What the Academy actually teaches, week by week

We are asked, weekly, what the Moonlabs Academy curriculum looks like up close. Usually by parents, who want to know what their eighteen-year-old will actually be doing. Sometimes by educators, who want to know if there is something they could lift. Occasionally by other founders, who quietly suspect the curriculum is the most interesting piece of operator IP we have, and who are not wrong.

This essay is the full twelve-week breakdown. The shape of each week, the artifacts shipped, the readings, the moments we keep watching change students. We are publishing it openly because we would rather more young operators got to this material — through us or through anyone else — than have a curriculum that is competitive by being secret.

The shape of the twelve weeks

The course is built on three pillars: Coding, Commercials, Investment. Every week touches all three. We do not block off “coding weeks” and “sales weeks” because that is not how operators work. You do not get to be in an engineering frame on Tuesday and a sales frame on Thursday. You shift between them inside the same day. The course is structured to build that muscle from week one.

Twelve students per cohort, two operators in the room. Roughly 1:6 ratio. Weekly contact hours: 25-30, of which about half are live work alongside us. The remainder is independent shipping with checkpoint reviews. There is no homework in the usual sense. There is a portfolio of artifacts you build over the twelve weeks, and you cannot graduate without it.

Week 1 — The wedge

We do not start with code. We start with the question that determines everything downstream: what is the wedge. By the end of week one, every student has written a one-page wedge document for the company they are going to build over the twelve weeks. The structure is: who is the buyer, what hurts them today, what is the smallest thing you could ship that removes the hurt, what would they pay for that thing.

The week sounds soft. It is not. The wedge documents at the end of week one are the single best predictor we have of which students will ship something usable by week twelve. The students who finish the document by Wednesday and spend Thursday and Friday refining it produce companies. The students who are still arguing about the buyer on Friday evening produce demos.

Coding component: setting up the operator stack. Cursor, Claude Code, Git, GitHub, a baseline Laravel-or-Next.js scaffold. By Friday they have a deployed “Hello world” at a real domain.

Commercial component: a two-hour session on pricing intuitions, run as a series of exercises. How much would you pay to remove this specific pain in your week. Calibrating the gap between what students think a thing is worth and what it is actually worth is the work of the entire term, but the first incision is here.

Investment component: a forty-minute session laying out how a tech company actually makes and loses money. Not theory. The actual P&L of a real company. We disclose more than is comfortable so that the students never have to wonder again what a real one looks like.

Week 2 — The first shipped thing

Week two, the goal is brutally simple: every student has a working, deployed, publicly accessible version of some part of their wedge in the wild by Friday at 4pm. The bar is low on purpose. We are training the muscle of going from idea to deployed in five days. Almost everyone is surprised by how much can be done.

The coding component is real production engineering, taught at the level the project actually needs: routing, persistence, auth, deploy. The student does not have to understand it in full generality. They have to make it work for their case, in front of us, with the AI tooling. We are firm about understanding. If Claude wrote a piece of code you cannot read aloud and explain, you rewrite it together until you can.

Commercials this week: the student writes the first version of the landing page copy. Not as marketing fluff. As a sales document. Headline, sub-headline, three benefit clauses, one call to action. We rip them apart and rewrite alongside them. By Friday the page is live and we are A/B-ing headlines manually with the cohort as the audience.

Investment: introduction to the cap table. Every student opens a mock cap table for their company in week two and maintains it through the course. By week twelve they have made twenty-five cap-table decisions, the way founders actually make them.

Week 3 — The first five conversations

The single most uncomfortable week of the course. By Friday of week three, every student has spoken to five potential buyers of their wedge. Real conversations, not friends. We coach the outreach. We sit in the room for at least one call per student. We debrief every one.

Most students discover, in week three, that their wedge is subtly wrong. The thing they thought was the pain is not the pain. The thing they thought was the price is not the price. This is the point. The course is structured so that this discovery happens in week three rather than month nine of an actual company, when it would be much more expensive to learn.

Coding component: building the first proper feedback loop into the product. Form, database, dashboard. Lightweight analytics. The kind of plumbing every product needs and very few students have set up before.

Commercials: discovery call structure. We use a one-page framework, adapted from interview-based product research, modified for AI-flavoured products. The framework is public; the value is in the reps.

Investment: how investors think about market size, and why most early-stage pitches get market size dramatically wrong. We do an exercise where students size their market three different ways and have to defend the most conservative.

Week 4 — Reprice the wedge

Week four is the first major recalibration. With five buyer conversations in hand, each student rewrites their wedge document from scratch. Some pivot meaningfully. Most sharpen. A handful realise their original idea was wrong and we help them pick a new one over the weekend.

Coding component: introducing AI agents as a first-class part of the product, not just the build. Most student products at this point will benefit from having one or two specific AI-driven features. We add them, observably, with evals.

Commercials: pricing intensives. We bring in pricing data from real companies we are connected to and run an exercise where students price their wedge five different ways and pressure-test each one in role-play.

Investment: dilution modelling. We hand out a real seed term sheet (anonymised) and walk through what each clause does to the founder. The students who have not seen this before are usually visibly shaken. This is the right reaction.

Week 5 — The deck v1

Week five, every student writes a ten-slide deck for their company. Not a polished one. A working one. The deck does not have to be beautiful; it has to be true. We are firm about this. Every claim on the slide must be defensible in the cohort the next day, and we do, in fact, defend it in front of the cohort the next day. Public failure is part of the structure.

