Now is the time to turn your idea into a business. We’ll help you. Here’s how:

As a Venture Designer at Founders Factory, I’ve sometimes described myself as a “startup midwife”. When startups are born in our Venture Studio, we work to give them the best chance of success by supporting them with thorough research, brainstorming, and testing alongside our corporate partners.

Having launched more than forty successful start-ups, our team knows how to quickly validate ideas, build the best products, hire founding teams, and attract first customers. It’s still genuinely thrilling to see ideas that start on a post-it note turn into a living, breathing, businesses.

At Founders Factory, we live by the saying, ‘power to founders’. We want to support individuals no matter what their background, network, or access to capital, to discover the power of entrepreneurship to build businesses that will shape the future. We also believe that right now, as many face uncertainty with career opportunities and job security, this could be the right time to learn how to turn an idea into a future business.

For that reason, we have decided to lift the bonnet and share how we turn concepts into investable businesses, via our new Venture Design course in collaboration with Future Learn.

The six-week course is made up of accessible frameworks and lessons we’ve learned to shortcut the process and increase our startups chance of success, that we believe are essential for any burgeoning entrepreneur.

• Week one: find a focus area; where to start looking for ideas and problems.

  
  

• Week two: explore that space and getting a deeper understanding of potential customers needs and desires

  
  

• Week three: the really fun one. We teach you how to generate creative solutions and consider how the startup can generate revenue

• Week four: break down your ideas so you can analyse the biggest risks

• Week five: the techniques and tools we use to test our ideas quickly and cheaply

• Week six: how to pitch your business with our in-house expert and ‘pitch Ninja’ David Hickson aka our Head of Strategic Development

The course is open for enrolment now on FutureLearn.com and just £62 with teaching commences on 19 October 2020. Learners will also get the opportunity to pitch their idea to us, for a chance to enter our programme and receive a cash investment and hands on support from our team to further develop the startup.

We hope that as many people as possible can benefit from what we've learned and create the next generation of entrepreneurs. #PowerToFounders