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Founder Discovery Lab

Validate your startup idea. Six weeks of customer discovery, mentorship, and structured experimentation.

Program Overview

Duration

6 weeks

Cohort Size

12 to 20 founders

Time Commitment

~6 hours per week

At the end of Discovery Lab, founders should be able to clearly answer three questions: Who is the customer? What problem do they have? Is it worth building a startup around?

Week-by-Week Curriculum

Week 1

Founder Orientation

Build a founder mindset, understand how scalable startups differ from small businesses, and prepare to learn through evidence rather than assumptions.

Week 2

Customer Discovery

Define your ideal customer profile (ICP), identify early adopters, and use unbiased conversations to understand who experiences the problem most acutely.

Week 3

Market Opportunity

Assess market size, competition, and growth potential to determine whether the opportunity can support a scalable venture.

Week 4

Problem Validation

Turn the riskiest problem assumptions into a prototype or experiment designed to generate evidence and accelerate learning.

Week 5

Value Proposition

Align customer pains and gains with your offering, test what resonates, and decide what to emphasize, change, or cut.

Week 6

Discovery Synthesis

Bring together customer, market, problem, and value proposition evidence to decide what you have learned and identify the strongest next step.

What You'll Leave With

A validated problem statement, customer insights from real conversations, and a clear decision on your next step: continue to Builder Studio, pivot to a new idea, or pause the project.

All three outcomes are successful. The goal is validated learning, not product development.