Introducing the Founders Coaching Founders Program

Designed, developed, and delivered by Founders. For Founders.

  • Designed for those that learn by doing

    You can't learn entrepreneurship in the classroom like you can't learn swimming in the classroom. You need to get wet. You need to get out there and DO IT!

    No training yet? No problem? We have a 3-month, cohort-based training program called "Zero to One Customer (021C). As the name implies, it gives you a step-by-step guide to finding paying customers for your startup. Free with the coaching!

  • Coaching Sessions with Founder-Coaches

    Veteran founders don't automatically make good Founder-Coaches as doing what they've done, doesn't necessarily mean success.

    Our Founder Coaches understand the frameworks, mental models, and tools needed to replicate their successes. Equally important, we are happy to show others how to do the same.

  • Accountability & Flexible Schedules

    You progress on your startup when you deliver on your commitments. Your coaches and peers in your own learning group(s) create the right amount of social pressure to keep you going!

    Decide on a schedule based on what works for you and the coach, or find a coach available for the time you're available. Schedule a late-night session with fellow founders. It's up to you.

Trusted by these organizations

Avoid these common early-stage startup problems

School and Corporate taught us that making mistakes are bad. Getting things right all the time is always good.

Starting a startup requires you to unlearn those lessons and do exactly the opposite. Otherwise, you may end up making these mistakes

  • Wasting a ton of money (your own and/or your investors) trying to "get it ready for launch"

  • Revenue and break-even gets delayed several months or even years, and you're only hope is to "find angels"

  • Spend hours in pointless debates with your part time cofounders

Founder Coaching Program Inclusions

We start by sending you a welcome email and scheduling a live conversation between you (with your team) and a Founder-Coach.  This is just a discovery call but we found that a lot of our coaches are already finding this very valuable. 

Here we understand your challenges as a founder, your startup, and your program goals. We end by giving you access to all our recorded instructions and scheduling your first coaching session! 

Matching, Booking, and Coaching  Services

Our roster of Founder-Coaches covers a wide breadth of industries, from agriculture, content, platforms, and enterprise-level organizations, we're confident to have a match for you. 

Have a different coach in mind? Let's talk about it! 

Get 1on1 coaching for those times you need particular help for the particular situations that founders frequently get themselves into. 1on1s are perfect for solving co-founder issues you'd rather keep private. 

For maximum learning and value, group coaching sessions would be best. Here you can share your experiences, get expert advice, learn from, and teach others!

Founder Learning Groups

Being a founder is inherently lonely, making it difficult to keep going. Learning Groups create the right amount of social pressure to push you into doing what you said you'll do, ensure that you progress with your startup, and grow your network of fellow entrepreneurs. 

Join Our Own Early-Stage Startup Journey

Individually, Carlo and the founder-coaches have spent thousands of hours teaching, coaching, mentoring, leading, working with, and generally helping other founders. Collectively, the Founder Coaching Program is new and also an early-stage startup. 

Startup PH Training is now also a startup and The Founders' Coaching Program is our first product. Tell us what you like, what you don't like, and help us constantly make things better! 

What You'll Use

Personas and Journey Maps

Gain empathy through interviews, observation, and or immersion, then process your findings in a way that everyone in your team understands. 

Knowing your customer's goals, frustrations, values, etc allows you to design a great product and position it correctly

Knowing the actions your customer takes and how they feel about each, lets you know how to give them a great experience

Experiment Tracker

Define the assumptions you're making with your startup idea and design an experiment to test it. 

It's okay to make mistakes here because the goal isn't to prove the awesomeness of your idea. 

The goal is to discover the unknown so we know how to improve our idea.  

This tracker is inspired by the Javelin Board and Lean Startup's Build-Measure-Learn  feedback loop and is very useful for collecting and sharing the important insights gained to the rest of the team

Sales Pipeline Analysis

Doing soft launches, interviews, pre-selling, and lead-gen campaigns is important. But equally important is tracking the quant and qualitative results, analyzing them to find insight, then use that to guide your next steps. 

Did they sign up? Start serving them! Not buying? What were the concerns? Listen to your customers and pivot, pivot, pivot!   

The sales funnel measures how many are able to go from being made aware of your product, to considering it, to signing up then later on becoming a paying customer

Lean and Business Model Canvas

Now that your idea has paying customers, it's time to start thinking about the rest of your business. But don't create something nobody reads. Use canvasses to describe your startup strategy succinctly


This is a one-page business plan and strategy document that takes an hour to get started and a few minutes each week to update. 

About Startup PH Training

After failing in my VC-funded tech startup which I founded and ran for two years, I found myself teaching other founders how to avoid making the same mistakes I did.

For almost a decade now, I've worked with startup founders and enablers like Philippine Software Industry Assocation, DICT, Ideaspace, Smart, etc.

When teaching in schools like Mint, UP, UPLB, CIIT, SoFA, I barely gave exams but I did give a lot of homework and expected them to find paying customers. And find them they did. Last year our highest-performing group did Php60k worth of revenue in a semester!

So I hope to share the same learn-by-doing experience that my students had gone through this program.

We hope to get more founders to stop coding at the early stages, rapidly validate, and pivot just as quickly.

If you are the founder of an early-stage startup, join us!

And if you are a veteran founder that wants to coach/teach other founders, also join us!

Financials

You have an entire year from the first coaching session to consume all your sessions.

Early Adopter Pricing is valid until we reach 25 signups.(we're currently at 18 signups!)

Can't afford, but hungry, driven, and COMMITTED to your startup's success? Let's talk!

