Activate Podcast

With Adrian Austin we discuss the best practices and the mistakes to avoid when mapping out a digital product's customer journey.

What are the best techniques to build and tell your business story. What to do, what to avoid and what absolutely not to do (such as telling jokes).

Talking about your business is a key ability and it helps understanding your thinking process. How to structure your communication, the importance of improvisation and, as always, remember to practice, practice, practice.

In this episode we discuss about the best approach to sketching the basic user interface elements of the product and how to decide which solution should be tested with actual users.

Moving from your business strategy to product design using impact mapping to connect development roadmap to business goals. Some of the things we mention in the episode are: MindMup (https://www.mindmup.com/) - brilliant online mind mapping tool that works especially well for running impact mapping sessions Impact Mapping by Gojko Adzic (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Impact-Mapping-Software-Products-Projects/dp/0955683645/ref=sr_1_1) - short, approachable, pragmatic volume on how to get started with the technique

Who are you going to sell to? Do they really have this problem? Why pains sells more than gains.

Key questions for founders: why you? Why this? How story telling and quantitive hypothesis are the foundation of your strategy.

Paolo Valdemarin and Matt Mower discuss about the selection process at Activate Capital. How do we pick entrepreneurs, what questions should you ask yourself before starting a new project or a new company.

Everything you ever wanted to know about applying to the Activate Capital #startuplab programme but were afraid to ask.

A special episode to wrap up the first startuplab programme. Our guests today are Activate Capital founding partner Greg Rice and Tomo founders Gus Booth-Clibborn and Fahad al-Saud.

Adrian Austin is the special guest of this episode. From ideas to a working prototype: how does our design process work.

Our special guest this week is Annette Kramer for an interesting conversation around moving on from the aggressive startup "pitching culture" to an approach more based on conversations and partnerships.

Joining us for this episode are Fahad and Gus, founders of Tomo, the startup we have selected for the #startuplab programme.

In this episode: a quick review of the last week at the #startupLab, some analysis on the post brexit investment scene and a cool poker analogy.

This week's episode is about the tools we use at the #startupLab to help the team understand the direction they are going in, who they are trying to serve and how to achieve that with limited resources. Strategy on Page Deri ap John Llewellyn Davies http://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategy-Page-Deri-Llewellyn-Davies/dp/1908691387 Value Proposition Design Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Greg Bernarda, Alan Smith https://strategyzer.com/books/value-proposition-design https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1118968050 Impact Mapping Gojko Adzic https://www.impactmapping.org/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0955683645 MindMup https://www.mindmup.com/

First episode of the Startup Lab Podcast with Paolo Valdemarin and Matt Mower. About creating an accelerator programme and our experience delivering the first week.