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What You'll Learn

Build a business strategy with SWOT and PESTEL
and run the session where it gets decided rather than discussed,Find product-market fit through customer discovery
Jobs to Be Done and journey mapping instead of assuming it,Calculate unit economics and know at which point your model actually makes money,Choose a monetisation model — freemium
subscription
transactional
licence — and understand what each does to cash flow,Build the sales machine: AIDA
SPIN
FAB
objection handling with LAER
and a pipeline you can forecast,Set up marketing that pays back
using CAC
LTV and ROMI rather than gut feeling about channels,Design operations that survive your absence: processes
metrics
bottlenecks and the rhythms that keep a team synchronised,Know when to scale and when the model is not ready
using the growth stages of a business model,Learn alongside Mikes 1.6 million students from 185 countries,Get the authors experience from Preply
Wargaming
iDeals and Alfa-Bank

Requirements

No business degree needed. Every framework here is introduced where it becomes useful,Bring a business or a serious idea. This course is applied
not observed,Basic comfort with numbers — unit economics and cash flow run through the whole thing,English at intermediate level or above
since all lessons and materials are in English,A spreadsheet for the financial model and the budget exercises

Description

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.

Who this course is for:

Founders building the first version of a company and learning each function as it becomes urgent,Specialists with a strong idea and no idea how the commercial side works,Small business owners who built something that works and cannot make it grow,Freelancers and consultants turning a practice into an actual business,Managers preparing to run a whole company rather than one function,People who have launched something before
watched it stall
and want to know why,Anyone joining a startup at a level where all of this becomes their problem