Our Latest Platform Initiative: Design Sprint
As “Platform” roles become more popular at venture capital firms, it’s important for firms to identify how they can be most helpful. After all, no one firm can be an expert in helping their portfolio companies with everything. Some firms are excellent at talent acquisition, others are better at business development, and some are masters at product design. That’s why it’s important for startups to have a diverse group of venture firms around the table, as each brings their own unique set of expertise to the mix.
At Ground Up Ventures, we tell our portfolio founders to view us as an extension of their headcount. We excel at being proactive with our value-add and approaching our companies with creative ideas of how we can help.
The Design Sprint
Staying true to our commitment, we launched our first Design Sprint in January 2019. As every founder could attest to, one of the biggest pain points in scaling a startup is the backlog of projects that need to get done. For many companies, it doesn’t make sense to outsource marketing, sales, and business development as the company needs to perfect and hone these skills. One area that is simple to outsource is graphic design.
So last month we brought in an in-house designer to help ease the load for our portfolio companies. The idea was simple. If you can explain your project in an email, send it to us and we’ll get it done.
As part of the Design Sprint, we designed over 30 types of graphics from App Store screenshots to landing pages, checkout modals, and more! For our companies, the experience was seamless and in many cases we drastically reduced the time it took to get the graphic live.
We were blown away with the positive response from our portfolio founders and are looking forward to hosting our next Design Sprint in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we’ll go back to the drawing board to brainstorm more creative and out-of-the-box ways that we can add value as an extension of their headcount.
Ground Up Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in pre-seed and seed stage startups in the United States and Israel.
