Your Startup Incubator
Stop launching failed products. Learn how to discover, validate, build and launch a profitable side project.
Founders love us at the Nugget Startup Academy
Listen to founders talk about their experience at the Academy.
A Startup Incubator
For Your Side Project
There are many reasons it's difficult to attend a traditional incubator, from low acceptance rates (3%) to lifestyle considerations. At the Academy, you'll be accepted as long as you're a good fit. Also, you can work from any location, at any pace.
A Proven Process to Discover & Validate Your Side Project
We use cutting edge instructional techniques to help you discover, validate, build and launch a profitable side project. Over 25% of our founders have acquired seed customers for their side project.
A Batch of 10 Founders to Keep You Sane
Seeing 9 other founders making progress, doing the same course as you, is the best existence proof there is. Your batch keeps you centered, is your mastermind group, is a place to share knowledge and a way to be held accountable.
Each batch has its own private Slack group. Members' progress and course work are posted to the Slack. In this way, batch members develop deep insight about each other's journey, and true camaraderie builds over time.
A Mentor to Help You Overcome Road Blocks
Our mentors earn a living as solo founders and bootstrappers (combined revenue of $1m+/year). They've done this for a long time. We go well beyond the usual forum based Q&A's. We offer office hours style mentoring in Slack any time you need.
Right now we have 3 full time mentors. The next milestone on our roadmap is to scale mentoring at the Academy. We're adding an integrated mentoring platform and will be inviting 100's of proven mentors to come and join us. You will be grandfathered in.
A Way to Prove You're Not Wasting Time
Track your project stats even before it exists. What worked? What didn't? Measure everything. Make key decisions based on data, not guesswork.
A Way to Celebrate Wins and Inspire Others
Celebrate your wins, log your journey and track your momentum. Your updates are posted to the community and to your batch.
A Course of Bite-Sized Simple Logical Lessons
Our lessons are built on first principles, mental models, logic and facts. Each lesson builds on the next and teaches actionable skills.
A Plan to Shoot for Your Lifestyle AND For The Moon
Yes, we'll show you how to start a micro business and focus on bootstrapping your first $100. Then, we'll shoot for $1,000/month, then $10,000/month and so on. Everything about the Academy is focused on executing in the short term, with an eye on the long game.
It's worth noting, over 10 Unicorns started out as microprenure bootstrapped side projects. This is discussed on our page The Why.
A Lifetime Alumni Membership with Lifetime Benefits
We may be new and small, but we are strong and our vision is big. Next up we're building a mentoring platform. Then an investor platform. As a Lifetime Alumni, you will get access to all of these enhancements and more.
Meet Your Instructor
Hey there! I am Justin V. founder, builder and author of The Nugget Startup Academy.
Originally from the UK, I live in Los Angeles with my lovely wife Georgie and son Jack. In my day job I am CTO and founding team member of an EdTech startup. We've raised over $10m and have 40 employees. Our product impacts hundreds of thousands of kids.
As a side project I bootstrapped and sold Pluggio a SaaS social media dashboard. I also co-host well known tech startup podcast called TechZing where we have interviewed many founders such as Patrick Collison (Stripe), Rob Walling (Drip), Derek Sivers (CD Baby).