Every startup freshman comes to understand their lack of industry-specific knowledge and the need to carry out many functions on their own. You can come up with a great idea, but it will be glossed over because you don’t have enough knowledge, experience, and connections. This is solved by hiring competent staff, of course, but there’s always a risk to get hooked on a convincing disguise of some noob. In which case it can become the demise of a project that hasn’t even been launched.
How can you avoid this? One option is to choose a professional who is guaranteed to have all the necessary knowledge and experience. The second option is to become such a professional yourself. This is exactly what startup founders can gain with another project of Admitad Projects.
What Hogwarts Is and Who Is Being Trained There
First Steps is an ADP project internally referred to as Hogwarts. The school’s main goal is to raise the applicants’ competence, find their strengths, and improve their skills. All classes are tooled for solving practical startup tasks, and you won’t find any unnecessary and outdated theoretics.
The idea of founding the school belongs to the head of the studio, Maksim Volokhov. Training is provided by Vadim Ananiev (head of the Admitad Projects incubator), Sergey Pushkin (head of production at Admitad Projects), and Vera Ivanova (lead tracker at the Admitad Projects incubator).
How Schooling Works
There were some difficulties with the first class. Not all teams were ready to work and go by our framework. So some projects were filtered out before the training even began. According to the statistics, out of 100 people who got into the learning process, 10 would pass the preliminary stage, and only 3 would complete the training.
Perhaps one reason is that our current training is not classical. Our students don’t study lots of academic theory, at times alternating it with practice. Usually, folks come to our school because they want to do their projects, and teachers share their expertise on specific requests. Got a question? Here’s a practical answer that you can put into action and test its effectiveness in your startup.
To illustrate the value of Hogwarts, here is feedback from Roman Gordeyev, CEO of AIRFL. “It was surprising that they helped us with the project for free. They gave us tips on how to work, providing us with advice and expertise, spending their time on us. We realized what real market research is. As it turned out, there are tons of nuances in CustDev that we had no idea about.
During training, we had access to experts in different areas. What’s important, no one told us anything like ’only what we say is right’. We were given a full understanding of the processes, a possible way of implementing them, and then it was up to us to make any decision. There is no pressure at all, only extremely useful specific knowledge. And it’s very cool. You start to think bigger and broaden your business horizons considerably.
Essentially, after completing Admitad Projects First Steps we got a step-by-step guide on how to develop our project. For startup freshmen, this knowledge is of particularly high value. It will keep you out of trouble at the start!
When talking of specific benefits in numbers, having completed the training we:
- completed 100 CustDev surveys while testing 9 hypotheses;
- found 2 target segments and prepared them for launch;
- with MVPs, closed 58 orders worth about 80,000 roubles;
- laid a plan to reach 2.5—3 million roubles of revenue per month.
In fact, thanks to the knowledge we gained at Hogwarts, we changed the concept of our startup to a product model and started making real money.”
Plans for the Future
Our main mission for the future is to create a full-fledged training program with theoretical and practical components in collaboration with our HR department. It will be based on identifying the competencies of founders. Then we’ll start upgrading these skills during tracking. Interaction with the studio’s departments specializing in different areas will help accomplish that.
But we would still like to keep teaching startup founders as our top priority. It’s not about taking people “off the street”. It’s not about those who come in for the sake of study and learning. Instead, we’re looking for people who want to develop their existing projects. Then they will immediately see the effectiveness of Admitad Projects First Steps in practice.
P.S. Got any questions about studying at Hogwarts? Ask them in the Admitad Projects Telegram channel.
