image description
image description

Do you have an idea? Unsure what to do to get it out there?

INTRODUCING

SHIP IT

WHAT IS IT?

An 8-week live, interactive course that will walk you through the steps of how to turn your idea into a product or service people will pay for.

WHEN IS IT?

Begins Monday May 1, 2017 and is taught once a year.


Register by Friday April 28, 2017.

Taken by people who have shipped:
  • image description
  • image description
  • image description
  • image description
  • image description

Meet our SHIP IT instructors & sample their teaching style before applying.

Sign up below for free access to the SHIP IT 7-Video Intro Training Series.

If you build it, your users will come ... right?

Isn’t that how a product launch is supposed to work?
tick

You're a maker and doer at heart, but you're buried under an avalanche of ideas.

You're stuck, obsessing over ideas, worried about money, and mulling over questions like:

SHOULD I ...

Quit my
day job?

SHOULD I ...

Start building?

SHOULD I ...

Raise capital?

These questions stop entrepreneurs like YOU dead in you tracks -- preventing your amazing ideas from coming to life.

You’re instead lead to believe one of these ‘popular’ misconceptions:
  • You should quit your day job tomorrow.
  • You should start building a product right away.
  • You should cross your fingers and start pitching investors.
tick

stop

You’re shoulding all over yourself!

IT’S TIME FOR A REALITY CHECK ...

You aren’t ready to quit your day, build a product, or step up to pitch anyone until you know you are building the right product and business based on your expertise AND lifestyle needs.

Otherwise you’ll end up:

  • Holding yourself back building a product or business you think you should be building, instead of the one you WANT to build
  • Chasing the wrong set of customers who are uninterested in your offering or are unwilling to pay
  • Spinning your wheels in a million directions trying to figure it all out!

We've seen far too many entrepreneurs give up too early or chase the wrong direction.

We know because we’ve done it too! We’ve learned the hard way and put all our
learnings into our course.

SHIP IT will teach you how-to:

  • Overcome doubts and fears around your ability to ship your idea.
  • Outsmart risks in areas such as positioning your idea relative to competitors, attracting paying customers, and hiring talented employees.
  • Uncover your unique expertise and show you how to create an product or service around it like a book, course, consulting or coaching, or a software product.
  • Start small monetizing your idea from day 1, and see what it will take to build a 6 and 7-figure business.

What you’ll get along the way:

  • image description

    3 hrs/week of hands-on instruction

  • image description

    Group coaching with expert instructors

  • image description

    Personalized feedback on your idea

  • image description

    Access to Femgineer's global alumni community, for life

  • image description

    Real-life case studies

Why SHIP IT works:

  • Be guided through an 8-week online course that contains step-by-step lessons starting with idea and ending with strategies to help you ship it.
  • Complete exercises at the end of each lesson, submit them, and receive ongoing feedback from instructors tailored to your situation.
  • Be invited to participate in an active and engaged community of founders around the globe who are also working on bringing their ideas to life.
  • Receive lifetime access to the materials, including future additions and improvements.

We're proud to see our alumni go on to launch paid products, raise capital from angel investors, run successful crowdfunding campaigns, and get accepted into accelerators.

But don’t take our word for it, see for yourself

STUDENT SUCCESS STORIES

How one founder turned an idea into a tangible prototype and angel-funded startup.

Alyssa Ravasio, Founder & CEO of HipCamp - a platform that makes it easy to discover and book awesome camp sites - used the lessons that she learned from Femgineer to find early adopters, launch a prototype, and raise $1M in angel funding for her startup.

Femgineer's Ship It course pushed Ravasio out of her comfort zone to seek customer feedback much earlier than she was ready. With only a prototype in hand, she was nervous about what others would think. But Femgineer forced her to move faster and to get her product into the hands of her customers.

"Going through a lot of these usability interviews, I've learned to ask open-ended questions instead of specific ones. For example, I would ask - what is your biggest challenge when camping? I've received so much unexpected feedback on that one question."

