Welcome to Startup Launch

The Startup Graveyard

Every year, thousands of startups launch. Within five years, roughly 90% of them are gone. The graveyard is filled with brilliant ideas, passionate founders, and products that nobody bought.

The pattern is disturbingly consistent. Founder has idea. Founder loves idea. Founder spends months (or years) building idea. Founder launches. Nobody cares.

This course exists to break that pattern.

What You’ll Learn

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

1. Validate a startup idea before investing significant time or money
2. Research your market and competitors using AI-powered analysis
3. Build a minimum viable product that tests your core assumption
4. Create a pitch deck that makes investors and partners pay attention
5. Develop a funding strategy matched to your startup’s stage

What to Expect

This course has 8 lessons, each covering a critical phase of the startup launch process. You can complete it in one sitting or work through a lesson per day.

Why Startups Actually Fail

The data is clear. Here are the top reasons from analyzing thousands of failed startups:

Notice that the top two reasons, no market need and running out of cash, are both addressed by the same approach: validate first, build lean, and spend wisely.

The Lean Launch Process

This course follows the lean startup methodology, adapted with AI tools:

VALIDATE → RESEARCH → BUILD MVP → PITCH → FUND → ACQUIRE → SCALE
    ↑          ↑          ↑          ↑       ↑        ↑
   AI        AI         AI         AI      AI       AI
  helps    helps      helps      helps   helps    helps

Validate: Test whether real people want your solution before building it.

Research: Understand your market, competitors, and positioning.

Build MVP: Create the minimum product that tests your core assumption.

Pitch: Communicate your vision clearly to investors, partners, and customers.

Fund: Match your funding strategy to your stage and needs.

Acquire: Get your first paying customers and learn from them.

Each step generates evidence for the next. Skip one and the entire chain weakens.

How AI Changes the Startup Game

Starting a company used to require resources that only well-funded founders had access to. AI has democratized much of this:

AI does not replace human judgment, customer conversations, or the hard work of execution. But it eliminates the information barriers that used to make starting a company possible only for well-connected, well-funded founders.

Your First Quick Win

Try this right now. Think of a startup idea, any idea, and ask AI:

I have a startup idea: [DESCRIBE YOUR IDEA IN 2-3 SENTENCES]

Give me an honest assessment:
1. Who specifically would pay for this? (Be specific about the person, not the market)
2. What problem does it solve? (Frame it from the customer's perspective)
3. Why has nobody successfully built this already? (Or if they have, what would make mine different?)
4. What is the riskiest assumption in this idea?
5. What is one thing I could do this week to test whether people actually want this?

The answer to question 5 is where real progress begins.

Key Takeaways

• 42% of startups fail because they build something nobody wants, making validation the most critical first step
• The lean launch process moves from validation to MVP to customer acquisition, building evidence at each step
• AI democratizes startup tools that previously required expensive consultants and specialized expertise
• Every startup idea rests on assumptions that must be tested before investing significant time or money

Up Next

In Lesson 2: Idea Validation That Saves You Years, we will test your idea systematically before you build anything, so you invest your time on something people actually want.