On November 5, 2021, Santa Cruz Works (“SCW”) held a 4 hour workshop for participants in the 4th cohort of our accelerator: Santa Cruz Accelerates. Approximately 18 of the 34 startups participated.  Julia Byrd was our instructor and guide. James O’Connor of Innovation Within demonstrated The Discovery Platform™, the software teams will be using to conduct customer discovery to help them validate their business models using the Skinny Canvas. The purpose of Discovery is to gather first hand market validation of a product/solution/startup before exerting time and money building the wrong thing. In other words: reducing risk. 

There were 3 segments in the workshop:

• Introduction to Interviewing - how to ask objective, open-ended questions that give you meaningful insights and data points.

• Skinny Canvas - all participants were given free license to the Discovery platform. Training and support was also provided.

• Value Propositions - participants learned how to create statements that express the worth of something to a customer segment. Essentially, “why does my customer care about this?”

The entire event was recorded, and is available to participants of Santa Cruz Accelerates. 

There will be weekly checkups and guidance for the workshop participants. A second workshop on January 21, 2022 will be offered for those Santa Cruz Accelerates participants who missed this event.