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Online courses for entrepreneurs: In this article, I’d like to highlight a few online courses for a startup founder. As a startup founder, I understand the challenge of trying to bootstrap and complete many things by yourself. An important part of running a startup with no money means that you’ve to do a lot of activities on your own. This discussion talks about some of the key online courses or resources that can help you gain expertise to progress in these areas.

Online Courses for Entrepreneurs

As a founder, it is hard to segregate time to learn amongst many other things you need to do. However, it is one of the most important aspects of being an entrepreneur to ensure that things are done to an acceptable standard. This includes developing your business plan, identifying unique selling points or Minimum viable products etc. Although there are plenty of online courses available for entrepreneurs, you’ve to choose the best ones.

My personal recommendations would be to consider a reputed provider such as Coursera, Edx or Open Classrooms. These providers have many courses for free which can provide the value you’re looking for. I’ve been privileged to implement some of these learnings both as a founder and in my career in general. They have proven to be productive and added a huge value to my approach.

A big bonus of going through these courses is that it provides you with industry-specific knowledge and frameworks which gives your investors huge confidence in conversations with you.

Key online sources for an Entreprenuer

After having searched through plenty of useful and useless videos on youtube, I’ve restricted myself to a certain set of factors to find out the best course that suits me. Along with having only trusted websites to look for the course of my choice, I also look through reviews. In this case, not just the reviews but also comments and whether it consists of people from various nationalities and specifics about the topic. This helps me eliminate the paid reviews which usually spike the usefulness factor of an online course. You don’t want to be wasting time on a bad course – even though it is free.

While talking about online courses for entrepreneurs, I’d like to focus on some key search tricks which can help you find the right course. These are split into the following headings:

• Using long tail keywords in trusted websites
• Scholarly or research articles filter while searching on google
• Specific websites related to coding or technical learning
• Key sources for business specific content
• Common aggregators for online courses for entrepreneurs and other professionals

Long tail keywords

Most authors end up using keywords for us to be able to search relevant articles. Long-tail keywords help google identify what you’re exactly looking for. Granted that it comes up with a few unhelpful links, you can use the video filter to see what comes up as the most viewed item. It isn’t the best solution and doesn’t work for courses. But for individual videos, the long-tail keywords are very helpful to find the right online courses for entrepreneurs.

Scholarly Articles

Google is great, but if you haven’t used google scholar, you’re missing something. It is a filter that helps you look at specific research papers. These sources are not only reliable but also vetted which makes them worthy articles to have been published. Most of these articles contain data and market research which can easily form your first source of information for the size of the market etc.

In addition to this, plenty of consulting companies perform market research helping you to gather key insights. Some of these data companies such as statista provide you graphs and macroeconomic figures which you can make use of. In addition, a general google search gives you report from consulting companies such as Delloite, KPMG, PWC etc which have specific divisions performing these types of researches. Another area to try is if you have a university membership that gives you access to Bloomberg reports or Harvard business school reviews which are a fantastic source of learning.

Technical Courses in online courses for entrpreneurs

I was amazed to see the amount of technical and coding courses available online. These courses are not the only audit but also guided and reviewed which helps your coding to improve immensely. These courses train you on using cutting edge technologies for free. Some examples are courses from top-level universities such as Stanford which train you on machine learning. You can even audit these courses if budget is a constraint making it a brilliant opportunity to explore.

Another common and popular forums are GitHub, Stackoverflow which have forums of brilliant discussions which you can benefit from. Other popular sources are courses from Udemy etc which have some helpful and specific courses which allow you into a network of people with a common interest.

Best Online Courses

Personally, I’d suggest the following as the top resources I’ve found for online courses for entrepreneurs

• EDx – Very good sessions, some covering well being and personal aspects as well. You will be able to find some courses from Harvard, Berkeley Uni as well
• Coursera – It is a mix of all types of courses – has a few from Stanford University and a few other popular names
• Udemy – Lots of individual providers with a rating of their courses
• Open Classrooms – Mostly free courses from different providers and universities
• Youtube – Need to be careful about what to choose – too much of content out there.

The bottom line is to identify the course that suits you best. It is easy to get lost in bad courses – choose carefully and move swiftly to find the most useful course for you.