Coventures is about venturing together. You have an idea for impact? We provide the entrepreneurial skill-set for making that a reality. We are a company of serial entrepreneurs, founders, experienced product managers and venture designers.
We help ventures in all stages of venture formation:
Don't waste your time building the wrong things. Find new growth opportunities that really matter. We help you turn your strategic assets into impact with new ventures and digital products.
Validating with code is really, really expensive. Be sure to validate the business opportunity, strategic alignment and business model validity in the most cost-effective way possible.
Do you have a winning strategy and structure for growing your ventures and digital products? We help you remove impediments, recruit the winning team, manage the product and if required spin-out the venture as its own startup-company.
We help you figure out where you want to go and to build an inspiring and compelling vision for your product or venture. Your vision needs to reflect a strong purpose and it needs to have a narrative, which provides emotion. We can help you achieve this.
Your vision needs a strategy with an unfair advantage. We help you build a dynamic, iterative strategy process that takes into account your resources and delivers outcomes (knowledge & impact).
We are very hands-on and support in execution of strategy. We always consider the execution, resources and capabilities required for providing strategies that don't only work on paper, but provide real results.
Creating new digital ventures is by no means an easy task. That’s why we have brought together serial entrepreneurs, product managers, designers and developers who have the experience and understanding of creating digital products and services, and building new digital businesses. We can help you navigate venture building from an idea to a cash-flow positive venture on growth track.
The hard fact is that over ninety percent of startups fail and the number one reason for failure is that startups are building something that customers do not need. We think that there are enough useless digital products in the world and do not aim to make new ones. For that reason, we work hard to discover the real market need with the lowest amount of work possible. On top of finding a real market need, you also need to validate a whole lot of other things. The market needs to also be large enough for your ambitions, it needs to be strategically aligned with your company strategy, you need to have an unfair advantage in this market, your business model needs to work and you need to have a credible go-to-market strategy. Often it will require many iterations before a business model has been properly validated. These iterations can often be done without hardly any development work (cheap).
When you have a validated concept building the product requires very specific entrepreneurial expertise. In this type of work the right developer will provide 10x value compared to the average Joe. We have a network of this type of developers and are experts in staffing cost-effective "dream teams" for building your business.
Have an idea for a new digital venture? Let’s discuss.
The Discovery of new opportunities and sources of growth can be tricky. If there is one thing we know or sure it is that the best insights don’t come from inside the building. You need to talk to your customers, understand how the market is changing and what your role is in the future world.
Building a venture or digital product from an idea is a very big high-risk investment (often bigger than you think). The quality of your idea will greatly increase your probability for success, but it is also the multiplier of your impact. Investments at this stage to the quality of your ideas have a very, very high ROI. It's a shame they are done quite seldom and often in the wrong things (process).
Not all ideas for innovation are created equal. Ideas are very different, some are insights on unfilled customer needs, some potential solutions to fill that need, others are actually more like incremental ideas for improvement. Good ideas for innovation require work. You need to combine these pieces of insights and create potential concepts that consider the corporate resources, capabilities, and strategy.
Of the resulting concepts some are excellent for your internal R&D, others you need to launch as external ventures for providing the structure required for the innovation. A typical mistake we see is that companies think they have a process problem, when its almost always about capabilities. Making sense of ideas is hard work and it requires a lot of entrepreneurial expertise.
We help our clients in opportunity discovery, where we analyze your situation, help you find new opportunities for growth by talking to your internal stakeholders, your customers, and relevant industry experts. It’s like market research, but just much more effective done using business design and startup methodologies.
In the end, you’ll have a list of solid opportunities to execute on, but also a much better understanding of your strengths and what type of opportunities are you pursuing.
Many companies struggle with the challenge of not knowing how to organize effectively for innovation. Many may have good R&D processes providing incremental innovation, but making the leap to really organize for providing more groundbreaking innovations is difficult.
The thing with innovation is that it’s all about bets. For pursuing more radical innovation you need to be able to accept a certain tolerance of failure. You need to manage it more like a portfolio, than a linear process, and finally, you need to have the supporting culture and scaffolding. For many companies, these challenges can be daunting. We often get questions like:
We understand your confusion and we would love to help you clarify this rather bewildering landscape for you. We help our clients with building innovation models, labs, etc. and we also have world-class advisors available for consultation. We’re also super excited about these topics and constantly write about this on LinkedIn and in our blog, so just reach out to discuss your situation for free (we’re happy to help).