As part of the Ship It course, Alyssa was able to do more than develop her product - she was able to identify a critical flaw in some of her early business assumptions. Initially, she built her prototype around the assumption that her customers had no familiariy with the state parks around them. She even wrote code to help audiences find state parks close to their cities.

But Alyssa's early prototype helped her see that her target customers already knew where they wanted to camp - they just needed a little bit of help finding the right place.

She was also surprised to learn that her customers didn't need a bunch of complicated features - they already found her prototype useful.

image description
Alyssa Ravasio Founder of Hipcamp

How one emerging startup leader and entrepreneur learned how to launch products faster.

Jessica Jalsevac, now head of operations at ScriptDash (a prescription delivery service) and formerly director of account management at ZeroCater (a service that coordinates corporate catering from local food vendors), joined Ship It to learn how to bring products to market, faster.

A key lesson that she learned was the importance of the customer feedback process and how to do better research and reduce time to market.

"In the course of doing all the exercises for the hands-on labs, I realized that we weren't thinking correctly about our target market. Poornima taught us how to structure that feedback from our potential customers and how to use that feedback constructively. If I had gone out and done it myself, I wouldn't have had an effective approach as well as a proper way to segment them."

In other words? She realized that stepping in the wrong direction would be better than not taking a step at all - a lesson that she keeps close to heart as she continues to advance in her career.

image description
Jessical Jalsevac Head of Operations ScriptDash

You could go at it alone, mirroring what you think you should be doing.

(But you already know the ending to that clichéd startup story.)

You’ll burn through the cash you don’t have pursuing the wrong path.

You’ll waste hundreds of hours building a product your audience doesn’t want.

You’ll build a business that doesn’t really resonate with your life goals.

#whaa-whaa

The top 3 reasons
most founders give up after their first year.

( ... and how to guarantee your product won’t take the dreaded Walk of Shame)

#PRODUCTFAIL Scenario 1

Going ALL in on a BIG idea

We are constantly being fed the narrative of the twenty something who either dropped out of college or quit their day job, worked out of their parents garage for 6 months to come up with an idea, shipped it, it started growing like gangbusters, and then attracted some fancy Silicon Valley VC.

Kudos to them for killin’ it!

What are the rest of us supposed to do?

When you have financial commitments like kids, a mortgage, and so on, there is no shame in working full time and starting something on the side. Frankly, it shows you are capable of managing your time and being financially responsible!

You’ve gotta start by considering the type of product you want to ship.

Too often people go all in on building something like a software product, which requires tons of time and capital.

And if they don’t have loads of experience, time, or the capital it can feel really slow going.

So why not start with something small?

There is no shame in starting small.

You can learn a lot from shipping a small product like a blog, a book, or offering a service. Then use those learnings to tackle something bigger!

Remember: those that climb Mount Everest, don’t start by climbing Mount Everest ;)

In Ship It, you'll learn how to start by building and shipping small products and scale up.

#PRODUCTFAIL Scenario 2

You think you have to figure it ALL out in your first year

Do you meet a lot of people who tell you they started a year ago and now they are “killin’ it!”

Really it only took them a year?

No one really wants to admit that things aren’t going well, because it’s a sign of weakness. It shows that they don’t have it all figured out yet.

Here’s the thing: no one has it ALL figured out!

Those who might have made their first dollar, need to figure out how to make their next dollar. Even those who have made hundreds or thousands, often find themselves stuck after a while, trying to figure out how to get to the next level.

They’re also embellishing on how long it took to get their idea off the ground.

Some claim it took months, others will say a year. However long they tell you it took them might not be an accurate estimate, because again people don’t want to admit that it took them years to figure it out.

If you dig a little deeper you’ll discover that they might have had a slew of ideas that didn’t go anywhere for awhile. In the course of experimenting they happened to discover a breakthrough idea, which did take off. Instead of counting all the time it took to get to the breakthrough idea, they reset their clock, making them appear to be an overnight success.

