Entrepreneur Courses: The Best 32 (Free & Paid) in 2021
There are thousands of courses for entrepreneurs. In this article, we collect the best 32 ones, both free and paid, covering a wide range of business topics.
Education is the driving force for human self-improvement and you, as a fellow entrepreneur, should live and breathe this rule.
Serious learning happens with a mentor. Once you listen to the words of someone more experienced, more resourceful than you, then the real learning begins.
That’s why we decided to come up with this list of the best courses for entrepreneurs, covering different topics: improving sales skills, creating a more efficient online marketing strategy, learning to negotiate all the way to courses on improving your communication skills, and building a more empathetic mindset.
Description of the course: Sell it before you build it. If it's hard to sell a finished product, it's even harder to sell one that doesn't exist yet.
In this course, however, we'll teach you an actionable framework to get pre-sales and validate your startup ideas. All the pre-selling strategies will include real case studies (in some cases taught by the founders of the pre-sold products).
Strategies apply to all kinds of business models and industries. Even SaaS and marketplaces can be pre-sold (marketing automation SaaS Encharge pre-sold licenses for $4,000).
Description of the course: For most companies’ websites, the blog section is just a placeholder: it’s there because everyone has it, but it doesn’t bring exceptional value to the business. Customers from Content is a course designed to change that belief for every future founder. It’s one module composed of 6 videos, explaining down to the last detail on how to gain customers through content.
If you choose this course, you’ll discover the importance of choosing the right audience, creating unique content, writing SEO optimized blog posts, and measuring the ROI of your content strategy. Customers from Content is one of the best business courses for entrepreneurs who want evergreen strategies, not a poorly constructed, short-term, ineffective one.
Price: Original price - $749.
Who's behind the course? Grow And Convert Marketing Agency
Description of the course: The critical mistake most new entrepreneurs make is focusing all their attention on their product or service rather than discovering their customers’ true desires and needs. 30x500 is a course for entrepreneurs who want to learn how to shift their focus, from a company's perspective to customers' shoes and create a product or service customers are willing to buy. With this course, you’ll learn exactly what your customers want, how to earn their trust, and how to build a long-lasting relationship with them.
You’ll gain access to more than 60 video lessons, step-by-step tutorials, and exercises, book recommendations, bonus lessons, free updates to course materials, and other relevant materials.
Description of the course: Selling is a difficult skill to master, but once you do it, it will become your number one advantage. Sales For Founders is a course for entrepreneurs who want to learn or improve just that – their sales skills.
Louis Nicholls, the creator of the course and successful entrepreneur and SaaS salesperson, shares many insights on how to develop the mindset of a seller and become better at closing deals. It’s a perfect course for any new founder who wants to create a profitable business.
Description of the course: If you’re interested in knowing more about buying, selling, and growing small online businesses, Micro PE is the best course to do it. It’s created by Ryan Kulp, who owns a portfolio of technology companies, like Fomo.
In his course, he offers a lot of insights on finding out the most suitable businesses to purchase, tricks on how to finance the acquisition, and multiple strategies to grow the business and then exit it.
Description of the course: Coming up with an effective growth strategy is crucial for any business’ growth. If you’re having trouble setting one up, the Startup Growth Program is one of the best courses available.
Demand Curve’s founders and team has vast experience growing startups themselves, so every information, lesson, or insights you’ll learn here is double-checked, positive, and made to scale your business.
By the end of the course, you’ll have a complete growth strategy with your main 3-5 acquisition channels defined and tested.
Price: Self-Serve - $1,500 / Full Program - $5,800
Description of the course: If you’re able to understand your audience, you’ll be one step ahead of your competitors. Sales Safari is a course for entrepreneurs who want to get inside the mind of their customers and truly understand them, their needs, desires, beliefs, and any characteristics that may affect their buying decisions. Based on design ethnography, this course shares reliable insights about your users’ behavior.
Description of the course: If you think that only paid courses are the most useful ones, Startup School is here to prove you wrong. Not only is it free, but this program offers some of the most profound tips on how to better run your business. The best thing about it is the chance to meet other founders through video chat and share tips on the most effective business strategies.
Y Combinator created this program with one goal in mind – every entrepreneur should have access to knowledge on how to start, run, and grow a company.
Description of the course: What happens if you want to build a project, but you don’t have developers’ expertise to help you out? Makerpad can help you with it, together with their solid collection of courses on “no-code”.
They have everything here – from a large community of skillful people sharing their no-code knowledge to building challenges to compete with other members. You’ll really get your hands on resourceful guides, and receive the overall support you need to finish a project.
