The document outlines the agenda and key components of a startup bootcamp led by Dave Parker, focusing on critical topics such as telling your story, market research, customer development, and preparing pitch decks. It provides a comprehensive guide on assessing startup readiness, addressing weaknesses, and creating value through product, team, and market strategies. Additionally, it highlights the importance of customer development, competitive analysis, and the significance of establishing clear expectations among co-founders.

1. Copyright, DKParker, LLC 2020
Dave Parker
@DaveParkerSEA
https://www.dkparker.com/flat6-labs-jordon-bootcamp-cycle-1/
Trajectory Series
Jordan Bootcamp – Session 1

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Session 1 Agenda
¤ Intro
¤ Telling Your Story in 10/12 Slides
¤ Research & Competitive Analysis
¤ Markets
¤ Value Propositions
¤ Customer Development Data
¤ Awkward Co-Founder Discussions

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Presentation & Resources
¤https://www.dkparker.com/flat6-labs-
jordon-bootcamp-cycle-1/
¤https://www.dkparker.com/exit/venture-
ready/
¤Schedule and Deliverables

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About Dave
¤ 5X founder, Board Member, former SVP Programs at UP
Global (Startup Weekend + Startup America)
¤ Startup Next creator
¤ Startup Week
¤ Author – “Trajectory: Startup – Ideation to Product Market
Fit”
¤ 11 transactions – 9 sell side, 2 buy side
¤ VC/Investor

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Rules of the Road
¤ Ask questions as we go – especially if I talk too fast!
¤ Meta questions please! Not just about your company
¤ Don’t Ramble – I’ll interrupt
¤ Virtually…
¤ Network – you need to build you network for the future
starting today
¤ #GiveFirst – you have complimentary skills around you

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Score Yourself 1-4
Team: Why you, balanced team (talents, diversity), domain experts,
serially successful founders, great company experience
Idea: Are you solving a problem? New or existing problem, big category
(vs tool), early/late continuum, technical achievable, pain pill or vitamin
Product: do you have a product, how mature, customer first, solid design,
clear roadmap to scale
Market/Customer: big market (TAM/SOM), cash available, new or nascent
market?
Competition: How many incumbents, funding status, are you incremental
better or 10X better?
Traction: Customer validation, revenue, improving unit economics?
Timing: Why now? Are you late, early, too early?
Revenue Model/Finance: How will you monetize your idea? Do you have
a basic budget on spending, big or small economics
IP/Moat: Is your idea defensible? Can you build a moat over time?
Clear Ask: What do you need help with? Advice, funding, introduction,
help finding staff?
Total out of 40

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Venture Ready
Fast NO
¤ Market
¤ Team
¤ Product
¤ Traction
Slow Yes
¤ Idea
¤ Competition
¤ Business Model/Finance
¤ Timing
¤ Intellectual Property/Moat
¤ Clear Ask

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Addressing the Weaknesses
¤ Where were you weak
¤ How would you answer differently
¤ What can you change now – before final pitches?
¤ Don’t ignore the elephant in the room – investors won’t!

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Creating
Value:
Product,
Team &
Market
Business Model Breakdown

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Delivering
Value:
Price,
Economics,
S&M
Business Model

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Capturing
Value:
Reasonable to
Exceptional
Returns –
Traction & Idea
Business Model

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Creating Value:
Product
Delivering
Value: Price,
Economics,
S&M
Capturing
Value
Reasonable to
Exceptional
Returns
Defining Business Model

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Creating Value:
Product
Delivering
Value:
Marketing
and Sales
Capturing Value
Reasonable to
Exceptional
Returns
Defining Business Model

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Two Startup Epochs

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Epochs
¤ BC
¤ Pre Internet
¤ Pre Game of Thrones
¤ Pre Product-Market Fit
¤ Risk Capital
¤ AD
¤ Post Internet
¤ Post Game of Thrones
¤ Post Product-Market Fit
¤ Growth Capital

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Why Startups Fail

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Launch & Survive

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Judging a Startup – Bill Gross
Ultimate success – AT SCALE – Assumes good market
https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_bigge
st_reason_why_start_ups_succeed?language=en

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Surfing Analogy
¤ The Wave
¤ The Board
¤ The Surfer
¤ The Trend
¤ The Product
¤ The Leader/Team
Market timing = bad waves
Small waves are bad
Bad product
Wrong person/team for the market
Are all three lined up for you?

