In this 5‑minute promotional video, Sahil Lavingia outlines the third cohort of his 6‑week Minimalist Entrepreneur program, which launches on February 7 and runs through March 14, 2022. The cohort is limited to 50 participants who pay $1,500. Each week includes a 2‑hour Monday session (the first hour streamed publicly on YouTube, the second hour private for cohort members) and a 2‑hour Friday office‑hours slot, totaling about four hours of live instruction plus independent work. The curriculum progresses from idea generation (week 1) through memo writing, prototyping in Figma (week 2‑3), building a minimal viable product with HTML/CSS and self‑hosting (week 4), sales outreach and messaging (week 5), and finally scaling, hiring, culture, OKRs, and an assembly‑line workflow (week 6). Sahil emphasizes hands‑on feedback, the use of tools he personally employs (e.g., Figma, Gumroad‑style memos, his own domains), and the goal of taking a participant from $0 to a launch‑ready product in six weeks. Contact information (email and Twitter) is provided for questions.
Chapters
Hey everybody, I just wanted to give a quick, uh, 5-minute run-through of the third cohort of The Minimalist Entrepreneur. Every single time it's a little bit different. This is the first time in which the book is out, and so that basically means that we'll be able to spend way more time in the course actually going through how to implement the ideas in the book instead of going through the book itself, because everyone can go read that. Now. Um, so yeah, I just wanted to kind of show people the, the format. It's 6 weeks. Every week goes through this setup where on Mondays we'll do a 2-hour session. The first hour will be live streamed on YouTube, so anyone can, can, uh, participate, uh, watch and learn. And then the second hour will be private for members of the cohort. We're limiting the cohort to a maximum of 50, uh, students, uh, per cohort. And if this fills up in February, we'll do another cohort. At some point in 2022. And then Fridays will be office hours, 2 hours of office hours every week. So around 4 hours of content plus any work that you do. And so that's the weekly schedule. The first week we'll be going through business ideas and some of the tools that I use to actually come up with business ideas. There's a bunch of different ways to go about this. And so we'll go through a bunch of them, Then we'll talk about how I actually take the ideas and turn them into sort of tangible manifestations of them. So they're not just me blabbering, but they're actually nicely composed. I'll show you an example of one of those in here. And so this is kind of a memo that I wrote for a product that we're exploring at Gumroad, where I talk about the problem, the solution, the market, and the master plan. There's a bunch of different ways and levels of fidelity that you can get into with the memo. And so we'll go through that. And they will be good enough to raise money. In this market, especially, not the hardest thing in the world to do. So I will be giving all of these, I will ask people to do them, and then I will give feedback so you can actually improve your abilities on all of these different skills, because building a business is ultimately a compound skill of these things. And a couple others. Then we'll talk about actually designing what this looks like in Figma. And so I use Figma personally, so we'll use that tool. I built this, you know, that memo I turned into a functional prototype in 3 or 4 hours. So you can kind of go through the prototype and I, you know, show people how to use this and all of this good stuff. We have a much nicer mockup now internally. Uh, but we'll wait to show that once it's, uh, ready to, uh, for primetime. So I'll go through that. Um, then we'll actually build an MVP together. I'll teach people HTML, CSS locally on your computer, and then deploying it to a website. So you can go to sahil-lavingia.com or shl.capital or theminimalistentrepreneur.com or what have you. I'll show you how you actually from zero, like have a presence on the internet that you own. Without Web3. Amazing. Uh, then we'll talk about sales. That's like a really important part of building a business. Once you actually have like built kind of the— you've taken, you know, idea, memo, design, you built the thing, at least an MVP of the, of the thing. Now you actually have to tell people about it. And so we'll talk through how you do that, how you do that, what are the different channels, actually writing the, the email, um, or the DM, or that what, what have you, giving feedback on that. And then finally, the last week, the sixth week, We'll be kind of going from 1 to 1,000, right? Which is like hiring people, culture, all of that stuff. And I think the best way to show folks how that happens, because it's a lot softer than some of these other things, um, and many people may not be ready to hire somebody, uh, right away, um, we'll be just showing people how I do it at Gumroad. We'll go through— let me show you right now a little preview. We'll go through how we do OKRs and, and goal setting and planning. I'll talk about how we use this icebox. Different, the different columns, the different kind of the assembly line approach that we use at Gumroad where we go from scoping to designing to building. I have a doc here that we'll go through, um, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So basically the goal is from $0 to $1, from having an idea for a business to coming up with way better ideas for businesses to actually building, prototyping, designing, and selling the business, uh, or the product, I should say. Um, all in 6 weeks. So starting February 7th, goes until March 14th. It'll be $1,500, limited spots, 50 seats for this cohort. Uh, if there's a lot of demand, we'll do it again. Um, we'll figure that out. Um, but I think keeping the cohort small is gonna be really important so I can actually give feedback on all the ideas, cuz I think that's gonna be the most useful part of this cohort, especially now that the book is out. So thanks for watching. Hopefully that wasn't too long. Let me know if you have any questions. You can always email me, Sahil Lavingia at shil@hey.com or DM me on Twitter @sahil. Thanks for listening or watching. Bye.
