Life is a roller coaster ride and no one is getting out alive, that’s for sure, no matter where you come from and where you go. However, to live this life to its fullest, you must have nerves of steel and be wide-eyed about everything that takes place around you. One such rare ‘breed’ of people would be the entrepreneurs, who are changing the world, one day at a time. And helping them achieve their goals are the online entrepreneurship courses that map the way down this journey.Â
They are the ones who stumble across something extremely unique and give their heart and soul to developing it and bringing it full circle. Like Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla Motors, says, “If something is important enough, or you believe something is important enough, even if you are scared, you will keep going.’’
Now, to keep going and fighting the constant supermassive black hole of insecurity, competition and fear of failure, an entrepreneur must be armed like a soldier in battle. Therefore, to upgrade themselves and keep abreast with the latest happenings around the globe, they must take up online entrepreneurship courses which are both cost-effective, save time and do not mess with your personal work schedule as well.
Listed below are 11 best online entrepreneurship courses for startup founders:
1) Essentials of Entrepreneurship: Thinking & Action
This course from the University of California, Irvine Continuing Education department is meant for people with little or no knowledge of entrepreneurship to emerge with resources they can employ to assess their personal comfort and readiness to start their own business.
The course is made available by Coursera and taught by David Standen, MBA, Instructor, University of California. The course module consists of fundamentals of entrepreneurship, decoding the entrepreneurial process and recognizing business opportunities. It is an interactive course which provides potential entrepreneurs subjective knowledge to excel in their field.
Key topics include tips to evaluate creativity, opportunity and feasibility, business strategies for new businesses, the importance of a business plan and achieving success in new business. Post completion of the course, students would be equipped with the desired skill and confidence for starting a business besides providing them with a solid understanding across their role in organisations, if at all they were to join one.
There were no tangible cons or bad reviews for this course. In fact, 29% of students boasted of starting a new career after this course and 38% claimed of having derived a tangible career benefit from this course. Check out the course here.Â
2) Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies
This course is also made available by the massive open online course (MOOC) Coursera and is rated as the top online entrepreneurship course and one of the top three online business courses by the same.
It provides a general introduction to entrepreneurship, industry, and markets and is aimed at assisting active and aspiring entrepreneurs to build upon their ideas and transform them into companies.
This course will enable students to identify and analyze entrepreneurial opportunities, enhance their entrepreneurial mindset, improve strategic decision-making and build innovative business models.
Dr James V. Green, Director of Entrepreneurship Education at the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute would be your mentor for the same. Winner of the 3E Learning Innovative Entrepreneurship Education Competition, he has worked in multiple startups across several executive and operational roles respectively.
For this course, Coursera also provides financial aid to students who cannot afford the fees for the same and has a 7-day refund policy in place as well. In case you find this course worth checking out, click here to know all about it.
3) Y Combinator’s Startup School
This one is Silicon Valley’s most famous and most successful startup accelerator and one of the top online entrepreneurship courses by all means! What it does is that it provides seed funding, which is generally the earliest stage of venture funding, which bears your expenses while you are just starting up.
Y Combinator offers a 10-week online course which covers all in-depth topics from top high-growth startup founders. The instructors at Y Combinator include a staggering body of leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, and Drew Houston. This course is touted the best for a pair of founders who are probably working on an idea as big as Google.
At this school, they train prospective founders to get through the first phase with the help of due training and guidance. This generally means a hand-holding is done until the students build something impressive enough to raise an initial round of funding on a large scale.
Y Combinator accepts applications twice a year and has two batches per year running from January to March and from June through August.
The cons of studying here are that students may feel crashed and burnt out and feel tempted to drop out. Nearly 4,500 of the 15,000 people dropped out of the program in 2019 before it even began. This clearly proves that this programme is not for everyone, but if you have the appetite for chaos, this is the perfect place for you to learn and grow.
4) Fundamental of Entrepreneurship: Pitching Your Business & Yourself
This course, offered by Skillshare, will provide you with a short introduction on what makes an entrepreneur, how entrepreneurs can open up on their narrative so that they can secure both funding and customers.
For the final project, you will be required to make a 1-minute video elevator pitch for your business and yourself. This course is offered through Skillshare, and you can either just watch the videos for free or pay $8 per month for the full course experience.
The class is taken by Barbara Corcoran, Entrepreneur and author of Shark on ABC’s Shark Tank. Learn the craft of pitching your business here.
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5) Entrepreneurial Operations: Launching a Startup
Ranked by U.S. News and World Report as the finest university in the world for entrepreneurship for over two decades, Babson College offers an online course for its best and brightest. It offers a wide range of programming meant for entrepreneurs of all kinds for success across industries and organizations.
This programme will benefit entrepreneurs of all kinds: the ones who are building a startup, or looking to upgrade and innovate in a larger company/setup, or for the ones seeking newer opportunities for growth.
The key topics in this course include exploring ventures value chain, mitigating potential operational risks, and ways to successfully launch a startup. Now, optimise your businesses by learning the fundamentals of entrepreneurial operations here.Â
6) Entrepreneurship: From Idea to Launch
This course is made available for all newbie entrepreneurs or who are still contemplating of starting up. This course is loaded with tips and guidance to help you waltz through successful pre-launch works of your dream venture.
