This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Nobody starts a company because they wanted to learn unit economics. You start because of the product, and then everything else arrives whether you are ready or not.
What actually kills early businesses
Rarely the idea. Usually the founder is excellent at one function and improvising the other five. The product is good and nobody can explain who it is for. Sales happen through personal contacts and stop the moment the founder gets busy. Marketing money goes out with no way to tell which half worked. There is revenue but never cash. And the whole operation depends on one person remembering everything, which works until it very suddenly does not.
I built the people function at Preply while it went from a startup to a unicorn, and I have watched this from the inside — including the parts we got wrong.
How this course is structured
Six functions, in the order they usually become urgent. The founder’s own role first: strategy with SWOT and PESTEL, culture, the decisions only you can make. Then product: finding product-market fit with Jobs to Be Done and journey mapping, the North Star metric, monetisation models and unit economics.
Then demand — marketing that pays back, measured in CAC, LTV and ROMI, and selling with AIDA, SPIN, FAB and proper objection handling. Then the money: the operating model, budgeting, the four perspectives of measurement, and what has to be true before scaling is a good idea. And finally operations, which is the function founders postpone longest and regret postponing most.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals.
Why it is 53 lessons
Because running a business is six jobs, and a short course would have to skip four of them. This is the longest course I teach. Take it in order, apply each part to your own business as you go, and by the end you will have a strategy, a product model, a sales approach, a marketing budget, a financial model and an operating rhythm — all of them yours rather than borrowed.
What is included
– Lifetime access to all course materials
– Active instructor support in the Q&A section
– Udemy Certificate of Completion
– Practical assignments and real business cases
– A section with additional courses, tools and resources
One thing to keep in mind
The functions you are weakest at are the ones costing you money right now, and they are usually the ones you find least interesting. Start with those sections. Enrol now and begin the first lesson today.
