In June, Startup Grind Sacramento hosted a virtual workshop featuring Right Box Founder, Josh David Miller (JDM) who discussed how startups can design a strong business model.
No one invests in weak business models, and no successful business is built on one. And yet most early-stage startups and small businesses have generally terrible foundations that go on to plague them in later stages. Without a crystal-clear understanding of how your company meets the four basic components of any business model, you’re doomed to fail.
Watch the Recording
What is Discussed in the Recording
Suboptimal business models sink your chances of:
- Raising money
- Getting customers
- Turning a profit
- Scaling your company
- And more!
In this talk, JDM — aka Josh David Miller, aka “the shredder of business models” — walked through the process of generating the best possible business model hypotheses for early-stage startups, using design thinking.
Some of the things he talked about in this workshop included:
- What a business model is (technically);
- How to succinctly pitch yours;
- Common areas of weakness in startup business models;
- What investors look for in a business model; and
- How to turn unknowns into experiments and experiments into data.
Most importantly, JDM’s discussed the tools he uses to:
- Find the weakest part of your business model;
- Turn it into a question; and
- Develop a path to fix it.
Who’s this talk for?
This talk is geared toward the founders of companies who have not yet achieved product-market fit. You could be:
- A solo founder with nothing but an idea looking to get started;
- A founding team with a product and revenue looking to scale;
- And everyone in between.
About the Presenter
Over the past decade, JDM (aka Josh David Miller) has helped startup founders and innovators launch or grow 100+ products.
He likes to say that he’s a Woody-Woodpecker-like instigator on a quixotic quest to fix entrepreneurship by challenging how we think about our craft. But those who know him best describe his superpower as finding the right next question to ask in order to create focus, clarity, and potency.
Thus, some call him the shredder of business models.
By day, JDM uses that superpower to help startup founders and corporate innovators launch, find product-market-fit, and scale — fast.
His portfolio includes:
- The Right Box, an advisory which accelerates product launch & growth
- 1:1 coaching with a highly curated group of startup founders
- Talks on entrepreneurship & innovation
And he’s an actve member of the Sacramento startup ecosystem:
- Mentoring at the Growth Factory accelerator
- Mentoring at the Carlsen Center at Sac State
- Organizing the weekly 1 Million Cups founder forum
- Facilitate startup competitions and workshops
JDM also creates content on YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and across the web, and he hosts the “Inside The Box” podcast.
Read more about JDM here. Watch the video of his “Creating Your First Pitch Deck” workshop here.