The unique feature of this course is that it is based on the experiences of the teacher who teaches it! Yes, it is taught by Dr Jeff Cornwall, professor of entrepreneurship at Belmont University and is designed after his own experiences.
Jeff took a nine-year break from his academic career to co-founded Atlantic Behavioural Health Systems, so there’s the added advantage of getting all the knowledge first-hand from the horse’s mouth. Click here to enrol in this course and have your business running in no time.
7) Content Marketing Essentials
Online learning platform Udacity has a whole programme devoted to digital marketing, and Content Marketing Essentials is one of its components. Marketing software company Hubspot is behind the creation of this course and has developed a set syllabus for students to plan a content marketing strategy and to measure its reach and effectiveness.
The programme has lessons on planning content to send it across like a marketing message besides covering other aspects of content marketing like content creation through storytelling, curation, and distribution, promotion and tracking of content. Therefore, enrol in this course right now to become an excellent digital marketer!Â
8) Eric Ries’s ‘The Lean Startup’
 The Lean Startup is a novel, field-tested philosophy to provide you with a toolset to improve your chances of success and minimize the possibility of failure. Featured at the Harvard Business School, this course will teach you about what is a Lean Startup and how do you implement Lean principles into your own company?
The author of this book, Eric Ries has roped in all the leaders of this movement to talk to you about what a lean startup is and how you can implement it into your company. This course is one of the top online entrepreneurship courses and a deal not to miss – it has the most extensive yet curated content you will ever have in one place.
Eric has ensured that the most important aspects of a lean startup are condensed in a single course. Click here to enrol in this distinctive course today.
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9) Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies and Skills
Negotiation is the key to success, not only in the workplace, but in relationships, business, market and life in general! From negotiating a marriage proposal to negotiating the purchase of a car, this is one indispensable life skill, which if mastered, can get you amazing personal and professional advancement.
Even as an entrepreneur, you would be likely to find yourself in a situation which requires you to convince the person on the other end of the table. Here, you should be adept enough to convince the other person about what you want without them suspecting you of pulling your personal agenda through.
This course is prepared by George Siedel in collaboration with the University of Michigan, who has put together over eight hours of practical information which breaks down the complete process of negotiation for you. This course will teach you and let you practice the four steps to a successful negotiation, with one module for each step.
Additionally, this course allows you to earn a Verified Certificate (VC) through the verification of your identity and successful completion of the course.
A VC would help provide formal recognition of your achievements in the course and includes the University of Michigan logo. In case you are considering getting a VC, you should complete the verification process before taking the final exam. Click here to enrol in this course and begin your career advancement today.
10) Google IT Support Professional Certificate Specialization
This one is a five-course certificate developed by Google, in collaboration with Coursera and includes an innovative curriculum designed to prepare individuals for an entry-level role in IT support. The job in IT can vary from a remote job or working at a global company like Google itself.
In case you were looking out for an IT job, this course is meant just for you. This program is part of Grow with Google, a Google initiative to help create economic opportunities for all Americans.
This course can be completed in 8 months by dedicating 8-10 hours a week. There is also an option to skip ahead from the content you are already familiar with and move ahead to the graded assessments.
Through a mix of video lectures, quizzes, and hands-on labs and widgets, this program will introduce you to troubleshooting and customer service, networking, operating systems and more. Notably, the content in the Google IT Support Professional Certificate is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
11) How to Build a Startup by Udacity
Sounds pretty basic yet on point, right? This course is taught by Steve Blank, who has built several Silicon Valley startups, authored two books on entrepreneurship, and currently teaches around the world. This course teaches about the Customer Development Process, which teaches entrepreneurs how to develop and test their ideas using data from real customers.
Several startups fail due to a lack of validation of their ideas with their customer base, however, this course would help in mitigating the same and analysing the pain points of the idea/business and cater to the unmet needs of customers. Click here to start building your dream startup now.
Quite an exhaustive list of top online entrepreneurship courses this one is, isn’t it? However, we are sure that any and every course in this list would not only help revive your inner entrepreneur but would equip you with the necessary skill required to thrive in the world at large.
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Looking for an economical workspace that can help you start your new venture? Want to join the community of achievers for networking & growth? Download the myHQ app today!
FAQs:
Q. Why do I need an entrepreneurship course?
A. Not many are great entrepreneurs by birth, but they have the potential to lead and formulate a feasible idea. From better growth perspectives to structuring your startup towards success, there can be a number of reasons you might need an entrepreneurship course.
Q. What’s the most relevant online marketing tools for first-time entrepreneurs?
A. Well, this depends on a number of aspects. From the domain your idea lies in, to the kind of team you have and the operational requirements you may possess, there are a number of free tools to choose from. Here’s a complete list of marketing tools for entrepreneurs to check out.
Q. What are the most common issues faced by entrepreneurs and startup founders?
A. Entrepreneurship is a never-ending process. From capital generation to strategy and team building, there are a host of issues that lie ahead of an entrepreneurial journey. Check this well-curated piece on problems faced by entrepreneurs to know more on the same.
