FoundersDoor is a six week pre-accelerator for early stage tech founders from underrepresented backgrounds in London. The programme is delivered by YSYS in partnership with One Tech as part of the Mayor of London’s Digital Talent initiative.
You can find details of our current cohort here.
Discovery, Pivots and Prototypes
Three weeks of the programme have blown past and now is an opportune time to reflect on all that has occurred. In reference to the heading; discovery, pivots and prototypes, the startups have seen a good quantity of all three and we have only just hit the halfway mark!
Discovery — Week 1
Week 1 started with a session ran by a friend of YSYS, Rumbi Makanga, who has over 7 years working with early-stage startups to find product-market fit, commercialise their ideas and achieve growth.
The focus of the cohort was around defining and validating their problem statements through the customer discovery process. The key problem here was to firstly become aware of the various assumptions that they have made and secondly, to determine how to test the assumptions in a non-bias way
Uneco, Selectaire and Bridge took a mixed approach of customer surveys and more in depth interviews to illustrate the data captured, which came with its own challenges.
For instance, the assumed customers for Bridge’s AR product was schools and local councils, with end users being students. However, the time of the year, in conjunction with the pandemic, meant that gaining access to these interest groups was more challenging.
On the other end, this had minimal impact for Uneco and Selectaire who could leverage their personal and online networks to reach their target audiences. Uneco made use of the various parent and clothe-swap Facebook groups already operating to gather interest for a focus group, whereas Selectaire, being their own customers, could tap into a community that they are already a part of to get survey responses.
Pivots — Week 2
Rumbi, went on to emphasise the need to track evidence from customer interviews, and with the discovery process underway and team’s consolidating a week’s worth of insight, they had began to gather enough data to start re-evaluating the direction of their startups.
For instance, after analysing the survey responses from 100 people and conducting 33 customer interviews via Zoom, Selectaire discovered that the key problem their audience had was the slow speed of delivery of hair wigs from platforms such as AliExpress and the poor customer service that often accompanies it. This suggested that being a supplier of the wigs could potentially be business model to adopt alongside the marketplace.
Having done some research, the Legal Loft team noticed that the legal support space was quite competitive, with many law firms already providing pro-bono support to small companies and other organisations like Seed Legals providing templates and automated contract services. With that in mind, the team began to question whether or not their original idea was appropriate for the problem being addressed or whether a different approach should be taken e.g. specialising service offered to media companies with their specific needs.
Uneco’s customer interviews for the most part verified their original assumptions so the most prominent pivot was a name change! The startup formerly known as Unify became Uneco to avoid any issues with another company operating under the same name.
Prototypes — Week 3
By Week 3, the startups were excited to switch focus slightly to actually designing and building out some simple solutions in the form of prototypes. Zaisha Smith, founder of *Pitchsmiths, gave the teams a solid foundation in the theoretical and practical considerations of building prototypes of various forms: low, medium and high fidelity.
In addition to this, Dan Parry, co-founder of Tectonic and general no-code Guru, offered his expertise to consult the individual startups on how they can take advantage of readily available no-code tools to build apps, marketplaces and websites without any technical skills. Each team received a suggested no-code stack tailored to the types of products and services that they were creating.
Uneco was recommended ShareTribe to soft launch their marketplace; Bridge created a physical and digital equivalent of their prototype to deliver to a group of participants; and Selectaire built their website using webflow to describe their business and gather signups for their launch.
Next steps
As you can tell, there has been a lot going on and again I am stunned by how much can be done in the space of three weeks, whilst all of the cohort juggle full-time jobs or studies.
The second half of the programme will cover testing and iteration; marketing and financials, but the key goals for the entrepreneurs will continue to be to validate their ideas and begin to prove traction ahead of the demo event. Until then, stay tuned for the end of programme wrap-up and date announcements!