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Bring $$$

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Categorizing Your Solution
Product Service
B2B Salesforce Consulting
B2C Games For profit school

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What Problem/Opportunity
¤ What’s the problem
¤ Pain Pill
¤ Vitamin
¤ What’s the opportunity
¤ Solving for who?
¤ Can you create and capture value?
¤ Who will pay?

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Product & Companies
¤ Products aren’t fundable – Companies are fundable
¤ Lifestyle businesses – won’t funded
¤ Local vs. Scalable businesses
Which one will you be?
¤ Services vs Product
¤ Exit multiples

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Should you build it?

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And than there’s this ($120M)

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Pre-Mortem

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If Your Startup was to Fail, Why?
¤ What’s the number one reason
¤ Product
¤ Customer Acquisition
¤ Competition
¤ Lack of funding
¤ Rank

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10 or 12 Slides?

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Two Use Cases - Two Decks
Slides for Stage
¤ 10 Slides
¤ It’s a contrived event
¤ Check boxes for hitting
required elements
¤ Supporting Slides
Slides for Conf Room
¤ 12 Slides
¤ It’s about the dialog and
understanding the investor
questions
¤ Supporting Slides

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10/12 Slides for Your Pitch
1. Title, Value Proposition,
Contact Info
2. Presentation Overview*
3. Problem
4. Solution
5. Market Size
6. Competitive Analysis*
7. Traction/Timing – why you,
why now?
8. Product Roadmap/Demo
How You Make Money/Key
Metrics
9. Go-To-Market
10. Secret Sauce/Moat/IP*
11. Team
12. Clear Ask/What do you
need from Flat6
*for conf room pitch. Supporting
Slides – Architecture, etc.
Blog Post

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Famous Pitch Decks
¤ 30 Famous Pitch Decks
¤ Facebook, LinkedIn, etc
¤ Early to later stage
¤ Not all had great graphics
¤ Uber, AirBnB, Facebook examples

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Research & Competitive Analysis

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Research
¤ You are not the customer
¤ Methods of Research
¤ Blue Ocean
¤ Gartner Magic Quadrant
¤ Documentation and Analysis
¤ Google Search – what are the keywords someone would
type to find your solution
¤ Crunchbase Search – funding, timing, categories
¤ Competitive Product/Service pricing

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Pattern Matching
¤ Stage
¤ Customer Type
¤ Categories

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Research
¤ Create a Google Sheet with your research
¤ One tab for research, one for competitors
¤ Who has written about your market
¤ Professionals, bloggers, others
¤ Who has raised capital in this market
¤ What’s the state of the “Wave?”

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Competitor List & Notes
Competitor URL Crunchbase
Link
Amount
Funded
Team Features Notes

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Specific Competitors
¤ Feature List
¤ Product positioning
¤ Gaps
¤ Pricing
¤ Target customer/profile
¤ Marketing approach

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Getting Data
¤ Right Mouse click
¤ Keywords, meta data
¤ Pull keywords for competitors – Google Sheet
¤ Tools
¤ https://www.semrush.com/
¤ https://topics.seomonitor.com/query
¤ Google Keyword tool
¤ Social
¤ https://www.rivaliq.com/

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Getting Data – B2C
¤ Playstore/App Store
¤ One Star
¤ Four Star

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Who has tried this before?
¤ What about Analyst report?
¤ Why did they fail?
¤ Use Wayback Machine to look back

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Looking Back
¤ Feature List – then and now
¤ Product Positioning
¤ Pricing changes over time

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Competitive Tech Stack
¤ Builtwith
¤ Mixpanel
¤ StackShare
¤ Siftery
¤ Ghostery – MarTec Stack

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Updates
¤ Subscribe to Google Alerts
¤ Competitors
¤ Thought leaders
¤ Analysts
¤ RSS Reader
¤ Specific pages within competitors

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A Note Regarding Biases

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Questions?
Where to source your data for
your research?

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Competitive Slide Examples

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Value Proposition

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Positioning
¤ Positioning is holding a place in your customer’s mind –
not as everything, what’s memorable?
¤ Who is the initial customer
¤ Think about limiting service and customer first – before
you expand
¤ You’re not precluded from selling other services or products
¤ What claim or promise will you make?

