Top Gun Prep Fall 2014 

If you are a first-time entrepreneur with an innovative business idea, making progress can be slow and frustrating: who do you talk to? where do you begin trying to figure out if your idea is a good one? how do you learn all the new skills necessary to start and run a successful company? how do you get where you want to go fast? Introducing Top Gun Prep, the first program enabling any Maine entrepreneur to learn how to dramatically increase speed and decrease risk building their startup.
Here’s how it works:

Top Gun Prep teaches critical information from three sources: 1) the textbook of Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurship educator Steve Blank, 2) the GrowthWheel® toolbox being adopted by entrepreneurs and their business advisors around the globe, and 3) carefully chosen selections from the very best free internet resources for entrepreneurs. You’ll learn best practices for going from idea to market to growth, plus the basics of financials and financing.

This year Top Gun Prep will be a “flipped classroom,” with much of the content delivered in a series of about 40 interactive online modules, each taking about 10 minutes. You can listen and interact at your own pace, then apply what you've learned in the eight interactive weekly webinars. The webinars will be recorded for later viewing for participants who can’t make some or even most of the classes live. Online classes are led and the interactive modules are created by Don Gooding, an entrepreneur and angel investor who has assisted more than 200 Maine entrepreneurs over the last eight years, taught Innovation Engineering® at the University of Southern Maine, and spent 11 years with the lead venture capital firm invested in Facebook. Don runs the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development and is Vice Chair of the Maine Angels.

The online classes are highly interactive, as the Adobe Connect platform used to deliver them allow in-class chat, polling and live Q&A. Adobe Connect just requires a modern browser and can even work on most smartphones! In addition, all Top Gun Prep participants will join a private Google Drive where their short written assignments will receive feedback from, and their questions will be answered by, members of the Maine Mentor Network, MCED and partner staff, and up to 100 fellow entrepreneurs. Top Gun Prep will conclude with a pitch session by up to 15 selected participants. 

The course is particularly well suited for entrepreneurs building scalable innovation-based companies, but 75% of the Top Gun Prep curriculum is also helpful to entrepreneurs building small or micro-enterprises. The content will combine important basics with advanced concepts. College students contemplating entrepreneurship will get a great start, while more experienced entrepreneurs will be connected with some of the leading edge thinking on how to build large, successful, groundbreaking companies.

We are confident this will make a huge difference for you.

• Steve Blank’s methods are taught in Silicon Valley’s top universities, and have been adopted by the National Science Foundation to accelerate technology commercialization, form the basis for Startup Weekend and inspired Eric Ries’ Lean Startup. Here in Maine, GWI credits it with dramatically accelerating new product development, while Top Gun graduate RainStorm Consulting cut 10 months from their original product development plan by following Blank’s teachings.

• The 30+ online videos, 120+ blog entries and 10+ slide show selections in Top Gun Prep are drawn from more than 40 sources and 10 “best of” lists. Hundreds of hours were spent compiling and annotating all of this vital information, so you don’t have to!

• We have recieved rave reviews from previous Top Gun Prep participants, some of whom have gone on to achieve major business successes including equity financing, national press recognition and signficant revenue growth.

Top Gun Prep is only $300 for 8 weeks. It’s a great value when you consider the high cost and frustration of delaying the big returns from your big idea for months or years.

This year we have a new Top Gun Prep option: Introducing Top Gun Prep Meetups in Portland Wednesdays Sept 10 - Nov 5! You can just show up (for FREE) to any or all sessions, or you can register below to pay for the full online course with access to online materials and feedback on homework. The meetup schedule is:

The highly selective Top Gun Maine program will accept about 25 companies, largely from the Top Gun Prep graduates, for intensive mentoring and coaching.