The EJ Methodology: How To Check Infant Entrepreneur Mortality

I would not have believed this had someone just told me so. But based on my roundtables, I have now a reasonable sample of entrepreneurs to do some trend analysis and draw a few conclusions:

A good 25% of the entrepreneurs don’t bother validating their ideas. If we can simply plug this basic gap, we can enhance their chances of success dramatically.

Another 25% is immediately interested in raising money. Again, raising money without validating the business is pretty much impossible, so this is another pattern that I am seeing constantly, and if we can address, has a chance at significantly impacting infant entrepreneur mortality.

I have put together a set of slides on the EJ methodology, which I would like you to use as you are either trying to self-teach or are working with entrepreneur groups and entrepreneurs as 1M/1M ambassadors. Ideally, as we build the EDO partnerships, if we can equip the Internal Ambassadors to use these slides and help the entrepreneurs prepare for the roundtables, we can scale this much better. For the roundtables to be productive, I would like entrepreneurs to do their homework before coming to pitch me. And this includes thinking through a strategy for validating your business until it becomes adequately real, not just an idea in your head. Meaning, figure out how you get to paying customers, and come to discuss that strategy with me. I will be happy to help.

Over the last year or more, I have worked with over 75 entrepreneurs, and they are coming to the roundtables with absolute basic questions, almost all of which can be tackled by themselves, or by the Ambassadors pointing them to the appropriate resources as indicated in these slides. If my experience coaching entrepreneurs over the last year is any evidence, just addressing the validating point and the fund raising point are going to add tremendous scalable value to reducing infant entrepreneur mortality.

1M / 1M ambassadors, if you can give me a hand with scaling this portion of the process, I can spend my time tackling the more complex issues next, and also focus on looking for more patterns like these that may also be addressed with scalable solutions.