Upcoming Events

This intimate founder roundtable discussion focuses on getting to know your customer. You will present your target customer, and facilitator Stephanie Connaughton will work with you and the group to strengthen your customer description.

Gain valuable pitch practice by introducing your company to your peers in an “escalator pitch” format, which will be refined over the course of the workshop series. We will discuss the importance and elements of a value proposition, and how to transition from focusing on technology features to product solutions with customer benefits.

Excited to get to know other Social Impact founders at Harvard? Eager to develop friendships with folks going through similar challenges? Get a chance to really connect with others and kickstart relationships that can buoy you through hard times and cheer you through the good ones. It was a blast last term and is back by popular demand!

Validating demand is the first critical hurdle any entrepreneur faces when starting a venture. Why? Because you’re starting out with a guess, not an actual product or service. You’ll need to validate that guess before you start to build a product, seek outside investors, etc.

Your pitch deck is an investor’s first impression of your business. What are the must-have elements to make a good impression? What do investors look for in your deck? In this session, you will learn the key elements for crafting a compelling pitch deck and distilling these elements into a simple template.

We will discuss how startups should prioritize opportunities for different potential applications and how this can help define the company’s product goals and vision. This is particularly important for platform technologies, where a number of potential applications may seem viable, but prioritization is necessary to focus limited resources. We will review how partnerships and alliances with industry can help expand the breadth of a portfolio. Frameworks and tools to assist in assessing risk vs reward will be discussed and real-world examples provided.

The Lean Model Canvas is a one-page business plan template that helps you distill your key ideas and assumptions. During this interactive workshop, you will create your own Lean Canvas Business Plan and discover how it can streamline your thinking!

Are you beginning to develop an MVP, in the middle of building a web or mobile app, or have some other pressing issues related to managing your engineering resources? This interactive workshop will try to answer your pressing problems in real time.

Many founders think of marketing as a necessary evil: “If only we could get our product out there, people will love it.” But your product’s story starts before you think it does, and it begins with the WHO, not with the what. Come to this workshop to learn an accessible approach to consumer intelligence gathering that Stephanie calls ‘Marketing Thinking.’ Marketing Thinking exposes the right product decisions, pinpoints the ideal first customer, and deciphers what drives demand for your solution.

During this session, we will focus on defining target customer segments, articulating value to these customers, and estimating the overall market potential by application and customer segment. We will discuss stakeholder analysis and how to map the value proposition for each stakeholder group. We will also discuss concepts of market analyses and customer segmentation.