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Skills for a Modern Entrepreneur or Business Owner
Whether you have a great idea for a mobile application or a web company, or just want to explore what it takes to be a business owner—this Track covers what you'll need to know to get your ideas off the ground and into the world. The diverse coursework includes instruction on financial statements, marketing, data, soft skills, and much more.
We'll start things off with our 3-hour course on How to Start a Business. You'll learn about product market fit, exploring a business model, inbound marketing strategies, and sales basics---all things you'll need to be thinking about as you establish your business.
A few things you'll learn next: how to write a business plan, how to conduct user interviews, and researching your users' needs. You'll also complete our 3-hour course on How To Market A Business, which will teach you essentials on social media, SEO, and more.
Next, we'll cover Financial Statement Basics, Spreadsheet Basics, and data analysis and visualization, all crucial steps to ensuring your business's success. You'll also learn how to present, whether that be a pitch, a report, or something in between.
Our How to Freelance course will equip you to market your skills, no matter what they are. Finally, we'll do a deep dive into Career Foundations, where you'll learn how to choose your path, and our Soft Skills course, which will prepare you with practical tactics for the workplace.
We're excited to take this journey with you. Let's get started!
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How to Start a Business
If you have an idea and think you can make some money off it, it's time to start a business! In this course, we're going to look at what it means to take an idea and make a business model out of it. Once we have a business model, we're going to spread the word, try to sell our product and get real customers!
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How to Write a Business Plan
One of the most common questions asked when starting a business is how to write a business plan. Business plans are used for many different purposes, from planning out your initial venture, to fundraising and conducting feasibility studies. In this course, we will cover what a business plan is, why we need it, the basic structure of a business plan and some of the various formats.
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Conducting User Interviews
Learn how to validate product ideas by identifying an audience, sourcing participants, conducting user interviews, and analyzing the results.
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Researching User Needs
Many products are developed based on a hunch, a judgement call, and incomplete information. Needless to say, most of them fail miserably. Startup founders and business owners then ask themselves why. This course takes a different, risk-mitigating, more scientific approach to the art of starting a business. You’ll learn how to develop a product people really need by uncovering these needs well in advance. Before you write one line of code, before you hire a large team, before you take a big risk. You’ll learn the ins and outs of learning if people need your product by implementing three activities to learn from your future customers - Experience Sampling, Field Observation, and Interviewing. After making sense of it all, you’ll be able to kick-start your business with confidence in your knowledge and wisdom.
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How to Market Your Business
Marketing your business requires an understanding of how to communicate the benefits of your business to satisfy the needs of your potential customers. In this set of videos, we'll explore how to expand your reach and improve your messaging through various strategies such as social media, usability, SEO, video and email marketing.
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How to Build Your Business Through Blogging
C.C. Chapman, author of 'Content Rules' and 'Amazing Things Will Happen', presents his insights on how to start blogging, how to find ideas on what to write, and tactics and tools to create a variety of content that will build your audience and help you find new business.
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Financial Statement Basics
Understanding how to read the story that financial statements tell is a really useful skill and an important part of career development. In this course, we’ll give a basic overview of the 3 main financial statements: the Profit and Loss Statement, the Balance Sheet, and the Cash Flow Statement. We’ll teach what they show you, why it matters, and give you a bunch of practice problems to help retain that knowledge. After completing this course, you will be able to read, understand, and use financial statements and build on that knowledge as you continue to learn about them.
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Spreadsheet Basics
A spreadsheet is an electronic document that arranges data in a table by using columns and rows. Among other things, spreadsheets let you store, manipulate, share and analyze data. They're used in business to help make complicated decisions like where to open a new restaurant location, where to build a wind farm, or where to expand a business' marketing efforts. Spreadsheets aren't just for business use either. A household expense spreadsheet can help you determine when you will be able to afford a new car or take your next trip. In this course, you'll learn the basics of spreadsheets including the parts of a spreadsheet, spreadsheet vocabulary, how to import data, how to make complex calculations, how to reference data in different cells, and how to use spreadsheet functions. You'll also learn best practices for formatting spreadsheets, protecting your data, and more, all using Google Sheets, which is free and very similar to Excel. When you're done you'll have built an entire spreadsheet complete with data, complex functions and formulas and colorful and meaningful formatting.
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Data Analysis Basics
Learn how to make better decisions with data in this course on data analysis. We'll start by looking at what data analysis is, and then we'll see how we can use data analysis to create better outcomes.
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Data Visualization with Excel
This overview of Data Visualization in Excel is designed for absolute beginners, but can also benefit people who have already been using Excel to create charts. You will learn about the fundamentals of data visualization, how create types of charts in Excel, and tips on how to get the most of the charts you make.
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Presentation Skills
Learn techniques for delivering effective presentations so you can help guide decisions, influence change, and make an impact on the business.
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How to Freelance
One of the many ways you can make money off your technical skills is to branch off on your own and freelance. Freelancing and running your own business can be a very rewarding and fulfilling life with exciting projects and great clients but there are lots of things to learn. In this project we are going to look at how you can get started, where you can find clients, what you should be charging, and how to manage your first project.
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Careers Foundations
In this Deep Dive, the Treehouse team shares expertise on focusing your passions, finding your path, identifying opportunities, and how to prepare yourself to get the job you want in the tech industry.
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Soft Skills
In this series of videos, we're going to explore the most important soft skills: personal and professional qualities that allow you to do your job better. If you can be an effective communicator, manage your time, work well with others, and be a great problem solver, you'll have a lot more success in whatever you do.
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Track Completion
This course includes:
- How to Start a Business 3 hours
- How to Write a Business Plan 58 min
- Conducting User Interviews 42 min
- Researching User Needs 2 hours
- How to Market Your Business 3 hours
- How to Build Your Business Through Blogging 43 min
- Financial Statement Basics 85 min
- Spreadsheet Basics 2 hours
- Data Analysis Basics 75 min
- Data Visualization with Excel 90 min
- Presentation Skills 43 min
- How to Freelance 2 hours
- Careers Foundations 4 hours
- Soft Skills 3 hours