Boldstart & SVB Inception Bootcamp
Authors: Ellen Chisa (boldstart), Hani Azzam (SVB)
At boldstart and SVB, we’re working with founders from Inception, the earliest days — before incorporation, or right after.
From that vantage point — and our own personal experiences — we know many of struggles founders go through early on:
- Transitioning into “working alone” at home before you have a team.
- Honing in on a narrow enough specific ICP, and striking the balance between being too opinionated or not opinionated enough.
- Doing a great demo of your product, and measuring if things are actually working or not.
- Feeling comfortable with your financial runway when transitioning to work full-time on your startup
- Finding the right advisors, investors, and early supporters who can make a meaningful difference in your business
- Focusing your bandwidth on the problems that matter most
This list could go on and on. We knew we couldn’t possibly address all a new founder’s challenges in two weeks, but we could give founders a set of tangible lessons and relevant connections, plus the time to apply those lessons and activate those connections. We were lucky enough to get a generous first cohort who iterated with us on the program in real time.
We selected 13 early stage teams, hosted them in SVB’s offices in Boston, and worked together to tackle their most pressing challenges through guest workshops, 1:1 coaching sessions, and plenty of open work blocks.
Big Takeaways
Overall, we narrowed in on what “inception” really means and how to set a tangible goal/hypothesis.
Cofounders & building your early team
- Cofounders and early teams often come from existing relationships! When they don’t, everyone has their own technique for hiring, and it’s okay for the first few to be idiosyncratic.
- You should wake up every day excited and feeling lucky that your cofounder is a part of the business. Anything less shouldn’t be a cofounder.
User research techniques
- Get scrappy! Great user research for a startup isn’t necessarily about running a study with 50 participants and big incentives. Figure out how to have a quick conversation and fill in the sentence: “As a [user segment] I want to [task/activity, platform/tech agnostic] so that I can [end goal for the user, again platform/tech agnostic].”
- At the early stages user research and sales are deeply connected. It’s also important to keep in mind that your “user” and your “buyer” may be different folks.
Founder Selling
- You are going to be your own best salesperson! You have a deep reason you decided to build this company, so every founder has to get comfortable with communicating that value proposition to customers.
- Getting to a narrow ICP where there’s a clear repeatable motion and pipeline is like catnip for great sales talent. When you’re looking to bring someone else on, that’s what you want to have to attract the best folks.
Great product communication and demos
- Demos should be concise, shoot for 5 min.
- A demo should trigger a potential user’s light bulb moment as soon as possible. Their initial thoughts should be “I get it, I need it”. Never be defensive, and always earn people’s time.
Minimum Viable Brand
- The core of a brand is not a logo. It’s your customer’s perspective on how you show up and deliver value for them. Strong product and value delivery drive brand, not the other way around.
- Great brands don’t happen overnight. Use the wayback machine to look at how things have evolved for your favorite brands over time. To start that process yourself, you can also keep a brand journal/mood board so you can start to see themes about what does and doesn’t feel like your brand.
PR & Launches
- A new fundraise is a reason for press to care, but it’s not the whole story. You should have other exciting news to share outside of just raising money, and a goal for what you hope the launch will do for the business.
- Every founder should work some authenticity into how they do a launch. Do you love writing blog posts? Maybe opt for a Medium, Substack, or Linkedin article. Do you enjoy being in front of the camera? Publish a video. Go beyond just the medium of communication, lean into what makes you tick. CISOs in cars is a great example.
Advisors and Angels
- Everybody’s got their own preferences, it’s important to find angels/advisors that share your perspective rather than try to force something for the wrong reasons
- Never just give away shares; always get a clear sense of the relationship. It should be glaringly obvious whether or not there’s an actual mutual benefit.
The strength of community (and working together in-person)
- Founding a startup is a lonely journey. Even co-founders tend to spend hours holed up with each other.
- At the very least, physically working alongside others can inspire. In the best cases — which we saw plenty during the bootcamp — it can lead to new ideas, discovering new solutions, and even landing new users!
Banking, Legal, Accounting, and other logistical support
- Service providers are never going to make or break your startup (in most cases), but you also can’t run a business without them
- To choose the right ones, make sure they tick the following boxes:
- They are known as the best of the best for their core services
- They have startup-specific experience and/or knowledge (if this is specific to your industry, even better)
- They don’t take up too much of your time
- They bring additional value to the table beyond their core services
Practicing what we preach
We also wouldn’t be good program organisers if we didn’t iterate on our own product based on customer feedback! To that end, we identified our own areas for improvement:
More tactics, less strategy
- I think we fell victim to a common VC/service provider trap here — over indexing on the philosophical and strategic aspects of an inception stage business.
- Next time, we plan on doing more to anchor each session to very concrete, tangible products or updates that founders can leave with.
More 1:1 times
- Taking 2-weeks entirely off from our full-time jobs is hard, but maybe trying to balance being “online” for our full-time roles while getting to know each founder and their startups is even harder.
- Next time, we’ll be more diligent about scheduling recurring 1:1 deep dives with all participants and totally clearing our calendars to be available throughout the program’s entirety.
More opportunities for cohort to learn from each other
- The connections and camaraderie between cohort members completely exceeded our expectations.
- We want to lean into that for next time by explicitly setting time aside for all the cohort members to get to know each other, and also by giving them more opportunities to teach their areas of expertise to cohort mates.
All of this is to say we can’t wait to run this back! We had a great time and are excited to push our v2 into production sometime this Fall. So If you’re thinking of starting a company in the next year — fill in this form and we’ll let you know next time we run the program.