Support your cohorts with founder-created assets

Without sacrificing your time, energy, or social capital

With Inno, founders do the groundwork: updates, intro blurbs, and a clear view of their progress. You’ll know who’s stuck and how to help, without losing control of the process.

Founder-created assets provide you with:

  • Timely updates when you need them
  • Warm intro ‘forwardables’ or shareable blurbs for everyone
  • Warm intro outcomes
  • Historical data to tell future success stories (teams and the program)

Know whether founders are:

  • Following up on your warm introductions
  • Meeting with mentors and advisors
  • Stuck at a certain step

Teach the method, model the behavior

Following the path to idea validation can be one of a founder’s most valuable journeys, with benefits that compound long after the cohort ends. Through customer discovery, founders learn that the best results come from staying close to customers and giving and receiving support within their startup community. Every conversation helps build relationships that support their efforts, grow their social capital, and enrich their personal lives.

Catherine and Angie have taught customer discovery for years in classrooms, accelerators and workshops. If you’d like us to teach your cohort how to do customer discovery well and give a brief walkthrough of Inno at the same time, visit our workshop menu.

Help founders help themselves

“Remove all barriers” is our catchphrase: We teach founders to provide as much information as possible to those who’ve offered their time and social capital. Inno helps founders create a “forwardable” to send to anyone willing to make a warm intro. It includes a scheduling link and contact information. Mentors and managers can access it easily and provide feedback, too.

Outreach and introductions

Founders often stall at the ask. Inno helps them draft the outreach note and the warm-intro blurb, and helps connect them with mentors, interviewees and other useful contacts.

Teaching a low-ego approach

Inno’s workflow brings scientific rigor to qualitative customer interviews. By surfacing assumptions and turning them into falsifiable hypotheses, founders can stay open-minded about their MVP. When they interview without revealing what they want to build, customers test the hypothesis—not the founder’s ego—revealing what customers will pay for and what to build first.

Rigorously track what founders learn

To enforce a hypothesis-driven approach to idea validation, we consider Inno the “lab notebook for founders.” Founders take assumptions out of their heads, where they can’t be tested, and turn them into hypotheses to test in the real world. They’ll plan interviews, log what they hear, and extract findings. All of it lives in one place instead of being scattered across online docs, note-taking apps, and slides.

See progress and quality

Inno gives you a view across your cohort. You see where each team is, how many interviews they have run, and what the evidence says, so you can judge the quality of the work and spot the teams that are stuck.

A preview of Inno: draft the ask in five fill-in-the-blank lines

The five parts are vision, framing, weakness, pedestal and ask, from The Mom Test. The founder fills in the blanks and Inno writes the email. Then it writes the introduction a program manager can send on their behalf. This is example text you can change.

VisionI'm working on

FramingI'mI have nothing to sell.

WeaknessThe part I can't figure out is

PedestalI'm reaching out because

Ask

Subject: Seeking your expertise on missed appts

Hi Dana,

I'm working on a way for clinic managers to cut missed appointments. I'm early and still working out whether this is a real problem. I have nothing to sell.

The part I can't figure out is how clinics decide who to call first. I'm reaching out because you're an expert in this industry and have run clinics for over ten years.

Do you have time in the coming weeks to chat?

Thanks,
Priya

Want to try it with a cohort? Tell us about your program and we'll set it up with you.