In Ship It, you’ll learn:

  • How long it takes to ship different products, so you can judge for yourself how you want to start
  • How to avoid major time sinks and money pits, when it building and shipping products
  • How to setup a support system you can trust and will help you overcome setbacks

#PRODUCTFAIL Scenario 3

Fitting life into business, instead of the other way around

People often pivot their product or business to attract lots of customers and investors in order to build a big business.

If that’s your goal, then go for it!

But there is no harm in taking a moment to ask yourself, what’s more important to me – just building a big business or one that afford me time for personal care and loved ones?

It doesn’t mean you cannot attract investment or scale a business. It just means you need to learn to prioritize what you value: flexibility along with creative and financial freedom.

SHIP IT gives you the best TOOLS, FEEDBACK, INSIGHTS, STRUCTURE, and PROVEN PROCESSES you need to reach your goals, just like Alyssa Ravasio, founder of HipCamp.

Alyssa

Alyssa launched a paid prototype and raised $1M in angel investment a year later.

The only thing that limits what you’re capable of is what you believe you can do.

Femgineer offers great crash courses on the non-optional basics of how to build and grow a product that people will love.

Alyssa Ravasio, Founder of Hipcamp
mac

We know there are a LOT of courses to choose from, here’s how SHIP IT is different:

  • We cap our class size at 50 so you can receive as much attention as possible.
  • We teach our courses live AND online, so you’ll get to interact with instructors and peers from anywhere in the world.
  • Our instructors have successfully shipped a number of products from books to courses to software products, that people paid for. And NOT just one, but many!

Meet the lead instructor for Ship It:

Poornima Vijayashanker, Founder of Femgineer
img-poornima

I’ve worked with 100+ startup founders — from around the world — over the past 2 years as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at 500 Startups.

You could call me an entrepreneur, an engineer, an author, a speaker, or even a yogi. I do all of the above.

And most of you know me as the founding engineer at Mint, where I helped build, launch, and scale the product until it was acquired by Intuit.

I’ve been a guest lecturer at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering. Go Blue Devils!

Here’s what I’ve shipped:
  • Two self-published books
  • Three online courses
  • More than a handful of software products
  • 20+ episodes of FemgineerTV
  • 100+ talks around the world
  • 500+ blog posts
What do I do better than anyone else you ask? I rally people to get sh*t done … and make the world an iota better each day. Meet the other amazing instructors who are going to help you ship your idea:
image description
Elijah Murray

A UI/UX strategist, designer, and developer. He is the founder of Blue Fantail, a UX strategy firm for mobile and web design/development. He was formerly Co-Founder & CTO at Lenda.

image description
Karen Catlin

Karen is a leadership coach, an advocate for women in the tech industry, and author.

She serves on the Board of Directors of The CLUB, an incubator of women leaders. Through Brown University Women's Launch Pad, she mentors young women about to start their careers. Formerly, Karen was a vice president at Adobe Systems.

image description
Rikita Puri

An accidental entrepreneur who founded Storyhackers, a company that helps businesses create impactful and inspiring content programs. When she’s not writing about data, Ritika is the speaker curator for The Lean Startup Conference, expert liaison at Clarity.fm and advisor to Sortly.

image description
Vedrana Behaderovic

Heads operations at Femgineer where she is responsible for the management of its growing remote team. She has previously headed operations for a number of startups and hedge funds in NYC.

Because SHIP IT is part of Femgineer, we provide you with:

microscope

LIVE CLASS + LAB SESSIONS

We’ll challenge you to look at your product, your processes, and your business model differently.

What you can expect

  • Participate in 3 hrs/week of interactive classes and labs.
  • Receive intimate group coaching and personalized feedback from your trusted advisors—expert instructors like Poornima Vijayashanker and Ritika Puri who have been there and shipped that.
  • Exchange real world practice and use cases, tested processes, and curated tools to give you an edge in the marketplace.
Maria Brandt

Maria Brandt

Founder, Plan4Event

“Before paying for anything, I want to know if I’m going to get value.

