📖 Table of Contents

⚡ Introduction

🎢 Venture Building Process

⚡ Become an Empowered Entrepreneur

This Handbook is for the crazy ones; everyone who aspires to build their own business so you can enjoy the beauty of entrepreneurial freedom and change the world for the better.

When I started to build my first business in late 2014 I had no clue.

Fast forward, I am still building businesses and now much more successfully than I have ever done before. Certainly, there is still a lot to learn, but if I had known what I know today, things would have looked differently.

One of the most insightful learnings happened when I joined a leading Venture Capital firm in Switzerland. The company started to use Venture Building to complement its investment activities by building a portfolio of startups themselves.

In this setting, I got trusted with building the leading mental health platform in Switzerland.

Having created my first startup without much support and now using Venture Building to do it once again, I understood the power it can bring to anyone aspiring to build a business.

As I am very passionate to support other entrepreneurs in realising their dreams, I believe this knowledge should be shared and applied to other meaningful problems.

Develop entrepreneurial skills

Venture Building is the art of systematically building successful businesses.

To repeatedly build successful companies, Venture Builders develop and follow a process that helps them to get from an idea to a profitable company. We call this the Venture Building Process, a simple process that you can follow to launch and grow a business.

This process is based on best practices in entrepreneurship and Venture Capital and can be applied to any kind of business; whether you aspire to build a traditional business, a small online business or a tech startup.

Note that Venture Builders also provide other benefits to its ecosystem, such as the access to talents, shared services and capital. This Handbook, however, focuses solely on the Venture Building Process, which will help you to develop essential entrepreneurial skills.

On the one hand, you will understand the big picture of building a business, on other hand, you get equipped with a detailed action that you can follow to realise your ambition.

Increase your chances to succeed

About 90% of all startups fail.

If you build a more traditional business, the failure rate is still as high as 70%.

This should not hold you back from launching a business, but raise awareness that failure is common and that you need to figure out how to reduce your risk of failure.

Increasing the odds of your business succeeding is exactly the objective of Venture Building.

To do so, Venture Building incorporates best practices in entrepreneurship and Venture Capital into its process and methodologies:

• Investment criteria
• Customer centricity
• Lean Startup
• Build Measure Learn Cycle
• Value Proposition Canvas
• Lean Business Model Canvas
• Hypothesis Driven Testing
• Minimal Viable Product

As you read this Handbook you do not need to study all of these best practices to then figure out how to make sense of them altogether.

Simply follow the Venture Building Process and you are being taken care of.

Start with little time and money

In the US a staggering amount of 55% of people in their 20s want to launch their own business.

Among the most common barriers that hold people back from doing so, is the belief that starting a business costs lots of time and money.

First things first, it has never been easier to launch a business.

In today's world, you need a computer, an Internet connection and a couple of hundred USD and you are good to go. Certainly, some business ideas will require more capital than others.

The key is to find a business idea that suits your lifestyle and passion. As you may have guessed, following the Venture Building Process, will help you do exactly that.

Second, Venture Building can help you save time in different ways.

As you have a clear process to follow, you will not spend time on tasks you should not be doing, but apply a clear focus on what is truly necessary.

On top, Venture Building helps you validate certain aspects of your business step by step. During this initial phase, you will not have to run a life business, allowing you to start at your own pace.

I consider 1 hour per day about the minimum time that you need to invest, which enables you to launch on the side, next to your full-time job.

🎢 The Venture Building Process

The Venture Building Process helps you build a business following a clear path.

Following these steps will help you find answers to all relevant aspects of a business such as:

• Problem - Do you tackle a significant problem?
• Solution - How does your solution help your customer to tackle the problem?
• Business model - How do you make money?
• Market size - Is your market large enough?
• Competition - How do you differentiate from the competition?
• Unique insight - Why is it you that should succeed?
• Growth strategy - How do you reach your customer?
• Financial case - How interesting is your financial case?
• Traction - What traction proves the assumptions you make?
• Team - Are you the right person or team to build this business?

The process is built in the way that you focus on solving the most important questions first.

Only if you have found satisfying answers that still indicate your business idea to work, you will move forward in the process.

To start, familiarise yourself with the overall process to understand the big picture. Whenever you are lost, come back and study the big picture to find orientation again.

Once you are ready, start with the first step to then progress one step after another.

After all, action is the foundational key to all success (Pablo Picasso).

🔮 START

This first stage is geared to help you find a business idea that works.

You will learn about strategies that you can follow to find new business ideas, how to evaluate them to understand whether they are any good and how you can identify a niche in which you can become successful.

In the bonus chapter, you will learn about business ideas that you can copy and adapt to your background and passion.

⚒️ BUILD

Continue by mapping out your business and its strategy in more detail.

Next, identify open questions you still have (aka hypotheses) to then test them in a cost- and time-efficient way. In doing so, you remove risk from your business, without the need to build an actual product first.

🪴 GROW

Grow your business by assembling the right team and and building a product that is just good enough to get to the first sales (Minimum Viable Product).

Keep evolving based on your customers’ needs and keep testing and learning to ultimately achieve product-market fit.

🚀 SCALE

Contact

hello@venturebloom.com