“I’d invest more in early stage companies if they were higher quality.” 

- Common investor sentiment

Most startups build products nobody wants. We estimate 90% of the capital invested in startups is wasted on designing, building and selling products that don't have a viable market. Entrepreneurs often take a leap of faith and hope they hit some customers on the way down.

This happens because the assumptions some entrepreneurs make when building their business turn out not to be true. It's easy to get caught up in the passion of how great your startup business could be while forgetting to validate the underlying hypotheses that are implied in every idea. Achieving product-market fit is not an easy or trivial task. 

As a result, the failure rate of technology startups is very high. Y-Combinator, a startup seed fund and accelerator many consider to be best in the world, has a failure rate of 99.6%. A high failure rate is considered normal and accepted in the startup community. We think this is not a reality of the risk associated with startups, but a failure to understand customers and apply insight to the business model.

Our proprietary process helps us
succeed more

At the core of our process for building startups is a proprietary process called Insight-Driven Iteration. It was developed by our Founder and serial entrepreneur, Dave Linhardt. This process was created from the lessons learned from the six startups Dave created and from countless hours of teaching newbie entrepreneurs how to build successful companies at FounderSensei. Insight-Driven Iteration results in more efficient use of startup capital through its unique methodology for validating customer demand before the startup is even created. 

This process has been proven to achieve product-market fit more often and more efficiently than the normal way in which startups are built. Of the six startups created by our Founder, five were profitable without any outside capital. Considering each startup had a 1 in 2,000 chance of succeeding, the odds of doing it five times in a row were 1 in 32 quadrillion. The Insight-Driven Iteration process beats the odds of startup success. When applied to a the group of startups we create, the result is a portfolio of startup companies that significantly outperforms average returns.

Unlike most incubators, accelerators and whateverators, we originate 100% of our startup ideas

We are not an accelerator or incubator. We are a startup studio or a company that creates other companies. 100% of our startup ideas come from our Founders who are all serial entrepreneurs. These creative individuals work closely with our in-house validation team of customer insight experts. 

This is a conscious choice. We believe the best start ideas come from Founders who have personally experienced the problem and have suffered the pain and frustration the problem brings to their lives. This hands-on experience provides a deep understanding of the problem and the inspiration to solve it. While there are a lot of people in the world with great ideas, we choose to focus on the ideas that solve problems we've experience ourselves.