Gregory Shepard outlines a seven-stage business lifecycle (vision, product, go-to-market, standardization, optimization, growth, exit) paired with funding rounds. Without this standard process, founders can't benchmark progress or spot what's going wrong. Each stage has specific metrics and milestones needed to secure financing.
Chapters
In the study that we did on why entrepreneurs fail and when they fail, one of the things that we found out is there were no standards. There was no standard process that people went through. Made it really impossible to create some sort of deviations off of a mean. One of those things was that there was no official life cycle of a business. In other words, no way that explained you go from this to this to this to this because there's a lot of different ways to look at it. There's the funding and there's the progress of the pipeline and there's the progress of the product and so on and so forth. And so, what we did is we created a lifecycle. The lifecycle starts with vision, goes to product, go-to-market, standardization, optimization, growth, and exit. And each one of these stages have a round of funding that goes with them. So, at the beginning, it's pre-seed, seed, series seed, and so on. And what you have then is you have a standard and therefore, you can figure out what you need to know in order to get your round and what you do after your round in order to validate yourself through the funnel. Along with this is a curve. So as you go from stage to stage, your valuation goes up, and that helps you calculate what your valuation is so you don't get overvalued. You can find out about all this stuff at Boss Startup Science in the curriculum.
