The New Disciplined Entrepreneurship Toolbox

I first created the Disciplined Entrepreneurship Toolbox in 2015, will Bill Aulet’s help. I saw it as a set of tools and checklists that help a team navigate the 24-steps process. In the five years since its launch, more than 20,000 founders, students, educators, accelerators, and mentors have used it with their teams or companies.

The toolbox started as a fun project but in time had to evolve to support a large number of users and the development efforts to add new features. On top of this, we got a lot of feedback throughout the years that we wanted to implement, to make the tool more usable. We also learned a lot by doing a lot of bootcamps, workshops, and webinars on the topic, on how the methodology works in real-life situations.

This is why, recently, we launched the largest update ever of the toolbox, with a completely new user interface and three new key features that help guide startups in the right direction.

Project portfolio tracking

We’ve improved the way you track the progress of your startups. In the new dashboard you can now oversee overall progress in a straightforward, visual representation, see how engaged the founders are by checking when the project was last updated, and you can add new team members to each project. The step progress is now calculated differently to give you a more realistic view of what is actually happening and it is based solely on the deliverables, which are the conclusions added at each step.

All of these come in handy, especially when juggling with multiple projects or startups. It is extremely helpful if you are an entrepreneurship educator or accelerator since it allows you to observe the dynamics of your cohort and how invested they are in becoming disciplined entrepreneurs.

Project-level view

Looking at things on a more granular level, the details of what each founder/student is working on are present inside each project’s dashboard. There is a progress bar for each step individually, as well as a timeframe on when it was started and last updated. All of their conclusions are laid out in the summary tab and can be exported.

We don’t let founders dive in blindfolded, so a set of instructions is provided on each step to help them understand better what they need to work on and where their focus should lie. We’ve also written a few articles that help them build a persona, define their problem statement, and how to research for funding, complete with downloadable templates to help them in the journey.

Step discussions

Navigating the waters of entrepreneurship isn’t always easy, and having people in your corner, helping you steer the ship in the right direction goes a long way. On our platform you can assign mentors to each team to help them go through every step of the process and, in this updated version, we’ve transformed the feedback option into a discussion board.

We realized that communication should be two-sided and that feedback is truly valuable when it is put in context and met with follow-up questions. The back and forth between colleagues, educators, mentors, advisors, and any other people involved in each project helps refine each conclusion. The discussions are held at each step, as keeping the main focus on each individual step and the work around it is essential.

In the end, we are only as good as the entrepreneurs that we help shape. Our platform is built to give the founders the necessary tools to survive in the wilderness that the startup land is, the educators a structure for sharing knowledge, and early-stage investors a way to base their decision more on facts and less on gut feeling. All the other features that have proved to be very useful in overseeing and helping with the startup journey, such as exporting data, sorting through startups based on progress, team collaboration, and others, are still available on the platform and we are currently working on releasing new features. The journey is never complete, but here are our next milestones, just in case you were curious:

• Viewing project details laid out in a Disciplined Entrepreneurship Canvas, as well as Lean Canvas.
• Worksheets and templates attached to each step (as Google Docs/Sheets).
• Add-on materials to each step (books, articles, videos etc.).
• Updates and steps from the workbook.

If you’re interested to learn more, get in touch with us here. We’d be delighted to help.