Most founders and product leaders have a vision for their product. In our experience, the vision almost always includes many ambitious elements and ideas on how the world will be a better place when the vision is met. However, often it's tricky to come up with a clear story, which crisply explains how the world has changed to provide the right timing, what the differentiating strategy is, how the product is uniquely positioned in the marketplace and what is the roadmap for executing on the vision (the big milestones).
We help founders and product leaders do this. We help them get the story straight, which serves them internally as a clear roadmap/strategy guiding product development and all internal operations, but as importantly it will also help them explain their product to customers and external investors.
On top of clarifying the vision, strategy, and execution of the strategy. The deliverable here will be nothing less than a visually stunning investor, product, or sales decks completely aligned with the vision immediately ready to bring your new product to the market.
Most people agree that its a very different personality and skill-set you need in ventures than in big corporations. Some might say in ventures you need generalists, wherein corporations you wanna go for specialists. Some go as far to automatically reject candidates with corporate background when recruiting for ventures. With ventures it can be tricky to really know if you have the right profile. It’s hard to find the best talents and sometimes you might have some difficulties in explaining the scope of the role. Especially as it’s not enough to understand the current role, but you need to understand how the role evolves as the venture grows.
We help in situations like this with headhunting services for entrepreneurial CEO, board level, growth, and product positions. We can help you plan the role, find the right candidate, and validate that the candidate is suitable for the position at hand. We have a strong network of entrepreneurs and leaders that will bring us reach, but our experts also help us really understand the role and suitable candidate profile very deeply.
Getting to Product-Market-Fit is difficult and 71% of startups report they failed because they didn't find a market need for their product or ran out of cash searching. This is usually the first thing you want to validate when taking a new product to market. And you don’t want to validate it after the product development (very expensive). You better ensure the market is ready now!
When gathering feedback from the market, you need to be receptive and willing to re-design the business model as required. This is what startups are all about. However it’s difficult, especially if you’re attached to the product and if you don’t have many years of experience in doing customer discovery and/or building startups.
We are experts in customer discovery, PMF, and taking new products to new markets and we can help you hands-on in doing customer discovery be it for a new market - new product or an existing product looking to expand to new markets. We help you find the early adopters and scope the MVP solution required to get the ball rolling.
The need for Product Leadership Benchmark comes usually when the CEO or business owner starts to think about the following questions:
These are questions where each CEO should know exactly where they stand in their organization. If not clear, then we can help you figure out where you stand with a simple benchmark project. Just give us a call and we’ll help you figure out what we can in the call and if you need some more hands-on help we can get your organization on the path to world-class with a simple benchmark project.
Product Management as a service is something you can use in case you have noticed a temporary gap in your product organization. Our senior-level Product Managers are at your service and can work flexibly on arrangements ranging from 4 days/month to 5 days/week. On top of ensuring your product management will run smoothly our senior talents will coach your own product organization to become better and stronger.
Our senior product managers have the following benefits:
If your project would need some extra hands in product management, do reach out. Often hiring an in-house product manager is the best solution and if this is the case we can help you hire a really good one.
Let's explore the options together. Sometimes we might have an ideal candidate ready in our network.
Determining the right pricing strategy for your product can be a tricky question. Everyone says you should go for Value based pricing, but value based pricing is difficult unless you have very clear understanding of your product's value for different customer personas.
Pricing is the glue between product and sales. It's usually the first touchpoint where potential customers will think about buying your product. So you obviously need to align it with your sales strategy and product development.
Often when thinking about pricing many CEOs and product leaders might realize that they actually need better product management, as they don't know their customers well enough to charge the optimum.
For improving your business profits you can focus on customer retention, acquiring new customers or pricing. Of these pricing is by far the most effective value lever for producing value. So getting your pricing right pays off. Big time. Let us know in case you want to talk over your pricing. We have some experience here and would gladly offer you advice.
How to sell your pricing model to the customers - Case Maptionnaire
