Two days at QUest
On the 16th and 17th of September we took Tolvara to QUest x Techstars, a two day customer discovery sprint run by Queen’s University Belfast with Techstars, with guest sessions from Venture Folk, Ormeau Labs and the AI Collaboration Centre. This is what we took from it.
Discovering about discovery
With over forty teams taking part, there was a lot of energy in the room. It was great to see the range of products and ideas being developed in Belfast right now, and to hear about other founders’ journeys.
Coming from academia and research, customer discovery is not something I had ever really thought about, so the first day was genuinely insightful. The day walked us through the methods, for example the value proposition canvas and how to build a conversation guide, and as an engineer it was great to see how I can go about this in a structured way. It also made us look hard at how we had been running our interviews. Looking back, we had been too narrow: asking about the specific problems we believed the customer had, rather than hearing their stories.
Pitches are a story
Day two ended with every team pitching, and with over forty pitches in an afternoon you see every style there is. Our assumption had always been that a strong demo was all we needed: if the product worked, customers would see the value.
Show what you learned, not just what you built.
What set the winning pitches apart was that they had a real story. Each one was built around a moment the customer had actually lived through. The product and the next steps followed naturally from it. It really brought home how important the narrative is to getting across what a product is trying to do.
What comes next
There were far more learnings over the two days than we could fit here without making this a post no one would finish. This was my attempt at distilling it down to just two.
Thank you to everyone at QUBIS, Techstars, Venture Folk, Ormeau Labs and the AI Collaboration Centre who put the sprint together and gave us their time over the two days. We are delighted to have been chosen as one of the ten teams going through to Phase 2, and we are looking forward to putting what we learned into practice with the programme’s support over the next eight weeks.