“Vertical progress means doing new things — going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.”

— Peter Thiel in Zero to One

WELCOME TO SPACECAMP!

I’m Edward Cruz, the Founder and CEO of Go For Vertical, and I couldn’t be more excited to have you here!

We’re about to embark on an entrepreneurial journey together where you will learn how to conceive and deliver new technology and launch new ventures in space sciences and technology.

If you’ve done this before (or even just tried), then you’ll have an idea of how challenging and transformative this can be. And if not, you are about to gain some amazing new skills, which will empower you as you become a catalyst for launching your new tech venture.

I’ll be your guide the entire way, and I am excited to start teaching and working with you here.

SOME BACKGROUND ON YOURS TRULY, AND going for VERTICAL.

Before we dive in, let me tell you about myself and how Go For Vertical and our accelerator program got started.

Before launching G4V, I had a long, successful career as an enterprise software consultant in San Francisco and Austin. Some of my proudest achievements were helping launch major e-commerce sites like homedepot.com, levis.com, and dockers.com, to name just a few.

As the QA architect responsible for ensuring those sites were ready to go live, I learned a lot about what works when delivering technology, especially what does not. Probably only one or two of the significant launches I helped with actually went well during my 20-year career. The rest of them? Pretty much train wrecks. And expensive ones, too. It didn’t matter if the teams had huge budgets and dozens of talented engineers working on them using the latest technology.

What was being passed on to me as a “final product” ready for release was usually nowhere near ready for prime time, which always made my job a challenge. So I learned quite a bit during those years about how to build and deliver technology, and equally importantly, how to avoid screwing it all up.

Flash forward to when I started going back to my hometown of Tucson, Arizona, in 2015 and began helping early-stage startups there while continuing my consulting career. I realized there had to be a better way.

What if we applied the same standards for testing and delivering complex technology from the beginning, even (or especially) before coding began? Wouldn’t it make it much, much easier to get to the right outcomes that way?

It seems obvious that this would make sense, but the reality is that most tech is not developed like that. Sure, there is the intention, but that rarely gets translated into the right process needed to make it happen. And so, Vertical was born.

Going FOR VERTICAL, from Zero to One, and beyond.

Here’s the story behind our brand and what vertical innovation is all about.

In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Or, as he puts it, the great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create.

Horizontal innovation, as he calls it, is doing more of something that has already been done successfully before. That takes you from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar.

But with vertical innovation, when you do something completely new, you go from 0 to 1. That means conceiving, engineering, and delivering something that no one has ever done before.

That's precisely the challenge in creating new technology, and so that’s what we teach you how to do here in the Vertical accelerator.

So what is Vertical EXACTLY?

Vertical is a new way of delivering technology and launching new ventures.

It’s both a framework, like scaffolding that you can build on and a process you learn to execute. What it comes down to is that once you know it, you’ll have a complete set of tools, resources, and knowledge to build technology and ventures that genuinely connect with your audience. You'll be able to create beautifully curated experiences for them that actually work as promised.

And here's the real magic: you’ll be able to do it for about ten times less than you would with other approaches, like hiring a development agency to design and build it for you. In fact, most of our early-stage startups can deliver prototypes for less than twenty-five hundred dollars, and then their first full releases for less than ten thousand. And we also help later-stage startups by making it possible for them to achieve a much slower burn rate with remarkable capital and resource efficiency by using our customized hyper-lean approach.

Here's the bottom line: Vertical puts the cost of building complex technology in reach so that it usually doesn't even require external funding. And that's a major game-changer.

We realized we were on to something special with this when we helped one of our first startups, OneGreek, launch in 2015. An invitation-only social network for fraternities and sororities, OneGreek grew from 150 to 330,000 users in just nine months, making it the fastest-growing social network ever built, after Instagram. 

Using Vertical to build their technology stack for just $8000, the company went from bootstrapped startup to acquisition in under 12 months. GroupThreads acquired OneGreek in September 2016.

This amazing outcome wasn’t the only one. Since then, we’ve helped dozens of startups, non-profits, and enterprise companies do the same thing. We’ve even had another successful startup client exit with Audivity in 2019.

We’ll start getting into the details about how we do it here soon, but one of the critical things to keep in mind is how and why we found inspiration for Vertical.

HERE’s YOUR ROADMAP to The VERTICAL ACCELERATOR PROGRAMS

So now, let's go over your roadmap to the Vertical Accelerator.

It all starts with you here at the very beginning, in our first accelerator program, BASECAMP. It’s where you’ll get the 30 thousand foot view of our process, all while learning new foundational skills for delivering technology, like systems thinking, mind mapping, and getting started with features.

Then in our flagship, 12-module CLIMB program, we’ll show you how to use those new skills to deliver the first version of your technology quickly and how to get your venture off the ground with that critical foundation in place.

We’ll start by building a strategic prototype, then testing and validating it with your target audience. If you’re successful, then you’ll be able to get your first customers and discover your first marketing channels for scale and growth, all without depending on technical co-founders or investors.

Finally, in our masterclass program SUMMIT, we’ll show you how to build your full tech stack and venture, release-by-release, and all with incredible efficiency. With SUMMIT, funding becomes a nice-to-have and not a prerequisite for just getting started.

So whether you get funded or not, with Vertical, you’ll have a clear path to continue delivering your technology and launching your new venture.

SO Let’s get GOING.

Vertical has been used by dozens of startups, social impact ventures, and corporations to achieve some pretty remarkable results, and we’re excited to help you now too.

Delivering complex technology and launching new ventures isn’t easy. But with the Vertical process, you’ll be able to do it too, even if you're non-technical and have never developed technology before.

Because once you know how to get from zero to one and can go for Vertical, the sky really is the limit.

Up next: LESSON 2: HOW TECHNOLOGY IS BUILT TODAY