Starting an entrepreneurship journey is exciting as well as daunting. You have big ideas, and you know in your heart that you want to become an entrepreneur, but where do you start? It can be overwhelming. There's a lot of information out there, and it seems that everywhere you turn, someone else wants to charge you for courses, workshops, or membership sites.
Yet, entrepreneurship is not a 'one size fits all' kind of thing because everyone has their approach and style. But where do you start? Let's face it, the first step to doing anything is to take action, and this is no different. When the time comes, you will need some practical applications to kick-start your entrepreneurial journey.
So, to help you take that first step and get you on your way to becoming a successful entrepreneur, we compiled some free courses with you in mind. Some of these courses overlap, you can digest them a la carte or work through the various suggested series. Enjoy this comprehensive list of the best entrepreneur courses out there:
Build Your Foundation
The Entrepreneur's Guide for beginners and is a course created in collaboration with all Catalan public universities and EIT Health and aims to be the starting point for all those who want to improve their knowledge and skills in the world of entrepreneurship. In this course, you will be able to identify a business opportunity, develop the business model (and the steps to validate it), and know the main mechanisms to find your business.
What you’ll learn:
Entrepreneurship: an overview
Business Model Canvas
Business Model Validation: Lean Startup
Business Plan
Funding
We believe the barrier to entry for people to start a startup is still too high. We want to make it easier for you to start a company, regardless of who or where you are, so we're starting by sharing what we've learned, through Startup School. As founders actively pursuing your own startup, we welcome you to participate in this course. You will have additional access to active founder-advisors who can help give you feedback on your company.
This online course focuses on understanding the strategies, tools, and basic concepts that entrepreneurs use to undertake market innovations and scale their ventures, generating value and disruption in many markets.
What you’ll learn:
Innovative Entrepreneurship
Lean Startup
Designing a Business Model
Corporate entrepreneurship
This interactive course provides potential entrepreneurs with the knowledge of succeeding in an entrepreneurial opportunity.
What you’ll learn:
Learn about the many faces and contexts for entrepreneurship.
Learn about the entrepreneurial process and how to manage it.
Learn about what it takes to be an entrepreneur and your own potential to be one.
Learn to recognize opportunities to generate and assess your own business idea.
Explain the business planning process.
Apply entrepreneurial approaches, concepts, and methods to your own business idea.
Learn about the operational issues in developing new business ventures.
Ideation & Creativity
This course provides practical proven tools for transforming an idea into a product or service that creates value for others.
What you’ll learn:
Transform ideas into real products, services, and processes, by validating the idea, testing it, and turning it into a growing, profitable and sustainable business.
Identify the major steps and requirements in order to estimate the potential of an innovative idea as the basis of an innovative project.
Reach creative solutions via an iteration of a virtually endless stream of world-changing ideas and strategies, integrating feedback, and learning from failures along the way.
Apply the 10 entrepreneurial tools in creating a business plan for a new innovative venture.
Apply methods and strategies learned from interviews with startup entrepreneurs and innovators.
Communicate and sell innovative ideas successfully.
Based on books and articles written by the instructors, you will learn proven tools, frameworks, and concepts useful for discovery– generating an endless stream of new ideas and implementing at least some of those ideas with skill and persistence.
The first part of the course will teach you a tried-and-true structured method for generating and implementing game-changing ideas known as ‘Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom in,' which makes creativity more accessible to everyone. In the coming weeks, you will learn practical, tried-and-true tools for delivering ideas while applying basic business and management principles. You will practice the method, apply it to real-world problems, and create a 2-3 minute video presenting your idea.
What you’ll learn:
What is Creativity?
Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom in
Creativity in practice
Reinventing yourself
Bonus material (ungraded module)
This course provides practical proven tools for transforming an idea into a product or service that creates value for others.
What you’ll learn:
Transform ideas into real products, services, and processes, by validating the idea, testing it, and turning it into a growing, profitable and sustainable business.
Identify the major steps and requirements in order to estimate the potential of an innovative idea as the basis of an innovative project.
Reach creative solutions via an iteration of a virtually endless stream of world-changing ideas and strategies, integrating feedback, and learning from failures along the way.
Apply the 10 entrepreneurial tools in creating a business plan for a new innovative venture.
Apply methods and strategies learned from interviews with startup entrepreneurs and innovators.
Communicate and sell innovative ideas successfully.
How does a good idea become a viable business opportunity? What is entrepreneurship and who fits the profile of an entrepreneur? This introductory course is designed to introduce you to the foundational concepts of entrepreneurship, including the definition of entrepreneurship, the profile of the entrepreneur, the difference between entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial management, and the role of venture creation in society.
What you’ll learn:
Introduction to Entrepreneurship
Opportunity Analysis
Markets, Need-Finding and Planning
Pitching, Testing, and Prototyping
Learn The Financial Ins & Outs
Start and grow your own business without outside funding. Learn what it takes to manage your spending, prepare your personal finances, apply for awards and grants, and more.
What you’ll learn:
What is bootstrapping?
Is bootstrapping right for you?
Starting Your Bootstrapped Business
Manage Your Spending
Your Life vs. Your Business
Utilizing and Building Networks
Leveraging Press and Funding Opportunities
Control Your Finances
Learn the basics of fundraising for a start-up including attracting and negotiating with investors, with this free online course.
What you’ll learn:
Identify the potential investors in startups and understand their decision process and their selection criteria.
Design a sound financing plan in order to estimate the financing needs and the value of the startup, which determines the founders ‘dilution when raising equity.
Reflect on the process and the main issues of the negotiation of agreements between founders and external investors along with successive financing rounds.
Identify the key points to watch in order to succeed in the post-investment phase and prepare the exit.
This course will introduce, and help you put to use in your startup, the five models through which your customers can – and will, if you ask them! – fund your business. These five time-tested models have been put to use by entrepreneurial superstars like Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and more.
Sadly, though, the five models are rarely talked about and not widely understood. Until now! The five models will be brought to life by the real-world stories of an inspiring collection of incredibly creative entrepreneurs from around the world – including successes and failures – through a series of captivating no-holds-barred interviews with founders and others, and investors, too.
What you’ll learn:
Why taking venture capital is a bad idea
Matchmaker models
Pay-in-advance models
Subscription models
Scarcity models
Service-to-product models
Putting a customer-funded model to work in your business
Examine the many financing options available to get your new venture funded. Learn the basics of finance, valuations, dilution, and non-dilutive funding sources. Understand capital structure for new ventures, term sheets and how to negotiate them, and the differences between early-stage versus later-stage financing.
Develop an understanding of how to develop winning investor pitches, who and when to pitch, how to avoid common mistakes that limit the effectiveness of the pitch, and how to ‘get to the close’.
What you’ll learn:
The Early Stage Investment Landscape
Sources of Capital for the Early Stage Company
Getting Funded – Steps in the Funding Process
Pitching Investors and Closing the Round
Your startup needs to get cash positive as soon as possible – and ultimately, profitable.
What you’ll learn:
Recognize the Unit of Decision-Making
Take Control of the Decision-Making Process
Create a Pricing Strategy
Draw a diagram of the sales process
Select or Create a Business Model
Calculate the Cost of Getting a New Customer
Calculate your customer's lifetime value
The course aims at providing knowledge and experience to entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs generally start with a mission, a new idea that they want to bring to the world. If the idea is original, it is probably not expected by the market, which has to be educated. This is a very costly experience.
Entrepreneurs need to gather capital at the start of the journey. They need to articulate clear plans, define objectives and resources and raise money accordingly. They also need to manage cash.
What you’ll learn:
How to read a balance sheet
Value creation and cash flow
Growth and market power
The entrepreneurship and the financiers
Venture capital financing
Case study
This course is for aspiring or active corporate entrepreneurs who want to understand how to secure and manage funding for their corporate venture.
What you’ll learn:
Learning the fundamentals and how to create financial statements for new ventures within the corporate environment;
Examining valuation techniques for understanding how to assess and grow the value of the corporate venture;
Exploring the different sources of internal and external financing for the corporate venture; and
Applying lessons learned in the course to structure a funding deal and pitch the corporate venture.
Customer & Product Fit
What separates an idea from a business? A paying customer. And this is where we want to take you in this course. From there you’ll begin growing your group of target customers. This will set in motion your flywheel toward an impactful enterprise.
Yes, entrepreneurship is a creative process—this is what makes it fun. But a methodical approach is necessary for it to work. And it is this combination of creativity and discipline that you’ll begin learning in this course. Great for corporate entrepreneurs building a new product line, scientists and engineers commercializing new technologies, and entrepreneurship educators and policymakers.
What you’ll learn:
Conduct Market Segmentation
Select your Beachhead Market
Develop End-User Profiles
Calculate your Total Addressable Market Size
Understand your Customer Persona
While there are ample articles that mention the term, detailed guidance on how to actually achieve product-market fit is scarce.
Through their course, they will explore an actionable model that defines product-market fit using five key components. From bottom to top, we will examine the layers of product-market fit beginning with your target customer and transitioning through your customer’s underserved needs, your value proposition, your feature set, and ultimately your user experience (UX).
What you’ll learn:
Determining Your Target Customer
Identifying Underserved Customer Needs
Defining Your Value Proposition
Specifying Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Feature Set
Creating Your MVP Prototype
Testing Your MVP with Customers
Iterating to Improve Product-Market Fit
Tech, Corporate & Health Care Entrepreneurs
Learn Building the Business Model for Corporate Entrepreneurs from University of Maryland, College Park.
What you’ll learn:
Identifying how to create and deliver value for existing and future customers of the company.
Learning how to extract value for the corporate venture in a sustainable fashion.
Conducting in-depth interviews to guide the customer discovery process for your corporate venture.
Developing business models that encompass the product or service, customers, and economic engine that deliver on the corporate venture objectives.
Universities, government labs, and private companies invest billions of dollars in the research and development of breakthrough technologies that have the potential to transform industries and lives — but very few of these technologies ever leave the lab. Those that do often fail to find compelling market applications. So what determines success? How does an invention become an enduring innovation?
You’ll explore how entrepreneurs match promising technology with customer needs to launch successful new businesses. Using real-world examples, you’ll apply critical thinking to commercialize technologies, and you’ll learn about the venture creation process from founders, funders, and industry experts.
What you’ll learn:
Problem Solving and Systematic Innovation
Matching Needs and Seeds
Generating Business and Operating Models
Determining Readiness and Market Fit
Financing Your Venture
This course delves into intellectual property (IP) with an introduction into the innovation landscape within the UK and how that compares with other settings. You'll focus on how intellectual property applies to frugal innovations, compulsory licensing, and when and how to apply for intellectual property.
This course teaches you about how innovators can secure funding by exploring the types of funding available, the types of organizations involved, as well as the challenges that surround funding. A key part of this course is a focus on 'pitching' skills - what's involved in pitching well, what content you should include, how you can best deliver a pitch.
What you’ll learn:
Investing in innovation
Intellectual property - process and problems
Securing funding for innovation
Pitching your innovation
Business Series 1
This introductory course is designed to introduce you to the foundational concepts of entrepreneurship, including the definition of entrepreneurship, the profile of the entrepreneur, the difference between entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial management, and the role of venture creation in society.
What you’ll learn:
Introduction to Entrepreneurship
Opportunity Analysis
Markets, Need-Finding and Planning
Pitching, Testing, and Prototyping
Once you have a prototype and a clearer vision of the opportunity, you’ll need to create a small organization to discover how to create a repeatable and scalable business model.
What you'll learn:
Preparing to Launch: Essential Components
Building the Team
Networks, Professional Services, and Intellectual Property
Branding, Strategy, and Summary
Start-ups are designed to grow quickly, but successful start-ups grow smart. This course is designed to provide you with an understanding of the essential elements of successful scaling, including an overview of demand generation, customer acquisition, adoption, diffusion, and forecasting demand.
What you’ll learn:
Acquiring Customers and Forecasting Demand
Marketing and PR
Cost Structures, Pricing, and Tracking
Creating and Scaling Company Culture
Start-ups can benefit from a wide variety of financing options on the path to profitability, but how do you know which one to choose? This course explores different financing models, including bootstrapping, organic growth, debt, and risk capital, and also provides a clear overview of equity financing including the key types of investors: angels, venture capital, and crowdfunding.
What you’ll learn:
Business Models and Keeping Customers
Financing, Valuation, and Terms
Private and Public Financing, and Calculating Breakeven
Elements of the Pitch and Exit Strategies
Business Series 2
A successful business starts with a clear vision and a thorough understanding of the opportunities available to turn that vision into a reality. Whether you have an idea for a future venture or you already have a side-line business whilst studying, this course will help you consider your vision and explore the opportunities available. It will give you the time to plan and help you to start documenting your thoughts in a structured business plan while allowing you to share your ideas with others.
A successful business relies heavily on people and networking. A good team and a wider network are essential to success and growth. Whether you have an idea for a future venture or you already have a side-line business whilst studying, this course will help you to recognize the people who can help you take your business forward in both formal and informal business networks.
To run a successful business you need to understand who your customers are and more importantly, how you are going to reach them. Whether you have an idea for a future venture or you already have a side-line business whilst studying, this course will help you to recognize and understand your target market. It will give you the time to plan and help you to start documenting your thoughts in a structured business plan while allowing you to share your ideas with others.
A successful business relies on processes and information systems; it is important that an entrepreneur pays close attention to how their business works and how performance can be improved so that they are in a position to take it forward and manage growth. Whether you have an idea for a future venture or you already have a side-line business whilst studying, this course covers efficient business processes to improve productivity.
The management of finances is crucial to a successful business; financial information provides the evidence to support your decisions about a business and helps to justify those decisions when you present them to other people. Whether you have an idea for a future venture or you already have a side-line business whilst studying, this course will introduce you to key financial information and gives you a chance to discuss your ideas with others.
A successful business requires funding to get it started. There are many ways to get your business up and running, from the informal such as personal savings and borrowing, borrowing from friends and family to the more formal avenues like bank loans, raising equity to crowd-funding. This course will help you consider the finance options available for businesses, and how to fund the expansion of a business.
Changemakers & Social Impact
This free course is for anyone who wants to make a difference. Whether you are already familiar with the field of social innovation or social entrepreneurship, working for an organization that wants to increase its social impact, or just starting out, this course will take you on a journey of exploring the complex problems that surround us and how to start thinking about solutions.
What you’ll learn:
What's our problem?
What do we have to work with?
Getting out of your comfort zone
Innovating by design
Changing the system - who me?
What if it works?
This course offers an introduction to social impact strategy and social entrepreneurship, including key concepts, an overview of the field, and tools to get started as a changemaker. Students will learn how to innovate and design new ideas and new organizational forms to implement those ideas. Students who take this course will be better prepared to launch social impact organizations of their own invention.
By moving through four stages, Define, Design, Pilot, and Scale, students will turn their passion for changing the world into concrete plans for launching a nonprofit or for-profit venture designed to achieve a social goal.
What you’ll learn:
Learn about the key qualities of social innovation
Define and Design: Learn the inputs and basic blueprints of a well-articulated vision.
Pilot and Scale: Learn to build and use the balanced scorecard, a key tool to assess the real-world performance of social innovation.
Sector Selection and Business Models: This course concludes with an exploration of the organizational forms and modes of delivering impact across the business model spectrum
Launching Online & Subscription Models
In this course, you’ll gain an understanding of different business models, learn strategies for naming their business, create customer personas, create their brand identity, create their Unique Value Proposition and learn how to make their business stand out from their competitors.
You’ll know every step needed to build their website including best practices, production do's and don'ts for copywriting, photography and video. You’ll have a pre-launch checklist and website maintenance. You’ll gain foundational knowledge of marketing and pr - create a Pitch Deck about their business that they can deliver to potential partners and investors
What you’ll learn:
Let’s Start with the Basics of an Online Business
A Deeper Dive into Creating an Online Business
Preparing Your Online Business Launch
Successful Launch of Your Online Business. Now what?
Not sure where your next sale will come from? A subscription product or business eliminates the guesswork and is a great way to secure a steady paycheck. Find out how it is done in A Crafter's Guide to Starting a Subscription Business with Mei Pak.
Mei is a veteran jewelry maker who earns her living by selling online. In this class, she’ll teach you everything you need to launch and run a successful subscription business.
You’ll learn how to:
Create the ideal product for your subscribers
Package your product to move
Add more subscribers every month
Establish and maintain organizational systems
Engineer an amazing customer experience and keep customers happy
Why Sell Subscription Products?
Great Subscription Ideas
Positioning Your Subscription Product
Pricing Your Subscription Product
Interview with Stacey Trock of FreshStitches
Subscription Models: Which One is Best for You?
How to Manage Your Subscriptions
Shipping Tools and Apps
Finding Your Ideal Customer
Why Marketing is Necessary
Copywriting for Your Subscription Product
Photography for Your Subscription Product
Promoting Your Subscription on Social Media & Blogs
Interview with Maureen Vasquez of Pipsticks
How to Handle Unsubscribers
The Unboxing Experience
Frequently Asked Questions
Common Challenges for Subscription Businesses
Growing Your Subscriptions
Interview with Wendi Gratz of Shiny Happy World
Valuation & Exiting
Learn Entrepreneurship Strategy: From Ideation to Exit from HEC Paris. This course covers in chronological order each defining step of an entrepreneurial project.
What you’ll learn:
How to gather a founding team
How to raise money to initiate the project
How to deal with day-to-day cash management.
How to measure the product launch phase using cohort analysis.
Focusing on business to business sales
How do different types of investors think about an investment opportunity? What kind of securities and contracts do they offer? How should a company decide what is a "good deal"? This course is designed to introduce you to the challenges and pitfalls of financing new enterprises.
What you’ll learn:
The Basics of Valuation
Building your First Excel Valuation Model
Valuation of High-growth Startups
Venture Capital Overview
Angel Investor Overview
We hope this comprehensive list gives you a clear understanding of the entrepreneurship process. However, there's no template for becoming a successful entrepreneur because you'll have to figure out your own path. Although it might seem challenging to get started, there's no reason you can't turn your ideas into a thriving business with this list and dedication. But remember, all the start-up courses and business books in the world will not reveal everything to you. You'll have to take action and learn by hitting the pavement. Let us know which courses you decided to take.
Subscribe to the Digital Orange Juice for juicy ideas and the people who fund them. You can find out about our next pitch competitions here. Also, be sure to join our new community BGV Connect!