Top Gun Prep 2016 

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 many sources: 1) the proven ideas from Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurship educator Steve Blank, 2) distilled summaries of the best frameworks for innovation, marketing and financing, 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.

Top Gun Prep is delivered as a “flipped classroom,” with much of the content delivered in a series of about 40 interactive online modules, each taking about 7 to 10 minutes. You can listen and interact at your own pace.

The interactive modules were created by Don Gooding, an entrepreneur and angel investor who has assisted more than 300 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 has previously been the Executive Director for MCED and Vice Chair of the Maine Angels.

We will be here for you! In addition to the online modules, we will be hosting live workshops including:

 1. The Business Model Canvas

2. Pitching and Pitch Decks

3. Polishing Pitches with mentors

Top Gun Prep will conclude with a pitch session by up to 10 selected participants. 

The course is particularly well suited for entrepreneurs building scalable innovation-based companies, but most of the Top Gun Prep curriculum is 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 $175. 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.

The highly selective Top Gun Maine program will accept about 30 companies, largely from the Top Gun Prep graduates, for intensive mentoring and coaching.