Curriculum architecture

Why the program is twelve weeks

A course that teaches a founder to write for their own company can be five weeks or twenty. The twelve-week length is chosen for one reason: a founder can ship four distinct pages during the program, defend each one in a small-group review, and revise each one once. Anything shorter cuts the revise-and-defend loop. Anything longer breaks the founder's calendar.

The four ships are the homepage, the primary product page, the founder story page, and one email sequence. Each ship is timed to land inside its own module week. Each ship has a rewrite lab three weeks later. Each rewrite lab has a peer-review session before the ship is defended in the capstone.

Four phases, three tradeoffs each

Phase 1: Foundations (weeks 1 and 2)

The foundations phase teaches only two things. The reader model, which is a stripped structure for describing who the piece is written to. And the sentence-level moves that make writing sound like a person. Every lesson afterward inherits from these two ideas. The tradeoff we accept: the first two weeks feel slow. Founders who want to skip directly to the homepage are told to trust the sequence.

Phase 2: Core modules (weeks 3 through 8)

The core phase covers six modules: hero, below-fold, product page, founder story, email sequence, and opt-in page. Each is one week. Each ends with a shipped artifact. The tradeoff we accept: six weeks of ship-defend-revise is intense, and about one founder in seven falls behind by week five. The workbook has an explicit catch-up track that pulls those founders forward in weeks nine and ten without breaking the cohort.

Phase 3: Rewrite labs (weeks 9, 10, 11)

The rewrite phase does no new teaching. Founders bring one of the four shipped artifacts back into the lab, apply the peer feedback, and revise. The tradeoff we accept: some founders want new content in week nine and are told, gently, that shipping and revising is the point of the program.

Phase 4: Capstone (week 12)

The capstone is a defense session. Each founder presents one of their four artifacts, the original, the revised version, and the reasoning for every substantive change. The tradeoff we accept: the capstone is not a graded exam. It is a peer commitment session. Founders who want a grade are told the grade is the shipped page, and the shipped page has been live for six weeks by then.

Dependencies, and why they are drawn where they are

The dependency edges in the map are deliberate. The reader model (Week 2) is prerequisite for every module that involves audience choice, which is every module except the two hero-rewrite lessons in Week 3. The below-fold lesson (Week 4) is prerequisite for the product page (Week 5) because the product page reuses the three-block structure. The email sequence (Week 7) inherits from the hero rewrite because the subject line is a hero sentence with a shorter word budget.

Two edges are intentionally missing. The founder story page (Week 6) does not inherit from the product page because the founder story is a personal narrative and applying product-page structure to it produces bad writing. The email opt-in (Week 8) does not inherit from the founder story because opt-in copy is transactional and the founder-story voice bleeds into it in unhelpful ways.

How each lesson week is composed

What the architecture does not include, and why

The program does not include a marketing analytics module. Founders arrive at the program with a marketing analytics stack that already works or with none at all, and neither audience is served by a shared lesson. The program does not include a brand identity module. Founders are told, up front, that the identity work is a different course. The program does not include a hiring module for the first content writer. That module is a separate two-week workshop that runs after the capstone for founders who want it.

The exclusions are as much part of the architecture as the inclusions. Keeping the program small is the reason founders finish it.