- Create and teach a student-centered, action-oriented curriculum focused on finding product-market fit and making tangible progress towards specific, founder-driven goals.
- Restructure and facilitate the mentorship program by increasing efficiency and accountability, with the aim of helping founders launch sustainable ventures within six months.
Below, I outline my redesign and teaching of the program, and include some of my own learnings along the way. My post Insights from Teaching Social Entrepreneurship, touches on this too, if you’re curious.
1. Incubator Systems Design: Connecting Entrepreneurs
In this age of information, we knew that our greatest strength wouldn’t be the knowledge we conveyed, but the support network we provided founders and alumni. The team at Groundswell and I focused on building a system and curriculum around a high-touch, personalized, and community-oriented experience for founders.
In order to make this work, we needed to put founders at the center of our community immediately by facilitating connections. It was also important that we optimized our limited human and financial resources through implementing more structured systems. In other words, we wanted to integrate the cohort programming, mentorship, and networking in a seamless way to maximize both the chances of success for each founder and the loyalty of the alumni community. For example, we found ways to incorporate alumni and partners into existing events such as potluck dinners and the Test Market, which gave founders multiple opportunities to build relationships and gain insight in low-pressure environments.
We created a system using freely-available tools, connecting Slack (for group communication), Google Docs (recreated editable Lean Canvas, Roadmap, and mentorship templates), Google Sheets (for accessing resources, and scheduling mentorship), and Google Slides (accessing curriculum and founders’ most up-to-date content). We also planned touch-points around certain events to track each founder’s progress and their utilization of resources.
Below, I highlight the different aspects of the program and how we thought about improving efficiency and community integration while maintaining the human-centric experience that Groundswell is famous for.
2. Curriculum and Learning Design: Equipping Entrepreneurs
From my own experience as an entrepreneur, I knew the importance of having a ‘north star’ or OMTM (One Metric That Matters). I wanted to center the curriculum around helping each founder define and track progress towards his or her north star metric, keeping it at the forefront of each workshop and mentoring session. It’s easy to get stuck in the weeds (especially in educational settings) with questions such as:
“Do I have the right financial projections?”
“Is my website search-engine-optimized?”
“Is my logo cool enough for this market?”
These questions have some value, especially for later-stage startups, but for nascent ventures, asking “Have I found product-market fit?” is priority number one.
To answer this key question, a founder has to leave the building, speak to potential users or customers, and measure progress towards a north star metric (which could be anything from email newsletter signups, to letters of intent, to paying customers, depending on the state and nature of the startup).
During the one-on-one and group mentorship sessions, we helped founders identify their north star metric based on their product/service, target market, and business model. We then made tracking it a priority by having each founder use a Product Roadmap that we designed to be used in each mentoring session. In-person, we started each session with a group check-in where founders would give a brief update on where they were in relation to their north star metric goal, what they were having trouble with, and where they needed support. We found this extremely useful for keeping the focus on achieving the goals that mattered, and away from pursuits that wouldn’t result in traction.
Agile Teaching & Incorporating Feedback
I wrote in my last post that teachers should operate more like agile startups by speaking with alumni and students while crafting curriculum, dividing instruction into short modules, and frequently adapting lessons to student progress and feedback.
It wouldn’t be right to spend all day teaching about listening to users and iterating quickly, and not incorporate these concepts into my own instructional design. Using a quick online survey after each class, I was able to gauge how the founders were receiving my instruction and what they needed more or less of. I’d include these in our class discussions.
An example: in Stage II of the curriculum (see curriculum image above) I had allocated only one session to helping founders create a landing page. After reviewing feedback from founders after that class, I realized I’d underestimated the importance of this activity and ended up tripling the time we devoted to this mid-way through the program. Because I had split the course into short, interchangeable modules, I was able to increase the time spent on the module by incorporating the topics of validation, marketing, and A/B testing into these sessions without skipping content.
3. Mentoring: Supporting Entrepreneurs
As part of our people-centric program, I knew we’d have to nail the mentorship aspect, placing the focus on accountability, and making it both efficient and effective for founders and mentors alike. Here are a few things we learned:
Assigned mentorship and shared, online documents increased transparency and efficiency
Based on my analysis, mentorship meetings fall short of expectations for three reasons:
- The mentee is not prepared and doesn’t have a clear agenda for the meeting.
- The mentor requires too much time at the beginning of the session to catch up on what’s going on and doesn’t have a chance to prepare concise, actionable advice to address the founder’s issues.
- The pair don’t have a shared set of documents to measure progress towards a clear goal before, during, and after each session.
Some programs leave it up to the mentor/mentee to arrange meetings when they need them. We found it vital that each founder had one assigned mentor who they’d check in with once per week. We found this forced the founder to create short-term deliverables and be held accountable for meeting goals.
As part of this system, I also created a set of documents that would keep the founder and mentor on track. First, each founder kept a shared document where they’d define an agenda with a set of specific, focused questions before the meetings and notify their mentors a day in advance. This included a roadmap template in visual form that the mentor could quickly review.
I also took the Social Lean Canvas (an adaptation of the Business Model Canvas) and recreated it in a Google Doc, allowing founders to consistently update their business model and receive comments from peers and mentors. The team and I found the Canvas to be the central tool for helping founders plan and communicate their ventures.
Peer mentorship
It takes an entrepreneur to know an entrepreneur. In addition to assigning an experienced mentor to work 1-on-1 with each founder, we carefully placed founders into peer groups who’d meet weekly to discuss their challenges and progress. We encouraged candour and empathy and found these meetings created strong social bonds between founders that lasted beyond the program. Perhaps the most beneficial part of these meetings was the action declaration: we had each founder state weekly goals that the group was to hold them accountable to at the start of the following meeting.
Wrapping up
I enjoyed the process of observing, analyzing, and redesigning a startup incubator program. It’s a unique environment filled with exciting ideas and energetic individuals.
Looking ahead, I’m curious about designing systems and services within an incubator to help founders iterate more quickly, as I often observed founders spending inordinate amounts of time creating logos, websites, and product mockups. This could take the form of in-house ‘prototype teams’ made up of developers, designers, and marketers who could help the founder shape an initial product to test in the market. This would allow the founder to focus the bulk of his or her time on talking to users and finding product-market fit.
I’ll end with what I wrote at the conclusion of the program in the post Insights from Teaching Social Entrepreneurship:
Looking back at my first year teaching at Groundswell, I couldn’t have asked for a more diverse, interesting, and supportive community of aspiring entrepreneurs to work with. I’ve enjoyed seeing the progress, the epiphanies, and most importantly, the passion of each of the participants. Their visions for a better world give me hope that we will eventually solve the most pressing social and environmental challenges of our time.
I’m always looking for good people, new projects, and interesting ideas. Say ‘hi’ at isaiah.w.b [at] gmail.com or on LinkedIn
Check out some other projects I’ve been working on:
