How do you want to live your life? We dig in on founder-startup fit to see the types of businesses you’re uniquely prepared to start and to understand if those are the types of businesses that’ll jive with the life you’d like to live. You’ll also learn how to make time and space for your startup, and you’ll start building your internal system.

Customer Interviews. People either skip customer interviews entirely or do them incorrectly. No matter how well you know your industry, running customer interviews properly helps you find the right customer segment to start with. We make the process - finding people, scheduling interviews, coming up with questions, pulling out learnings - easy, through templates and teaching ways to scale/outsource.

Customer Segmentation. Run interviews and learn how to create and evaluate customer segments, or “SOMs.” We teach you about SOMs, help you find Inflection Points, and identify Traction Channels. By the end of Block 1 you’ll have deep insights into a number of different customer segments and will understand the benefits / drawbacks of each.

Pick a SOM and become Famous to the Family. Choose your customer, understand their Job to be Done, their Decision Making Units, and start becoming “famous to the family” — building out a presence that’ll build trust. Our classic “Trust Your Damn Pickles” workshop will show you the way.

Time to make this thing real and start to grow. We’ll pick a segment, pick a channel, build a landing page and get something compelling in front of your customer. You won’t have a product yet, but we’ll teach you how to get a proxy of what you could build in front of people in a way that’ll help you learn their “intent.” Would they buy? What do they like?

Double down on what’s working and start building out your top-of-funnel system. We’ll teach you how to run marketing sprints — identify an assumption, pick a channel, push a test live, measure the feedback, make a decision. These could be digital ads, physical fliers, in-person events, content marketing, or a number of other methods to get your message in front of your customer to see if they bite.

We’ll zero in on what you need to build, how much you need to charge, and whether the whole thing makes sense as a business. You’ll build a “Skateboard Product” or a “Concierge MVP” to solve customers’ problems in an unscalable way. And you’ll flesh out a business model to evaluate future growth potential.

By this point you should have customers, feedback loops, and an idea for how to build a profitable business. This Block will show you how to set things up for further success beyond the foundations.

Most businesses that go through Tacklebox won’t want (or need) VC funding, but for those that do, we’ve got a block that’ll take you through it.