Learn

Study the principles of Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Jobs-to-be-Done, Agile,  and more. Understand how they come together to move your business forward.

Practice

Videos, templates, quizzes and detailed explanation help you think through your idea, teach you what to test, and how to validate aspects of your business model.

Grow

There’s no substitute for doing the work. The courses will boost your confidence in building your business, maintaining focus, and overcoming common obstacles.

Innovation Frameworks

  • Lean Startup
  • Customer Development
  • Design Thinking
  • Agile
  • Jobs-to-be-Done

Templates

  • Persona tools
  • Experiment map
  • Value Stream Discovery
  • Kanban board
  • Prioritization board

Tools

  • Fun Videos
  • In-depth explanations
  • Quizzes
  • Worksheets
  • Detailed instruction

Hi, I’m Brant Cooper,

Your friendly neighborhood course designer and instructor. Way back in the day, circa 2008, a group of tech entrepreneurs came together in a Google Group to discuss practical applications of Steve Blank’s Customer Development framework as he described in a compilation of university lecture notes entitled Four Steps to the Epiphany. Meanwhile, Eric Ries, a student of Blank’s was blogging about his ideas combining customer development with agile software development principles, which he came to call Lean Startup.

In 2010, Patrick Vlaskovits and I wrote the first edition of the Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, dubbed by many as “The Startup Bluebook”—the first book to discuss the practical application of these principles. It quickly made its way into the hands of startup founders, forward-thinking corporate innovators, university business school professors, and accelerator program directors around the globe.

In 2011, Eric Ries published the wildly popular The Lean Startup, which took aim at helping not only startup entrepreneurs, but corporate innovators. Eric put lean innovation practices on the map, combining customer development, with agile and lean manufacturing principles.

In 2013 Patrick and I followed up with our second book, the widely acclaimed NY Times bestseller, The Lean Entrepreneur (TLE). TLE provided in-depth instruction on how to develop empathy for customers, run rapid experiments to test assumptions, and use metrics to focus work and measure progress on any endeavor facing uncertainty.

You know about these changes because you’ve lived them. Working remotely or being forced to work with illness surrounding you. Management unable to trust workers they couldn’t see were actually working and excelling. Businesses mandating policies running counter to the needs of employees juggling difficult home circumstances; massive layoffs even with government bailouts, record profits and so on.

The greatest freedom I ever experienced came from the power to walk away from a job or a bad manager. The greatest freedom is economic freedom.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I live a privileged life; advantages that came to me out of pure, dumb luck. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked hard all my life and I’ve worked through a lot of mistakes and bad decisions. But for whatever reason, I am comfortable admitting to my errors and even uttering the words “I don’t know.

That’s privilege, too.

But that attitude in and of itself develops a learning mindset; I am an explorer at heart. And now I want to teach you how to apply the explorer’s mindset to help you, hopefully, develop economic freedom. Whether an inspired side hustle or the next unicorn startup, the learning principles are the same.

 

Since 2014, I’ve been running Moves the Needle, Inc, with the aspiration of helping large organizations apply the “entrepreneurial spirit.” It’s not that they need to act like startups, as a matter of fact there are many good reasons not to. But while the world is changing fast, the way we structure and manage work is stuck in the middle of the 20th century. Improvement comes from empowering workers to excerise their intelligence and creativity.

My experiences doing this work led to my most recent book, Disruption Proof, published by Hachette in the Fall of 2021. I wrote Disruption Proof in the heart of the pandemic, which really drove the point home: we’re not in the Industrial Age anymore. Increased complexity and massive uncertainty poses new challenges to the institutions we’ve grown to depend on, not only big companies, but education, government, and startups, but also unions, non-profits and other NGOs. The way we manage and structure work is fundamentally changing.

 

The Lessons

The first course is pure business fundamentals. When done with the course, you’ll already be working on your business.

The second course is particularly helpful if you’re not sure you have any good ideas to tackle or perhaps you need to choose between a few. Moreover,  Opportunity Discovery has lessons every entrepreneur should study. Even if you are sure you have a rockstar idea, you might want to take a look to learn how to think through and validate whether that’s actually true.

The third course is a detailed program for testing and validating diifferent aspects of your business model as you grow. Again, you will be learning while working and I’ll guide you how to figure out what to focus on and how to test ideas before investing time, money or other resources.

So jump in. I live my principles in these courses. I’m committed to continous improvement so will be adding more features and resources to help ou along your journey.

Good luck and go get ’em!

–Brant Cooper, 2022
Encinitas, California