How to start a business free course

Nobody is born knowing how to start a business.

Setting up a company takes much effort, measurable steps, and tons of experience. That’s why a free course and resources on how to start your own business never hurt anyone. So we’re putting together a list of items destined to help you in that endeavor. 

1. How to start a Business: Free online course

Our free startup online course for new founders and anyone interested in starting a new business has everything you need to know about getting a new company off the ground. From how to choose the right co-founder to your first investor meeting, Caya, Slidebean’s CEO personally created a free course and resources on how to start your own business. In it, he goes over everything you need to know before you get started, including the following list of items:

• Steps to be completed before fundraising
• Building the most basic MVP
• Startup Founder Agreements and Vesting
• How to Create a Pitch Deck
• How to approach investors
  

Mainly, the 5 sections with 15 free lectures are our CEO’s way of speaking from experience. From starting his first company, failing, getting back up, and starting a new successful company, this businessman has now succeeded in a profitable company of a team of 25 members. So we think there’s tons of insight you can learn from that, including business viability, managing money when there isn’t any, and information on when to incorporate a business in the US, for example. Check out our course content if you’d like to learn more. 

Free Udemy Course

2. Learn how to calculate TAM

If the acronym is uncertain to you, it’s best to read further and get familiarized with Total Addressable Market (TAM) and how it relates to starting a business. If you’re already acquainted with the concept and its abbreviations, you’ll most possibly agree with the hardship it represents to get this one right. And how relevant it is to get it right from the start. 

Over a bit less than 15 minutes, Caya lets Steve Barsh, angel investor, and a managing partner at DreamIt Ventures, break down basic definitions on the topic. Yet, of course, Steve delivers excellence beyond just basics into the most common mistakes people make when calculating TAM and presenting it to investors. 

The entrepreneur tied to this famous accelerator also clarifies how to estimate TAM correctly, and, better yet, he also shares the simplest of formulas to do that. Fortunately, this last formula applies to any and every single startup, regardless of the industry, so you can rest assured you’ll find the video material useful without regard to where your focus lies.

- Watch the video tutorial here: How to calculate TAM?

How to calculate TAM

3. How to start a business: staying updated is vital

Peculiar to our times, we recommend a 12-minute video on how to start a business in 2020. Why? Because we can’t deny the upcoming recession, the increased unemployment rate and the changes almost every market is facing as the world deals with a pandemic. Fortunately, we got updated material to which you can resort as you scout for a free course and resources on how to start your own business.

If starting a company was already hard before this crisis hit us, the sole idea of starting up a new enterprise can seem daunting. The amount of instability right now can very validly make entrepreneurs insecure about going ahead with their business projects. 

Before you desist, and especially before you jump the gun on any ideas, we recommend you go over all the essential details to our current entrepreneurial times as you watch this highly recommended video. 

4. How to raise Capital: Info tailored to fundraising

If you’re already a bit ahead, however, and are instead wondering how to raise capital in 2020 with COVID-19 spread out globally, then this other video we mention now is just perfect for your needs. Fundamental to it, the CEO of a startup that’s been focused for years in business presentation software directly addresses some of the best practices to pitch investors remotely. That is just golden! Don’t miss out on it, if you can. 

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5. Financial Model Webinar

Heads-up here, however! This material is already of an advanced entrepreneur kind. Do you feel up for the game yet? And, especially if you’re struggling with financial models, we hear you! And we’re here to help. 

In how to build a financial model for a SaaS business, Caya focuses on numbers. Partnered with a need to work in Excel, this webinar is a step-by-step financial modeling tutorial. For it, our CEO uses a spreadsheet that can be easily downloadable and customized. It’s also one we’ll share next.

Care to work with it? Head on over to our financial model template, the spreadsheet that made us profitable. We meant it when we said we wanted to give you more than just a free course, but also tons of precious resources on how to start your own business. And this sheet is one of our secrets gone public, explained, and turned into material for your full benefit. 

Take advantage of it by downloading it for free and making the best of it that you can. We recommend using it on Google Sheets for several reasons. 

As we’ve defined in past articles: “A financial model is a prediction of your company's growth and burn-rate. What it does is translate your past and present financial data into a dynamic model.” These kinds of predictions generally operate out of an Excel document. And it’s typically necessary for raising capital, planning a business and managing it, making investment decisions, and going into mergers or acquisitions. 

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Financial Model Template

6. Founder's Edition: a plan made with founders in mind

Besides the Slidebean app, which you can use for free or with our Starter and Premium plans, there’s Founders Edition. With it, you get a myriad of benefits explicitly oriented for the startup founder. We give you a monthly call, for instance, through which you can talk to our team of business analysts. They’ll help optimize your pitch deck for investors in considerable ways.

You also get a proofread of a presentation per month. Our team will review your slides and share a revised draft. And as if that were not great enough, we also give you a tune-up! Yes, like cars get. Once a month, our design team will work with your existing Slidebean presentation to make it look its best, including slide layout, alignment, style, color palettes, and fonts.

Are you still thinking about it? How do dozens of startup deals sound, on top of that? As part of our founder’s edition, we also sourced the web for the most relevant startup products in the market. And we came back with an offer of startup discounts that are usually only available on select accelerator programs. For that, we partnered with companies like Amazon Web Services and Brex, to give you an example, and now make unique perks available to our founders valued at over $5,000.

Founder’s Edition

7. Pitch Deck Consulting services that help

The tools above are mostly for self-servicing clientele who needs to have access to astonishing presentation design in no time! It still requires a high level of sufficiency. So, for those who wish to order a more devoted and highly professional service, Slidebean’s agency is also available for content & design. 

In a nutshell, you go onboard a whole process when you choose to hire our design services. Through calls with our CEO and another one with our design team, you get to choose your slide format, the number of slides you want, and then you leave it up to us to produce the perfect pitch deck content to sell your startup to investors. Yes, we sign NDAs, of course! And we highlight your pitch with a designer-quality type of slide-looking genius. You can get a winning deck in as little as 48 hours. Tell us it doesn’t get better than that.

- Talk to us: Slidebean agency

As a last bonus, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel, for weekly insightful videos on all things startups and small businesses!

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