We partner with industry experts to discover authentic customer demand and co-create startups with market traction.

You envision a certain business ought to exist. You see unmet demand in the world. We guide Co-Creators through our unique process and pair them with a Demand Associate — someone skilled in performing Documented Primary Interactions (DPIs). We'll work together to conduct and evaluate DPIs, invalidate incorrect assumptions, notice phenomena, and discover demand.

Once demand has been discovered, we found a startup. The Co-Creator typically leads as CEO, and begin de-risking the axes of product, sales and marketing, management, and financing. Our Co-Created startups raise their seed round with an unusually mitigated risk profile: paying customers, a compelling case for market competence, and without the usual "exploratory" phase that burns investor capital. We lead the seed round.

Applying Deliberate Innovation with us is unique and (initially) challenging. But finding authentic demand and seeing your customers more clearly than they see themselves has big upside.

We invite you to learn more about Deliberate Innovation here.

Discover Demand

The first phase is the search for Authentic Demand. We train Co-creators in foundational concepts of Deliberate Innovation that are distinct from how anyone else thinks about startups and are not taught in business schools. Building on this foundation, we then coach and support Co-creators through hundreds of Documented Primary Interactions (DPIs) - a new and more rigorous way of understanding customers. In contrast to typical interviews, DPIs are better thought of as data collection for scientific research. DPI planning involves hypothesis generation, implementation, recording, and analysis. A single DPI is one sample in a research study.

Address Demand

After hundreds of DPIs, if Authentic Demand is found and presents a compelling market opportunity, the project matures into a startup and enters the next phase. A clear understanding of Authentic Demand serves as a bright north star for product road map, and, in fact, the architecture of the company. The startup develops their leadership team, builds product, markets and sells the product, and raises financing. Investors we worked with have said startups utilizing Deliberate Innovation are able to skip a round of funding.