I had taken cheaper online courses before through Udemy and Stanford Online, but to tell you the truth, I didn’t get anything valuable out of them. I was looking for a tried and tested formula to help me develop and grow my product correctly.

I wasn’t looking for theories, I was looking for 1:1 feedback from instructors who have successfully launched products in the tech space.

scales

LAB EXCERCISES

The ‘real’ work you should be doing in your business weekly (we refuse to give you ‘homework’ that isn’t related to your product and business goals)

What you can expect

  • You'll be guided through exercises during class. Then be expected to complete them outside of class, submit them, and receive ongoing weekly feedback from instructors, based on your product and goals.
  • Ask your instructors and fellow students ANYTHING related (or not!) to your LAB WORK 5 days/week in our Slack Channel. Expect to be pushed out of your comfort zone (in a good way, of course).
  • We cap our class size at 50 so you can receive as much attention as possible—we care about helping you reach your win.
Chloe Marten

Chloe Marten

Co-Founder, Betty & Accepted into Idea Accelerator Miller with the Mill, 2016

“The lab work allowed us to practice what we learned in class.

Poornima’s assignments around marketing were super helpful and the templates provided gave me a solid foundation to build upon.”

hands

ACCESS TO TRUSTED ADVISORS (AKA YOUR INSTRUCTORS)

Our experienced instructors will support you as you learn, experiment, and confront a variety of daily challenges.

What you can expect

  • Top notch instructors who listen more than they talk, genuinely care about your success, and are willing to go above and beyond to support you.
  • Trusted advisors to support you through problems like: improving co-founder and team communications, focusing on critical next steps, avoiding burnout, monetization, building a business model that works, and more.
  • Mindset shifts to help build your confidence and prepare you to pitch investors.
Jose Valdes

Jose Valdes

Co-Founder of LendSquare

“Even though we had launched a product and were making money, there were things we didn’t know.

We learned how to improve the signup process for customers, perform tests, and grow our customer base.

And we received introductions to investors that helped us join the 500 Startups Accelerator Program.”

hammer

CURATED TOOLS

We’re not only recommending the tech tools our instructors can’t live without, but we’re also recommending the most effective tools our students have used to achieve sustained growth.

What you can expect

  • Exposure to the most efficient and effective tools we’ve tested for you.
  • Forget general information. We show you step-by-step how to use each tool so you don’t have to waste your valuable time figuring it out.
  • We’ll introduce you to the respected ‘industry standard’ tools that will help you grow your product.
smile2

COMMUNITY

We moderate our community to ensure you’re learning in a (digital) room filled with a talented crew of founders who are excited to support each other.

What you can expect

  • Receive individual check-ins from instructors and other students, who will act as your accountability partners to make sure you stay on track!
  • Access to a supportive community of like-minded classmates (in Slack).

Here’s a play by play of the course

Here is the course schedule Classes will be from 12 - 1:30pm PST.
MAY
30 1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 1 2 3
JUNE
28 29 30 1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 1 2
  • dollar-ico

    WEEK 1

    Overcoming obstacles that hold you back from shipping and mitigating market risk

    Explore Week 1Close Week 1

    Discover how to:

    • Identify what is holding you back from shipping your idea
    • Transition from employee to founder
    • Testing and iterating can help you ship faster
    • Identify various risks that prevent you from shipping such as market, execution (delays), recruiting, burning out, running out of capital, and competition

    Who you’ll learn from:

    Poornima Vijayashanker

    Lead Instructor

    Karen Catlin

    Instructor

  • head

    WEEK 2

    Identifying your needs and extracting your expertise

    Explore Week 2Close Week 2

    Discover how to:

    • Pinpoint your areas of expertise and create a service or product offering around it
    • Communicate ideas to potential customers, employees, and investors
    • Create a business around your lifestyle needs

    Who you’ll learn from:

    Poornima Vijayashanker

    Lead Instructor

  • graphic

    WEEK 3

    Building an audience

    Explore Week 3Close Week 3

    Discover how to:

