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. But how should you do that for your unique venture?

This interactive roundtable will help you explore and create a way to hopefully answer the following questions:

• Who wants your product?
• Why do they want your product?
• What value does your product provide to your customers?

Please do the following pre-work before the workshop:

• Think about the above three questions and formulate experiments that you can perform to answer these questions.
• Come ready to share and discuss your experiments.
• If you have time, please view the following workshop recording on Testing User Demand. It will help you understand the kind of experiments you should be running.

Speaker Names: Pete Gladstone (Harvard Innovation Labs B2C Advisor) & Phil Green (Harvard Innovation Labs B2B Advisor)

Peter Gladstone is the Assistant Director of Consumer Goods and Services. He leads programming and mentoring for all consumer-facing ventures at the Harvard Innovation Labs. Peter has over 20 years of consumer marketing experience having held marketing jobs of varying responsibilities for Gillette, P&G and The Boston Beer Company. Peter will be working in a part-time capacity. When not working at the Harvard Innovation Labs he can be found shipping blue socks all over the world for his two sons (ask him about it), training his family’s new puppy or mentoring consumer start-ups outside of the Harvard community.

As Associate Director, Venture Programs, Phil ‘s mentoring is focused on B2B, as well as teams where engineering/product development choices are critical to the venture.

Phil brings 30 years of experience in building products, services, teams, and companies. As a former CTO, he has built web-based enterprise applications, as well as consumer mobile apps for IOS and Android. As a former CEO, he built a customer base of 5,000 organizations, in 50 countries, serving over 1 million users. This B2B venture used a direct sales channel to penetrate F1000 accounts such as Bank of America, NASA, Owens Corning, Pfizer, Kraft Foods and used an indirect partner channel to penetrate international markets as well as small or midsize US businesses. As a COO, he has improved operations, profitability, and led the company’s push to establish an inbound marketing strategy focused on generating B2B leads. Phil has experience in conversational AI, search, database systems, agile development, no code product development solutions such as Bubble & Glide, and has worked at venture-backed start-ups, self-funded start-ups, and publicly traded companies. Phil can also advise on how to approach Angels, and he is a Boston Techstars alumnus. Phil holds an MBA from HBS and graduated from Harvard College with an AB in Economics.