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The Tufts Venture Accelerator Team extends a warm welcome to the 2024 cohort! We will start the day off with a round of introductions and icebreaker activities. We will also be going over what to expect in the next 10 weeks.
One of the most important elements of an entrepreneurial mindset is to be creative, to stay in the moment and be 100% present, to embrace not being perfect, and to optimize speed over perfection and quantity over quality in many situations. An improv workshop is an excellent way to warm up our creative juices.
Small teams pride themselves on being fast, nimble and agile - but sometimes that can lead to chaos. Big teams understand how to operationalize and optimize processes - but sometimes that can lead to rigidity and friction. How might we right-size a set of goal setting, project planning and project management systems and practices that work for the size of team that you are running, so you can stay focused, stay on task, keep communications wide open? In this workshop, each team will explore tools, rituals and frameworks and pick a set of tools that enables them to best collaborate throughout the summer and beyond.
The executive summary summarizes your new venture on just one page. It is a great forcing function that makes entrepreneurs examine every aspect of their new venture creation process, and is a wonderful tool to help teams do a gap analysis on where they should focus their time. In this clinic, teams will be working in small groups under the guidance of our entrepreneurial coaches, iterating and fine tuning their executive summary, identifying and prioritizing gaps in data / knowledge, making a list of their riskiest assumptions, and making a plan for hypothesis testing.
You will come away from this clinic with a list of Riskiest Assumption Tests (RATs) that helps you de-risk your venture in the coming weeks.
Let's celebrate the kickoff for the Tufts Venture Accelerator! Hosted by the Derby Entrepreneurship Center (DEC), all venture accelerator participants, faculty, staff and mentors in are invited to enjoy cocktails and appetizers.
Don't miss this opportunity to reconnect with friends and make new acquaintances!
In venture creation, knowledge about the market and customers is always evolving. You will review and refine your target market, TAM/SAM/SOM, and discuss whether your chosen area focus is a good match for a beachhead market based on your own selection criteria – and if not, how you might pivot to a more favorable beachhead market.
You will then review your stakeholder map, review what you know about each stakeholder’s needs and goals, identify and prioritize gaps in knowledge, and create a plan to close those gaps.
You will come away with an actionable plan for primary market research, starting with research subject recruitment that you can deploy starting immediately.
How differentiated is your solution based on what you know? How far can you push your MVP this summer? For B2C software ventures it is very possible to build a no code version of a throwaway app and test the solution in the market immediately. For social ventures in another country, you can design the solution but implementation takes a little bit more time. For health tech ventures, you can plan, but a lot of times, you cannot pull together a working prototype.
In this workshop, you will share what you have with your coaches and your peers, and do a preliminary audit for problem-solution fit based on data available today. You will make plans to push your product and solution prototyping as far as it will go. We will also help you develop habits to check for problem solution fit and do continuous customer development along the way.
You will come away with an actionable plan to take your MVP to the next level in the course of the summer.
In this workshop, you will explore your current thesis for business models and pricing strategy. You will draw inspiration from, but not become constrained by, precedence in how your competitors or other players in the market have charged for similar solutions – and how to define your own path forward with this background information. You will review and refine your pricing hypotheses and strategize on how you might test purchase intent and pricing elasticity.
You will come away with an actionable plan to validate your hypotheses for your ability to prove that your paying customers will be interested in paying for your products and services.
In this workshop, you will define and create your approach for both your initial Marketing and Sales strategies along with the tactics that you will need to support those directions. You will get specific about the personas you are marketing and selling to and how you are going to reach those individuals that will lead to your first 10 paying customers. You will look into not only where need to go for both primary and secondary research but also how to develop specific communications strategies that produce both marketing and sales conversions that lead to the initial revenue that you are forecasting.  You will develop a channel strategy, a hypothesis for your sales process and timeline and come up with a way to manage sales prospects within a CRM system. You will put together a basic sales plan and a sales playbook which include specific tactics that you can put into play immediately.
Join us for a fireside chat with the alumni of Tufts Venture Accelerator and learn how they utilized resources from Tufts to build their ventures from the ground up - and hear their stories of their progress since the program concluded.
Panelists:
Moderated by Tina Weber, Director, Tufts Venture Accelerator.
In this workshop, you will review your business model assumptions in spreadsheet format. What are your assumptions for your unit and overall economics - and how might you test that? What are the drivers for growth - and how can you validate that? What is your pricing structure - and is that compatible with the costs associated with your go to market strategy? What is the length of your sales cycle - and how is that reflected in your 5-year proforma income statement? What is your 5 year strategy/roadmap - and what staffing levels and other resources are required to get the job done? And lastly: what is your startup cost - and how might you raise that capital?
While all the numbers are hypothetical, this deep dive in your financial models gives you a tool for scenario planning, which can help you make strategic decisions for your business.
There are many difficult conversations that need to be had between cofounders of a new venture. In this workshop, we will review the framework presented in First Round Capital’s seminal article, “50 Questions To Explore With A Cofounder” by Gloria Lin. We will then spend most of our time on Part 5: Team Culture, and Part 6: Cofounder Relationship.
Each team member will have time and space to reflect on the discussion prompts individually, then discuss it as a group. We encourage every team to schedule recurring working sessions to continue the conversation throughout your venture creation journey, so you can develop a transparent and empathetic environment where cofounders can bring up issues of conflict with psychological safety, solving for the interests of the venture without losing sight of the cofounders as individuals, each with their own aspirations, career pathways and constraints.
When you look at a brand like Patagonia, or Coca-cola, or Apple, you immediately know what they stand for. Branding starts with thinking about the company's "why" and how you want to tell the story of your business. Once you get that sorted, the rest would follow:
In this workshop, you will apply principles shared in the session to each other’s branding treatment, and help each other evolve your approach to showcase your brand values.
Now that you have revisited all the key elements of business planning and have concrete plans for individual components, it’s time to make a high level 9 week plan with workstreams, milestones and deliverables that will get your business to where you want it to be by the end of the program. You will emerge with a week by week focus and key dates when you will have certain milestones accomplished - as well as a roadmap to continue the process beyond the accelerator.
One of the things founders don’t spend enough time on is to understand boards – what they need, how to build one, and how to best utilize their board to help them build their business. Boards for emerging new ventures are quite different from public boards. This week during our Board governance workshop, we explored how boards work and how our entrepreneurs might build the right type of boards. Topics we explored include why we build boards; typical composition of a startup board versus a nonprofit board; board compensation; relationship building; managing board meetings and more.
Many thanks to Jim Baum who delivered a talk on the same topic in 2021Â for the MIT Delta V Summer Accelerator.