Coding this week takes a step back to let the deck land. We catch up on technical debt and review code with each student. Most students discover that the code they wrote in week two is now embarrassing. This is good. It means they have learned.

Commercials: the elevator version of the pitch. Sixty seconds, written and rehearsed.

Investment: what a "good" deck looks like up close. We bring in three real decks from companies that raised and three from companies that did not. We do not tell the students which is which until they have voted.

Week 6 — First paying customer or first pilot

Week six is the week we ask, in writing, for the first paid commitment. Not necessarily live revenue. A signed pilot agreement, a letter of intent, a paid trial. Something that makes the buyer have skin in the game.

Roughly half the cohort gets there by Friday of week six. The half that does not is given a structured week seven to close it. By the end of week seven, we expect everyone to be there. If they are not, we sit with them and re-cut the wedge.

Coding: production-grade auth, billing, and customer onboarding. The actual mechanics of a real product receiving real money.

Commercials: contract basics. Standard pilot terms, what to negotiate, what not to argue about.

Investment: the SAFE versus equity decision. Calibrated to real UK conditions, not US blog posts.

Week 7 — The mid-course pivot window

Week seven is structurally the last opportunity to meaningfully pivot the company without losing the rest of the term. Some students take it. Most do not. We have a one-on-one with each student to make the call honestly.

Coding: refactor week. Real software engineering practice, observably applied. We open the codebases and review them line by line with each student.

Commercials: positioning. How to talk about the company in a way that survives contact with twelve different audiences.

Investment: the data room. What lives in it, how it is structured, why every founder underprepares it.

Week 8 — Demo day prep, first pass

Week eight is the first pass at demo day prep. Not the final pitch. The first draft of the final pitch. Pitching, reading, rewriting. Coaching the body language. Pressure-testing the questions an investor will ask.

The exercise that always surprises people: we have each student answer the anti-pitch, which is "in three sentences, tell me why this company will fail." Students who can articulate that well consistently outperform in real investor conversations.

Coding: feature freeze prep. Everything that goes into the demo day version of the product is locked by Friday.

Commercials: the customer reference. By the end of week eight, every student has a named customer who has agreed to speak to investors about them.

Investment: the financial model that survives diligence. We hand out a template, walk through the cells, then have each student build one for their own company.

Week 9 — The cold campaign

Week nine, every student builds a list of fifty plausible investors and angels for their company, in a structured way. We review the list, half the cohort’s list gets sharpened, the cold outreach goes out by Friday.

This week always shifts students’ relationship with fundraising. The cold campaign turns it from an abstract terrifying thing into a concrete pipeline with metrics. Once a student has sent ten well-crafted cold emails and received two replies, the fear has gone. The pipeline has replaced it.

Coding: production hardening. Sentry, structured logs, deploy pipelines. Real-life issues with real diagnostics.

Commercials: the introduction-asking conversation. How to ask warm introductions in a way that respects the introducer’s time and capital.

Investment: the term sheet line by line, with redlines. We hand out a real one we have negotiated, with the redlines on top.

Week 10 — First investor calls

Week ten, the cold and warm pipeline starts converting. By Friday of week ten, most students have had at least one investor call.

This is the week where the three pillars finally lock together. The student is now, often for the first time, sitting on a video call with someone they have never met, talking about a company they have built, defending a price, answering a question about the model, demonstrating a piece of the product live. All three pillars at once. It is the moment we have been training them for since week one.

Coding: nothing new. The product is locked and observably running.

Commercials: investor objection handling. What investors actually push back on and how to respond without flinching.

Investment: financial model stress-tested against the questions investors are asking.

Week 11 — Demo day rehearsal

Week eleven is full rehearsal. We run a mock demo day on Wednesday in front of three independent operators we have flown in or video-called in. Each student pitches; each student receives written and verbal feedback. Friday is the second pass with edits made.

This is also the week we begin closing arguments. Not every student is on a fundraise trajectory and not every student should be. For the ones who are, the demo day will be a live moment. For the ones whose path is a job offer, an acquisition conversation, or a slower growth trajectory without a round, the demo day is a portfolio piece. Both are valid.

Week 12 — Demo day

The cohort’s public moment. We invite a curated audience of investors, operators, and prospective customers. Each student pitches. There is a drinks reception. Term sheets are not signed in the room, because they almost never are, but conversations start that result in term sheets in the following six weeks.

Some students walk out of demo day with a job offer. Some walk out with a fundraise underway. Some walk out with a paying customer pipeline. All walk out with a portfolio that makes them, on paper, more credible than most operators twice their age.

What we do not promise

We do not promise outcomes. We promise the structure, the time, the operators in the room, the network exposure, and the honest feedback. Some students will be hired into senior roles at the companies we run. Some will be co-founders on the next batch of incubator companies. Some will go and do something else entirely, with the operator skills permanently rewired into how they think.

We have run the cohort enough times now to know that the curriculum works. The variable is the student. Twelve weeks is enough time to change the trajectory of a career, but only for someone who turns up willing to be uncomfortable, every week, until the discomfort is no longer the point.

If that is the kind of twelve weeks you are looking for, the application form is at the bottom of this page.

The Moonlabs Academy runs in Derby. Twelve students per cohort, two operators in the room. £6,000 tuition with multiple funding routes available. Cohorts are kept small on purpose.