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Don’t Bury the Lead
¤ Think of this like journalism
¤ What’s the headline?
¤ What’s the Lead?
¤ What’s the Story?

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Testing
¤ Each pitch is a rapid A/B testing
¤ Look for 1:Many opportunities to test your value
proposition
¤ Trade shows
¤ Peers
¤ Test tag lines

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Taglines
¤ The one sentence summary
¤ Pull from the Madlibs Pitch
¤ Benefits to customer – not features
¤ Simple
¤ Evolve with the company

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Branding
¤ You don’t have a big budget – so you can’t afford brand
advertising
¤ Start with brand neutral and build
¤ Memorable
¤ Phonetically easy to spell
¤ Avoid double letters, etc

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Exercise
¤ Write out:
¤ What makes you different?
¤ Why should people buy from you?
¤ Write your websites tagline and opening paragraph
¤ What claim/promise will you make
¤ Write your DRAFT Unique Selling Proposition
¤ Compare this to your Pitch

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Customer Development

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Customer Development
¤ Parallel process with Product Development
¤ “Get out of the Building”
¤ Develop for a few not Many
¤ Prioritize features based on Needs not Wants
¤ Validate with Revenue/Commitment

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What is Customer Development?
¤ Four Steps of an Epiphany – Steve Blank

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Customer Development Goals
¤ Acute focus on problem – not product
¤ Find out if customers care?
¤ What do they want?
¤ Determines the difference your product at launch and at
scale
¤ Feature priorities & Product Roadmap

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Customer Dev Mechanics
¤ Google Forms
¤ Structured questions
¤ Progression
¤ Easy to Hard
¤ What do you really want to know?
¤ Will they pay for it? How much
¤ Why will it fail
¤ Neutral, not Guided Questions

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Customer Dev Mechanics, Cont
¤ Build a list of interested parties
¤ Mail Chimp List setup
¤ Ask for permission to email
¤ Monthly updates –
¤ Format: “What we did, what we’re going to do and
where we can use your help”
¤ Regular frequency – be predictable

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What Not To Do
¤ You are not the customer
¤ Don’t tolerate a small sample set – this could delay your
success by Years
¤ Avoid “Selection Bias”
¤ “Isn’t our product amazing”
¤ No rhetorical questions
¤ No blind surveys
¤ Can’t outsource

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How Many Customer Interviews
¤ B2B – 25+
¤ Profile
¤ Job Title
¤ Type of Company
¤ B2C – 50+
¤ Demographic
¤ ¯_(ツ)_/¯ = bad

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Fundraising Note
You have opinions
You have Data
You get money!
Investors have opinions
They have money

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Hypothesis vs Fact
¤ If you are convinced you’re right you won’t be open to
radical feedback that could change the trajectory of
your business & life!
¤ Always testing what you think you know
¤ Permission to give negative feedback
¤ If this idea was to fail, why would it fail?
¤ Why is this idea stupid?

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Awkward Co-Founder Discussions

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Everyone Has Expectations
¤ Set up a process to get the expectations out in the open
¤ Pre-Incorporation
¤ Meeting 1 of 2
¤ Why do you want to do this
¤ Capital in vs out
¤ Timing of life
¤ Passion
¤ Go to Startup Equity Calculator

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Co-Founders – Part 1

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Co-founders, part 2
¤ Meeting 2 of 2
¤ Print out a copy- bring it to the meeting
¤ How far off are you? What responsibilities?
¤ At Incorporation
¤ Reverse vesting schedule
¤ What happens when someone leaves?
¤ Option pool 20%
¤ Why 50/50 is the only wrong decision

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Post Incorporation
¤ Milestones/Deliverables
¤ Slicing Pie
¤ Market rates
¤ Don’t over inflate
¤ Track time and contribution
¤ Regular meeting
¤ Weekly standups
¤ Make HR changes fast – they won’t get easier

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Dave’s Madlibs Pitch
Hi, I’m <your name here>, and my company <your Company
name here> the problem I’m solving is <insert problem here>. Our
product <insert product info here> is designed for our target
customer of <insert target customer here>. We make money by
<insert method here> and our team is the right team because
<insert why you’re awesome here>. I need help with <insert help
needed here>.

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THANKS!