The Spring Studios Founder Launchpad is a fully virtual 8-week venture-building program focused on helping founders build a VC ready startup proposition.

• Community: ~30 top percentile global founders to bounce ideas with while you build Partners: Industry experts (e.g exited founders, regulators, CXOs) for mentorship, guest chats and warm customer introductions
• Expertise: Course content designed by venture builders and iterated with founders
• Risk-free: No need to quit your job, and no requirement to continue working with Spring Studios post-program
• Bahrain + MENA platform: Tap our local networks to understand if your idea is a good fit to launch in MENA

Am I suitable?

What sort of founders do we look for?

There’s not really a one-size fits all approach to defining a good founder. Red-herrings exist - for example confidence in the absence of resilience, and a well-decorated CV.

This is, in turn, a primary motivator to run a program like the launchpad. As profiles and applications can only tell so much about an individual, the only real important metric is to see how you work in practice, over an extended period of time.

Some things we like:

• Resilience to failure - you’re able to pick-back-up and self-motivate even after hitting barriers or failures
• Hustle - you’re action oriented, solve problems, and able to lead and motivate others to hit objectives and deadlines
• Working smart - Hustling is a double-edged sword - at times you need to be able to zoom out - finding ways to make faster, lower cost progress through quality strategic decisions, rather than directing all your time (and eventually, capital) to the wrong path
• Model suited to incremental validation - you are building a startup which you’re able to take a clear path towards incremental validation - e.g pre-regulatory approval, or before securing larger capital. This speaks volumes about your ability to manage capital effectively, unlock incremental revenue and traction, and shift tact fast
• Strong opinions, loosely held - you’re passionate in your vision, hypothesis, and will defend them - but, as soon as you’re presented with data to disprove your opinion, you don’t let ego get in the way of change
• We work well together during the program - there’s an element of personal style here, but do we you work well with our team, are we mutually excited to work and go above + beyond for each other, and does your model align with Spring’s strengths. This isn’t always going to be the case, but our hope is that you’re making strong progress with your startup throughout the program regardless

Do I need a startup idea?

We want to see that you’re the kind of individual that can come up with startup ideas. So, we request during the interview process that you give us an example of a startup idea you’ve had, so we can learn a bit more about how you think.

This idea can, and likely will evolve a lot during the course of the program. So don’t worry about being tied to a specific idea based on your application - you’re free to change/pivot at any time.

How should I look for startup ideas?

There’s many ways you can look for and build a successful startup. We like the below visualisation from Fletch:

Source: https://www.fletchpmm.com/resource/eight-founder-journeys-to-product-market-fit

The above diagram shows how there are many valid routes to building a successful startup. However, this can be confusing if you’re not already versed in this process.

The most common pitfall we see for newer founders is building a solution from ‘vision’ - or - in the absence of a real problem being solved.

We’d suggest that, for most founders, the below is a pragmatic way to get started:

• Identify a problem that is experienced by a certain demographic. You might choose to leverage a combination of personal experience, customer interviews and secondary research to find problems. Good problems are small, well defined, painful for users that experience them, and have the prospect of leading you to uncover further problems to solve as your company grows
• Understand the opportunity. It’s not always true that the existence of a problem means that solving it is worthwhile. Are you comfortable that ways to solve the problem may exist that could lead to a profitable business model down the line? Does the problem look painful enough, solvable, and can you start to formulate a narrative around why others might prefer your approach to the market?

The above is usually enough to get going, and start spinning a flywheel of iterative low cost development to start to design and validate a solution in tandem with users. You don’t need all the answers on day one.

Deep and unique insights - the kind that are overlooked by others and will give you an edge, are harder to obtain through extensive secondary research. 

Our view is that you’re better off to start engaging with users early, and proving yourself wrong or right as fast as possible.

A few origination techniques we like:

• Personal experience: Problems you’ve experienced - in life, in work, where you have a first-hand connection to the problem
• Corporate relationships: Spring Studios has extensive relationships with corporates in Bahrain and the wider GCC region. We look to open up channels for entrepreneurs to start engaging with these partners and conducting discovery with their teams
• Proxies: Looking to successful models in other geographies, and exploring if there’s untapped opportunities in different customer segments or local geographies. Discipline to not skip-over customer validation or ignore demographic nuances is still essential here
• Trends: New platforms, technologies and operating models which create new categories of problems and opportunities to innovate - e.g gig-economy, AI, Open Banking, economic downturns

Do I need to quit my job?

Not at this stage. While entrepreneurship requires a high risk appetite, there are many examples of highly successful entrepreneurs taking a balanced approach to leaving their jobs.

The launchpad provides a nice transition period - spend the next 8 weeks figuring out if you’ve got an idea worthy of quitting your job for, leveraging our process, and then take the jump.

Sound interesting? We’d love to have you there. Read our blog on what kind of startups we're looking for, or apply now.