Frameworks that every founder needs to understand to build a great company.
“To successfully build your company, you have to quit your job,” was the one piece of advice I wish I didn’t take so quickly.
Driven by the need to improve the quality of education in Latin America, I decided to quit my Private Equity job and start an EdTech company called Trybu Learning.
At the time, as a Co-founder and the CEO of Trybu.mx, I thought that I had a clear execution strategy and roadmap. My co-founder and I designed our company’s business model and go-to-market plan based on what we thought our customers’ pain points were. We were about to find out, 18 months later, most of our hypotheses were wrong.
The most challenging thing for me as the CEO of our startup was to know what I didn’t know.
“To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.”
— Confucius
Here’s what I knew:
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) are skills that children have to develop to succeed in the 21st Century.
Schools have outdated education content and learning methodologies.
Based on these two facts, we decided to build an SEL program for children 3-6 years old, recruit and train a network of teachers, and have them teach our program as an afterschool class.
Here’s what I didn’t know:
Parent’s did not care about SEL
For me, it was evident. I had a daughter, and I knew how important it was to develop her social and emotional skills. Trybu’s education program was the best. Grit, Resilience, Creativity, Perseverance, and Empathy were skills our program helped children develop. I was biased—these skills have allowed me to deal with my life’s hardships.
Without questioning whether parents cared about their children’s SEL development, I quit my job to build a Unicorn—a company worth more than one billion dollars. The only unicorn I got was a stuffed unicorn I bought for my daughter with the remaining $20 on my savings account after three years of trying to build my company unsuccessfully.
In this series, I will share the biggest mistakes I made to help you avoid them.
Join our community of hundreds of entrepreneurs building great companies
Mistake #1: I didn’t spend enough time getting to know our customers.
Today, I realize that I didn’t fully understand my customers.
I encourage you to be intelligent and diligent. Passion, drive, and resilience are not the only things you need to succeed. Before you quit your job, make sure you validate your customer’s most pressing problems. The following frameworks will help do just that:
The Value Proposition Canvas: This framework will help you design your customers’ profiles and map your understanding of your customers’ main pain points.
The Lean Startup’s “Build, Measure, Learn” Loop: This methodology will help you understand how to build a lean and agile execution plan to validate your key hypotheses.
The New Mindset for Product-Market Fit: This framework will help you set the bases to sell your product before you spend time building it.
In my next article in this series, I will dig deep into these frameworks to help you understand them and apply them effectively, hoping to save you time and feel more confident in your entrepreneurial journey.
To be continued….