Price: Unlimited all access $350 per year / Lifetime access $600 / Business all access $3000 / Business success - Customizable
Description of the course: No Code MVP is another no-code course; this one helps you validate your business idea building an MVP and making some sales.
The course is designed by Bram Kanstein, an entrepreneur who launched two no-code products himself, one of which is the most upvoted product in Product Hunt. Within the 9 chapters of the course, he provides valuable information on how you can do the same for your business idea and startup, starting with the pretty basic lessons like fundamentals of starting a business to the more complex ones like connecting different tools to automate things on your MVP.
Description of course: This course will teach you how to use +40 mental models to produce better work, more productively and while thinking like a top-tier marketer.
The course it’s not just about the theory - it teaches you how to put it all into practice and apply it to real-life situations.
Description of the course: Daniel Vassallo left his job at Amazon to create a brand of himself. However, he discovered that with 150 followers on Twitter, that could be a bit of a challenge.
He didn’t give up on his idea, and in 14 months he managed to gain 24,000 Twitter followers. How he did it, the obstacles he faced, the strategies he used, and the do’s and don'ts – you have all that here. In 100 minutes, he will give you the recipe for creating a long-lasting audience on Twitter and creative ways to increase your engagement with your followers.
Description of the course: If you’re trying to increase your online presence, but can’t figure out how SEO works, here’s a course that can help you out.
SEO Blueprint is one of the best courses for entrepreneurs who are eager to learn all the tricks SEO has – and there are plenty of them. Glen Allsopp is behind this course and being the SEO wizard that he is, his knowledge on the topic is top-notch, no questions about it.
The course has 6 video sections where Glen makes the learning suitable for everyone, from beginners in SEO to more experienced ones.
Description of the course: Spending money on ads that don’t bring the planned ROI can be frustrating for any entrepreneur. Nicholas is here to help you, with his courses for entrepreneurs willing to learn how to write and design landing pages that convert any user into a long-term customer. Everything from A/B testing to landing page optimization you have in this course.
You’ll get access to 35 videos, Nicholas will give you his feedback regularly and you can share your thoughts with the Landing Page School community.
Description of the course: Balancing between money and time is the biggest challenge for any business owner. Jack Butcher, a founder himself, had the same problem – but he found the solution as well. Build Once, Sell Twice is one of the best courses for entrepreneurs who struggle to utilize the process of productizing their knowledge to increase income.
After finishing this course, you’ll have a better understanding of productizing service business, building a content strategy around your product, and scaling your business by using social media platforms.
Description of the course: Wharton's program is one of the best online courses for entrepreneurs, especially for the ones who are either thinking about launching a company or their journey has just begun. As mentors, you’ll have Wharton's professors and successful founders and financiers, so you’re in good hands.
Through their five-course series, the professors will teach you all about founding a company from the start by using methods like idea generation, data-analytics tools, and finance. With this course, not only that you’ll receive credible entrepreneurship certification, but you’ll develop the entrepreneurial mindset as well.
Description of the course: It’s no surprise that HubSpot, the leader in the online marketing world, has its own academy. Created by the brilliant minds from HubSpot, the academy is every bit as excellent.
Even if you’re picky, HubSpot has something for everyone – starting from advertising courses and e-commerce all the way to inbound marketing strategy, customer service and sales courses. It’s really one of the best platforms of courses for entrepreneurs, one you’ll definitely find useful regardless of your niche or vertical!
Description of the course: How to Build a Startup is an excellent 9-lesson course for all new startups out there. Steve Blank and Kathleen Mullaney created this course for a single purpose - to help you succeed, from scratch!
The main idea of the course is to show you how to come up with great business ideas and quickly test and validate them by gathering customers and feedback.
Description of the course: Impact Theory offers 3 specific courses: Business, Mindset and Bundle, which includes both of the first ones. The man behind the curtain is the well-known entrepreneur and investor Tom Bilyeu, who personally teaches his audience. By subscribing, you will get access to courses, live office hours and a community.
In the Mindset course, you will learn how to eliminate negative thoughts and establish a growth mindset that will unleash your full potential. The Business course guides you to important and useful strategies on how to build and grow a business from the ground.
Price: $47/mo for the Mindset course; $97/mo for the Business course; $120/mo for the Bundle option.
Description of the course: This interesting 7-week online course can be your goldmine on info about how to grow your business. There are some pretty important skills that you will gain while taking this course such as business intelligence, planning, innovation, and strategic management.
This course is mostly focused on the challenges faced by entrepreneurs when they’re trying to grow their new businesses.
Description of the course: Learning How to Learn - the name explains all. It’s a wonderful course by Dr. Barbara Oakley with a simple goal - to teach you how to learn! This course contains a variety of learning techniques that are used by experts in many fields such as music and art.