    • Identify your ideal customer segment so you don’t waste time building for and marketing to the wrong people
    • Convert prospective customers to paying customers so you can bring in consistent revenue
    • Understand your customers needs and map them to your product's benefits

    Who you’ll learn from:

    Ritika Puri

    Instructor

  • computer-ico

    WEEK 4

    Productizing your expertise

    Explore Week 4Close Week 4

    Discover how to:

    • Bridge the what and the why in your product
    • Evaluate tradeoffs for building and selling various types of products such as a book, course, consulting and software

    Who you’ll learn from:

    Elijah Murray

    Instructor

  • sales-ico

    WEEK 5

    Pricing your product or service

    Explore Week 5Close Week 5

    Discover how to:

    • Price your product or service based on the value you offer to customers
    • Make your first dollar
    • Put in a process for sales that actually works so you’re not reinventing the wheel every single day
    • Build a pipeline with customers you can close so you’re not wasting time and money on the wrong customers
    • Overcome customer concerns and objections so you don’t freeze under pressure

    Who you’ll learn from:

    Poornima Vijayashanker

    Lead Instructor

    Karen Catlin

    Instructor

  • cloud-ico

    WEEK 6

    Recruiting teammates

    Explore Week 6Close Week 6

    Discover how to:

    • Recruiting co-founders, technical talent, and other service providers
    • Manage the product development process
    • Hire in-house vs managing an outsourced team or contractors

    Who you’ll learn from:

    poornima-small

    Vedrana Behaderovic

    Instructor

  • loudapeaker-ico

    WEEK 7

    Funding your idea

    Explore Week 7Close Week 7

    Discover how to:

    • Learn why the best start by bootstrapping, and identify less-than-obvious fundraising channels
    • Determine whether raising capital from angel investors and VCs is right for you

    Who you’ll learn from:

    image-description

    Poornima Vijayashanker

    Lead Instructor

  • envelope-ico

    WEEK 8

    Strategies to successfully ship your product

    Explore Week 8Close Week 8

    Create a plan to ship and deliver a final presentation that showcases your business + idea

    Who you’ll learn from:

    Poornima

    Lead Instructor

SHIP IT is perfect for you if:

  • You’re a talented tech founder, engineer, designer, or product manager who loves to learn and is eager to productize their expertise.
  • You have thick skin, value constructive feedback, and don’t take yourself too seriously.
  • You participate in labs, support your fellow students, and dig networking.
  • While you might be interested in fundraising down the line, you realize that you have A LOT of work to do before you’re ready to meet with investors.
  • You’ve got grit, drive, and moxie–‘nobody puts Baby in a corner.
AND, you currently have one of the following web or mobile apps in the market:
  • image description

    A BOOK

  • image description

    A COURSE

  • image description

    CONSULTING

  • image description

    COACHING

  • image description

    SOFTWARE

SHIP IT is NOT for you if:
  • You’re obsessed with fundraising and more focused on introductions to investors, rather than doing the work. Work that will make you an attractive investment long-term. Basically, you want quick results, not sustained growth.
  • You tend to pile your plate too high and flake out. If you want to experience real results, you need to free up time to focus.
  • You just want to learn how to code. This course does not teach people how to code, but it will teach you how to transform your product, grow your user base, and build a sustainable financial model
  • You’re strapped for cash and not ready to invest in your learning. If you can’t afford this course right now, we recommend you check out our free resources instead.
  • Your don’t want to productize your expertise into a book, course, consulting, coaching, or software product.
  • You’re a drama queen.

HOW MUCH IS IT?

Learn from anywhere, with flexible options for you. Our live, interactive online courses, coupled with hands-on exercises and self-study materials, give you the ideal blend of experience, freedom, flexibility, and peer support.

Register to attend SHIP IT by Friday April 28, 2017

PAY MONTHLY

3 payments of:

$600

REGISTER NOW

PAY UPFRONT

Single payment of:

$1,500

(save $300)
REGISTER NOW
Here is the course schedule Classes will be from 12 - 1:30pm PST.
MAY
30 1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 1 2 3
JUNE
28 29 30 1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 1 2
medal

Our 60-day money back guarantee

We want you to love your experience with Femgineer and understand that stuff comes up. If an unforeseen emergency comes up during the class, let us know, and we’ll work with you to figure out an arrangement.

