INTRODUCTION TO TACTICS

Our society is creating more problems in the world around us than solutions. This fundamental challenge is best addressed by entrepreneurs driven by passion, vision, and opportunity. Entrepreneurs, of course, aren't just startup founders. Entrepreneurs are also found in corporations, academic institutions, government, nonprofits, NGOs, and elsewhere as both founders and employees. Entrepreneurs are vital to our society's forward progress, but they must maximize their limited time and money, and stay scrappy. This book will help you, as a current or future entrepreneur, do precisely that.

In this book, I'll share tactics based on my experience as a successful entrepreneur, insights I've gained from other entrepreneurs, and through my experiences as an entrepreneurship educator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These are tactics I've used when building my businesses and that I've found most effective from my work with thousands of startup founders around the world. I'll teach you these skills and demonstrate how to use them through a systematic approach. These entrepreneurial skills will enable you to make a greater impact in the world as a startup founder or in your organization by creating new things using the existing resources already on hand. Won't your boss be excited to hear that?

The proof points and learnings you gather from early go-to-market tactics will help you sell to additional stakeholders-whether that's a new engineer you want to bring on board or an investor you'd like to raise money from. These potential stakeholders have many opportunities to choose from, so you must develop and present evidence to prove that your opportunity is the most compelling.

While certain specifics might not directly apply to every industry, these tactics are meant for any entrepreneur and are particularly of use during the early stages of any venture. This mindset and approach will help you evaluate and hone your early go-to-market approach. Even engineers and product developers will come away with a completely new view of taking a nascent concept to market.

You will find examples within that are simple and can be easily digested, but this book is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It is up to you to take what you learn from this book and apply it in the development of your business.

Because you already have your own specific expertise, I will share with you three promises that we make to participants from around the world in our Entrepreneurship Development Program at the Trust Center. As you read this book:

1. You will learn something you already know.
2. You will learn something you didn't know.
3. You will get as much out of this book as you put into it.

With that in mind, know that this book is designed to expand your entrepreneurial mindset, skillset, and mode of operating for everything you do.

Next Frontier of Entrepreneurship Education

During my years working in the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, I have taught more than 5,000 students and advised more than 500 startups. Some students I work with weekly for years, while others I've met with just once in their journeys.

Of course, this represents a tiny fraction of the entrepreneurs around the world working on solving big problems. They, too, can benefit from the content we teach at MIT, so I've taken as much material as possible that I cover during office hours, workshops, and classes and included it in this book.

When I first began working with student entrepreneurs at MIT, I found myself constantly revisiting the same topics during one-on-one office hours. These conversations typically boiled down to students asking for help on how to build a product, raise money for their startup, and recruit early technical talent, including technical co-founders. More often than not, I encouraged these entrepreneurs to pump the brakes and instead focus first on getting traction with customers. This isn't just a delay tactic, but rather a necessary and prudent change to the order of operations.

No one wants to invest their money or bet their career on a product without confidence in its potential and some facts and data to support that assumption. And, contrary to what many first-time founders may think, you don't need a pile of cash or a hot-shot CTO to test out some hypotheses and get a sense of whether you're on the right path to finding product-market fit.

The reality is that startups need meaningful traction to justify moving forward with hiring and fundraising. Sales represent that traction, but you also need something to sell, which means you, the founder, must wear a lot of hats. That requires training in a variety of skills and functional areas. You can learn these skills and go to market before hiring anyone or productizing anything.

These topics were so popular among students that I began offering workshops. The demand for these proved so great that I then turned them into a full course on venture creation tactics, which is the foundation of the book you're now reading.

My work at the Trust Center, which manifests in this book, is based on lived experience out in industry as an entrepreneur. I recount my experiences co-founding three companies and advising countless others. Now I have the opportunity to share these experiences with you. I reveal details of how we systematically built these businesses. There is no magic power that I or anybody else has. I simply followed the process of applying these tactics.

Context of Theory, Practice, and Tactics

Entrepreneurship has traditionally been taught through theory and practice. Theory is the strategy with a long time horizon, which doesn't change frequently. Practice covers the frameworks and concepts representing first principles and fundamentals. Both are necessary for any and every entrepreneur.

But entrepreneurs who have learned the theory and practice have been left hanging. Far too often they don't have the opportunity to learn steps for taking a systematic, structured approach to learning the tactics of entrepreneurship. Tactics help entrepreneurs acquire the necessary skills to turn their business plan into an actual business.

The integration of theory, practice, and tactics is what leads to highly effective venture development. Entrepreneurs increase their odds of success when their tactics are tied directly to their strategy. Should you ever find yourself on historic Market Street in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, in the US, pop into Church and Union restaurant. Inside your eyes will adjust to the dim light of the old church building and be drawn to the ceiling. Look up and see if you can find this quote:

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

A local artist hand-wrote this on the ceiling of the restaurant in 2021, but these words actually date back 2,500 years to when Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War, and in fact the whole text is painted across the ceiling. Tzu makes this point to emphasize that you must have both strategy and tactics together. In the context of entrepreneurship, strategy is your business plan and tactics are more concrete steps and actions taken to get you where you need to go.

Rooted in First Principles

Anyone can build a business by learning and applying the tactics presented in this book. While these tactics can help you get started, it's important to recognize they're all designed to be rooted in the first principles of entrepreneurship. These are business fundamentals that-if overlooked-lead to a less efficient, less valuable business. After spending years studying entrepreneurship fundamentals, I can confidently say that a thorough understanding of them is required to execute these tactics with excellence.

Each tactic is related to the entrepreneurship fundamentals described in Disciplined Entrepreneurship, the book authored by fellow MIT faculty member, co-instructor, and friend Bill Aulet. If you haven't already familiarized yourself with Disciplined Entrepreneurship, you will surely find the methodology helpful. Disciplined Entrepreneurship presents 24 steps to a successful startup. These steps start by addressing the question "Who is our customer?" and proceed with the various components required for a strong business plan.

The 24 Steps are incredibly helpful for building a business plan and they can be expanded upon with tactics to gather larger-scale evidence that a business opportunity is real and empower you with the related skills necessary to turn your plan into action. Regardless of whether you built your business plan using the 24 Steps, you will find that these tactics can be used to verify your work thus far.

If you did leverage the 24 Steps, you can take the plan developed and begin to execute. Not every step maps one-to-one with a tactic. There is a one-to-many relationship. Each tactic relates to multiple steps from the 24 Steps. We'll walk through these tactics so that you can confirm your findings and get a paying customer. For example, putting these tactics into practice will enable you to further validate your Persona from Step 5, ensure your customer Lifetime Value (LTV) from Step 17 is actually greater than your CoCA from Step 19, sign up your Next 10 Customers beyond those from Step 9, and more. Data-backed, and all without a full...