Entrepreneurship in the Wild

A learn-by-doing guide to developing, testing, and pitching a startup idea, balancing a pragmatic approach and rigorous academic content.

This innovative book offers a learn-by-doing guide to entrepreneurship that balances practical advice with rigorous academic content. It introduces important concepts, provides highly engaging examples, and supplies the tools needed to put lessons into practice, creating a research-supported, step-by-step reference for developing, testing, and pitching any startup idea. By integrating lean startup principles, design thinking, and elements of the jobs-to-be-done framework, this combination textbook-workbook allows readers to choose for themselves whether, or to what extent, to engage with theory.

All of the book's ten chapters encourage hands-on effort, providing readers with easy-to-follow steps, calls to action, and attainable milestones. Aspiring entrepreneurs will find this systematic approach to be more efficient than haphazard trial and error, and much more likely to yield concrete results. Chapters begin with a "mini case," offering real-world examples of each step in the process. These cases--all featuring entrepreneurs working outside the Silicon Valley bubble--include a meadery operator that turned customers into advocates by designing compelling experiences and the development of a dating app for dog lovers that found a unique niche in a crowded market.

Throughout, readers are immersed in the activity of starting a business, guided not only through the successful development of a startup but also to an understanding of the principles underlying entrepreneurship. The book can be used as a text in undergraduate and graduate classes and as a reference by entrepreneurs and innovators.Welcome xi
1 Ideas with Legs 1
2 Finding Your First Customer 15
3 Validating the Opportunity 27
4 Designing Customer Journeys 39
5 Modeling Your Business 49
6 Positioning Your Solution 65
7 Validating Your Solution 79
8 Projecting Financials 91
9 Pitching Your Startup 105
10 Launching Your Startup 127
Notes 137
Index 143“This may be the first book on entrepreneurship I have seen that manages to be relevant and actionable without drawing extensively on familiar praises of Silicon Valley. Kudos to Massa for unearthing compelling examples of entrepreneurship under our noses. With exercises built in, readers cannot help but be motivated to work hard and see their best ideas translate into action!”
—Siobhan O’Mahony, Academic Director, Innovate@BU and Feld Family Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Boston University Questrom School of Business
 
“Entrepreneurship in the Wild distills and adapts the toolkit used to build some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies into a practical guide designed to empower aspiring entrepreneurs and founders across the globe. Designed around action and informed by a unique perspective building scalable businesses ‘everywhere else,’ this book is a go to resource for anyone who dreams of building big but doing it on their own terms.”
—Jon J. Atkinson, CEO, The Idea VillageFelipe G. Massa is Associate Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship as well as the Founder and Faculty Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Loyola University New Orleans.