Our Founder-Coaches

MK Bertulfo

CEO & Founder, Filipina Homebased Moms

Multi-awarded and seen on CNN, Business Mirror, Marketing in Asia, ABS-CBN Network, GMA, etc

CMO & Co-Founder, DropBizs

CEO & Co-Founder. GetHiredOnline.com.ph

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkbertulfo/
MK Bertulfo Linkedin Profile Pic

Francis Simisim

Partner, Favcy Venture Builders

Previous Experiences

Entrepreneur In Residence, 917Ventures
Organizer, Techtonic Manila
Cofounder & Director, Blogapalooza

https://www.linkedin.com/in/fsimisim

Glenn Baticados

Program Manager, SEARCA and UPLB Asst Professor

As an innovation manager for UPLB, he had assisted more than 20 agribiotechnologies towards commercialization and spinoffs ventures, applied for patent protection of more than 40 university technologies, generated revenue, funding and investment worth $1,000,000

He is a pioneer mentor of GoNegosyo and ILO Trainor on Green Business, former Director of the UPLB Technology Transfer and Business Development Office,

https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenn-baticados-64b574107/
Glenn Baticados Linkedin Profile Pic

Frequently Asked Questions

More questions? Email me [email protected]

  • Will signing up course guarantee that my startup will succeed?

    To be clear, no. But this coaching program will show you how to. We'll also give you the tools you need, then help you stay driven as you do what needs to be done. Startups are very hard and there are too many factors to consider. Providing a guarantee would be a lie. Although being part of this program doesn't guarantee success or exempt you from the effort, passion, or time required to do so, we do guarantee that you will progress in your startup a lot quicker, with less pain with considerably less expenses (assuming you follow the advice given).

  • What if I already have an MVP or in the middle of developing it.

    That's totally fine though initially we won't be focusing on that, and I highly recommend you put a hold on it until we speak! It's very difficult to be a solution looking for a problem, and the more you build it, the more you're making it more difficult to pivot in the future.

    We will be focusing on getting to know the people that could potentially be using it FIRST, understand their problems, and then see if what you've built is the best solution for it.

    If not, then the good news is you've saved yourself from spending more money and time building something people don't need.

  • What if I already have some paying customers?

    That's great! That's really critical at the very early stages of a startup. The focus will move from finding your first customer - to sustaining and growing your customer base. We'll focus on making it repeatable. The fundamentals for starting are the same for growing (Understand people, find problem, test solution)

    If you already have customers then you're now in position to progress much faster We'll understand how they feel about doing business with you and the areas that you can improve. By doing so, we'll keep them happy, keep and make sure they keep buying from us. Finally, we can find more people like them to grow our startup!

  • How do I know that this coaching program is for me? Can I get a refund if not?

    If you have a startup idea and are willing to invest time into it to make this succeed. If there is a problem so big that it affects you so much and are passionate about solving it. If you are committed to making this idea your full-time career soon as you to afford it, if you are working with a team and have committed to each other to make it succeed, then this is for you. Even if you have a full-time job now but are committed to eventually going full time on this idea, assuming it succeeds. If you said no to any of those, perhaps think about it some more.

    Or book me a call and find out (see what I did there?) One thing you can expect from me is to tell you what you need to hear. If I don't think you need this program - or if we're not a good match, I'll let you know. Not because I don't like you, but because at the end of the day, the goal is to solve problems worth solving

  • How much time will this take?

    TLDR - For best results, we recommend at least 3 hours for the coaching itself (which can happen once a month to one a quarter).

    Read further for a breakdown/recommendations

    For coaching sessions (group and 1on1) - an hour to prepare, another for the actual coaching sessions, then another for processing notes and taking immediate action on what was discussed. Time to perform the prescribed activities (eg running interviews, creating and launching campaigns, prototyping, testing, pitching, etc) will vary greatly and should not be considered as "additional work". This should be considered the "CORE WORK" for the founder and/or the founding team.

  • I've started a startup before and it did okay. Now I'm starting a new one. Is it still worth joining? Will I still learn anything?

    Absolutely! We want to be the Phil Jackson to your Kobe Bryant and give you the plays that get you to win the championships. Even experienced founders need help when starting new startups.

  • What day and time will the sessions be? Do I need to commit to a consistent day and time?

    In a nutshell, no. The beauty about 1on1 coaching is that we can arrange our schedule so that you and the coach are both available. While a consistent schedule makes things convenient. this isn't always possible so changes are inevitable What we need to watch out for is forgetting to schedule the sessions. You can expect to hear from us from time to time.

  • What if I don't like selling?

    That might be a problem because business and startups are all about selling. Not just to your customers but also by selling your vision when recruiting your co-founders, your employees, and later on to investors and other customers.

    The good news is that we don't sell to people that don't need our product or service. You won't need to do any convincing. If you do, then you're doing it wrong. People often associate selling with being that suave smooth talker that's trying to deceitfully convince us to buy something. That's now what you're going to learn.

    What you're going to learn is how to empathize with people, really understand them and match their problems with a solution to their problems and price it reasonably. Selling is problem solving. And if you like problem solving but don't like the old-school definition of selling, then this is your course.

  • What if I don't learn anything? Do I get my money back?

    This is a learn-by-doing type of course so if you do the activities that this course makes you do, then you will 100% learn a lot of things. Not just how to do things, but also about the people you hope to serve.

    You risk not learning anything if you simply watch the videos and don't complete the prescribed activities and attend the sessions. That being said, if at anytime you don't feel that you learned anything and or are unhappy about the progress you are or aren't making, let us know, and happy to give you your money back. All we ask is that you tell us what we could have done better.

Need a proposal sent via email?

Leave your email address for a Project Proposal PDF

Thank You