At any time during the course, if you feel like you aren't getting the results you want, you're welcome to drop out. If you’re not 100% satisfied with this course, we don’t want your money.

You have 60 days from the start of the first class to cancel, and receive a full refund.

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the format for ‘Ship It’?

* the most popular FAQ

People constantly ask us, Is the course recorded? Is it live? Will I have access to instructors? All great questions.

Let’s cover the basics: this course was designed specifically to maximize your hands-on learning and exposure to experienced instructors who have been in your shoes and successfully turned their product into a legit profitable business.

Here’s what you’ll get:

DAILY ACCESS TO INSTRUCTORS — via the Slack channel. Your questions won’t get lost in a 1,000 person forum. We actually respond within a timely manner in our 30+ person group. The course is a live course. As in, NOT evergreen.

LIVE CLASS SSESSIONS — we provide guidance, solutions, and advice based on your unique situation, in a group format. You’ll learn from both your vetted peers and your instructors

LIFETIME ACCESS TO EVERY CLASS RECORDING — so if you miss a call, you won’t actually miss a thing. Because we get it. Your schedule is cray-cray.

1:1 OFFICE HOURS — Yeah, that means you get private 1:1 time with instructors to focus on your product and business. You’ll be amazed by what we can cover in 30 minutes together.

How is SHIP IT better than a book or online course, like Udemy?

Books and evergreen courses are great, IF you want to consume content at your leisure. Without actually taking action, tracking your metrics, and hitting your goals. We offer individualized attention that you couldn’t possibly find in a book or evergreen product.

You’ll receive personalized feedback from our experienced instructors in a small classroom setting, and you’ll even get a buddy to hold you accountable. You’ll learn from the feedback the instructors give not only to you but to the other students as well.

We have a lab, and we request that you complete assignments, to ensure you’re making progress along the way. And because we’re in the tech space, so unlike many other options, our methods are zeroed in on your industry.

Will you provide intros to investors? Please, please!

While we do have a strong network of investors, we NEVER guarantee introductions. IF you are at the right stage in your business, we may be open to making an introduction.

We’ll take it case-by-case. In other words, DON’T JOIN ‘SHIP IT’ SOLELY FOR AN INTRODUCTION. You’ll be severely disappointed.

What happens after the course?

Here’s what you can expect after the course wraps:

ONGOING SUPPORT — We’ll stay connected beyond the 8-week course period. Continue to ask questions and connect with your fellow students and instuctors, in the Slack channel.

LIFETIME ACCESS TO CONTENT — Take the course over and over again. Share with your co-founders and team members. Or rewatch sessions at your leisure.

3-MONTH CHECK-IN — We’ll jump on a call to find out what you’re working on, where you’re stuck, and how we can help. Once you’re in, you’re in. No product left behind.

Can my team join ‘Ship It’ ?

Bring ‘em! We allow up to 3 co-founders/teammates to participate in the course with you. That means, your team will have access to all of the weekly calls, the homework, the instructors, the 1:1 office hours, and more.

Why should I trust Femgineer?

We founded Femgineer because we want to empower forward-thinking techies of all backgrounds. We’ve seen a lot of people give up too early, afraid that they’ll never be able to get over their fears. We’ve been in this space for a long time, and have identified tactics that can help you put stage fright behind you. Our alumni go on to give talks at conferences, speak up in meetings, embrace new opportunities, and lead teams.

Meet our SHIP IT instructors & sample their teaching style before applying.

Sign up below for free access to the SHIP IT 7-Video Intro Training Series.

FEMGINEER HAS BEEN FEATURED ON

  • cnn money
  • the dailt beast
  • fox news
  • wealth
  • glamour
  • huffington post
  • the new york times
  • techcrunch
  • wsj
  • vogue