It’s one of the most popular courses in Coursera. While it’s not strictly related to entrepreneurship, we decided to add it to the list as knowing how to learn about a topic and find information about it can directly and indirectly help you in the different stages of your business.
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Description of the course: Kim Kaupe’s course is created to share all of her necessary tips on how to become a better entrepreneur.
In this course, hosted on LinkedIn Learning, you’ll learn the behind-scenes of coming up with a business idea, raising money for it, building a team and finally scaling it. It covers a huge amount of topics, in a more general way.
Description of course: This online course is about accelerating your career by publishing quality content on the internet. As an entrepreneur, there’re lots of benefits you may gain by writing online, such as meeting other entrepreneurs and building an audience to whom then sell your business to.
Write Of Passage is all about writing quality and consistent content while not only building a network but also a reputation in your industry. This course contains 16 live sessions, 4 writing workshops, and exclusive guest interviews so you’ll be sure to get your money’s worth.
Description of course: If you are a freelancer who would like to scale your work or you’re a founder but your company lives project-to-project, this is the course for you.
You’ll find everything you need to know about a productized service together with templates, as well as gain access to a community for a lifetime. It contains 30+ video lessons on various topics like hiring, getting first clients, standardizing, etc.
Description of course: Blogging is not dead! Quite on the contrary, blogging is an excellent way to build an audience and reputation. That is exactly what is covered in Blogging for Business from Ahrefs Academy.
In the span of five hours and ten tutorials, you’ll learn how to write content that will turn every reader into a paying customer. And the best thing about it - it’s one of the few entrepreneurs courses that’s free!
Description of course: Unlike other entrepreneur courses on marketing, taught by theorists with little practical knowledge, this course is taught by someone with vast experience in the field. Ryan Kulp is the mastermind behind this course, which aims to teach you how to acquire customers through 7 tested strategies, as well as some technical marketing skills.
Over the span of more than eight weeks, through a lot of exercises and one-on-one mentorship, you’ll learn how to create a seven-figure strategy for SaaS growth.
Description of course: Marketing is a crucial part of any business and if you’re looking for online courses on the topic, you shouldn’t miss out on Sphere of Influence, which will teach you the ropes of empathy-led marketing. The principles taught in this course will help you connect with your customers on an emotional level to the point where you wouldn’t have to be ‘selling’ anything.
From the basics of how to create an ad on social media to checkout points and everything you need to know about the marketing funnel - all of that it’s here!
Price: $495
Who’s behind the course: Tiny Little Business (Andre Chaperon)
Description of course: We’re known as visual creatures so visual storytelling, especially in the digital age, is crucial. That’s why this is part of the the entrepreneur courses we’ve compiled. In 30 lessons, you will learn about the fundamental concepts of visual storytelling and how to use design to your advantage.
This course will teach you how to build a content brand, how to increase your value, and how to use design to sell your product or service among other things. No need to know how to design beforehand - they’ll teach you.
Description of course: This is the second time we’re mentioning Corey Haines on this list of entrepreneur courses, but only because both of them will shape you to be a better founder. Tailored for SaaS companies, Refactoring Growth is all about acquiring and retaining customers.
In this course, you will learn how to do extensive research on your customer’s profile and needs, how to set up your business model, how to build your sales process, and much more.
Description of course: We all wish we had a second brain sometimes, to store all the ideas and information we’re unable to process. Building a Second Brain will teach you a knowledge management system that will help you organize your thoughts.
At the same time, it will show you patterns and connections that will improve your thought process as well as show you how a digital environment can become your second brain. There are three editions to choose from, and you even get a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Description of course: This course is ideal for entrepreneurs looking to build a scalable, probitable and productized service business.
The course is divided into 4 modules that will get you from launching your productized business to scaling and exiting it. Besides that, it includes several templates that will agilize the management and marketing of your startup, as well as access to a community of productized service entrepreneurs who will support you.
Description of the course: If you’re looking for well-received entrepreneur courses, then Smart From Scratch is the right choice. Created by Pat Flynn, this online course is the way to learn how your business idea will or won’t work.
Pat gives lessons on how to create a business idea, validate it, and figure out if that idea is worth pursuing. You will also learn if there is an audience for your business idea and how to test it.
Let’s hope we exceeded your expectations from this list because we gave our best to create the most comprehensive list of best entrepreneur courses. It was challenging – there’s a plethora of courses out there with a questionable quality. We want only the best for you and this list has them all – both free and paid versions.
Let us know if we missed your favorite one, or the one you know for sure that’s credible to be on our list - and we’ll update it immediately!
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