Masterclasses
You’ll walk away from the online masterclasses with key skills and knowledge you can put into practice immediately.
One-Day and Half-Day Masterclasses
Customer Discovery
Learn the systematic approach to customer interviews that reveals whether your idea has real market demand, before you waste months building the wrong thing.
In the morning, you’ll master the frameworks that prevent the most common failure: founders asking leading questions and hearing what they want to hear. Learn Design Thinking for empathy, Jobs To Be Done for motivation, and Lean Startup for rigorous hypothesis testing. Practice interview techniques through live demonstration and peer exercises. Map your network to identify warm paths to target customers using social capital theory.
In the afternoon, you’ll role-play customer interviews in rotating pairs with structured feedback. Analyse sample transcripts using AI tools to extract problem severity and adoption barriers. Leave with your first 5 interviews scheduled.
Early-stage founders who need evidence before building, corporate innovators validating new ventures, and anyone who's heard "interesting idea" but struggles to convert interest into commitments.
Dates: 9:30am to 4:30pm UK (GMT) | 26 March 2026 | 23 July 2026 | 27 Oct 2026
Limited to 12 spaces per course.
Ready to test solutions? Continue with Prototyping & Testing for Validation.
Prototyping + Testing for Validation
Do you get the response "sounds interesting" when you talk about your product or business? Learn to design experiments that reveal whether customers will actually pay, using prototypes you can build in hours, not months.
In the morning, we’ll cover how to test your demand, not design. Master the fidelity spectrum from paper sketches to functional prototypes, and learn which to use when. Apply Design Sprint essentials to compress weeks of work into focused sprints. Map your riskiest assumption and design the minimum test that would prove you wrong. Watch a landing page prototype built live in 20 minutes.
In the afternoon, you’ll create your validation prototype using rapid tools: landing pages, clickable mockups, video demos, or paper prototypes. Test with peers using structured concept validation scripts. Practice distinguishing genuine demand signals from polite interest. Design your 7-day launch plan with clear success criteria and failure triggers.
This is for founders who've completed discovery interviews and need to test if interest converts to action. Anyone moving from "they said they'd use it" to "will they actually pay for it?"
Prerequisites: Customer discovery interviews completed. Defined target customer and problem hypothesis. Laptop with design tool access (free Figma/Canva works).
Works standalone or as a natural follow-on from Customer Discovery for Founders.
Dates: 13 July 2026 | 28 Oct 2026
Limited to 12 spaces per course - 9:30am to 4:30pm UK (GMT)
AI-Powered Validation: From Desk Research to Prototyping
Learn to use AI tools that compress weeks of validation work into days, across three parts:
Part 1: Market Intelligence: Learn how to use AI for competitor analysis, market sizing, and trend identification. Learn prompt engineering for extracting insights and how to check AI-generated claims. Set up a simple agent/NotebookLM as your validation knowledge base.
Part 2: Interview Analysis: Develop your stack, e.g. transcription and pattern extraction. Use prompts to analyse interview transcripts for problem severity, willingness to pay, objections, and cross-interview patterns.
Part 3: Prototype in Minutes: Generate validation assets using AI: landing pages, mockup images and value proposition copy. Watch a landing page built from brief to deployment live.
This is for founders doing validation solo or on tight budgets. Anyone who needs to move fast without sacrificing evidence quality, and teams that want to speed up their validation process.
Dates: 18 March 2026 | 27 July 2026 | 14 December 2026
Limited to 12 participants per session at 9.30am to 12.30pm UK (GMT)
Designing Product Testing in Real-Life Environments
Learn why 80% of pilots never convert to paying customers, and how to design yours differently so it proves value, proves adoption, and could be more likely to lead to a paid contract. This session is in three parts and covers beta testing, pilots and industrial research:
Part 1: Pilot Strategy: Understand the three pilot objectives: prove value, prove adoption, prove scalability. Learn to choose pilot customers strategically. Master pilot scoping: time-bound, feature-bound, user-bound. Decide paid vs discounted vs free based on your validation stage. Define success criteria before you start.
Part 2: Measurement and Learning: Set up key metrics and measures through surveys, interviews and in-product tools: adoption (activation, active users, feature usage), value (outcomes delivered, time saved, ROI), satisfaction (NPS, feedback, support tickets), and leading conversion indicators (expansion usage, executive engagement). Design feedback loops that generate learning without overwhelming your team. Learn pilot data scenarios to know when to iterate, extend, convert, or kill.
Part 3: Conversion Strategy: Learn what influences the pilot-to-paid conversation: timing, pricing, and ROI. Build business cases with ROI calculations and usage evidence. Avoid "just one more month" by setting hard conversion deadlines upfront. Design your pilot program with peer feedback on customer selection, scope, and conversion path.
This is for founders with a working early product ready to deploy. Product teams avoiding the free pilot trap.
Prerequisites: MVP or beta product ready. Customer discovery completed. At least 5 qualified prospects identified.
Dates: 27 July 2026 | 10 December 2026
Limited to 12 participants per session, 9.30am to 1.00pm UK (GMT)
Two-Day Masterclasses
Go-to-Market + Distribution Channel Validation
Most seed-stage founders with product-market fit don't know how customers will actually find them at scale. You've proven people want your product, but you're unclear which channels will work, where your users spend time, or how to structure experiments that generate reliable acquisition data instead of vanity metrics.
This two-day course teaches you to build GTM strategies grounded in user behaviour, not assumptions. You'll learn frameworks for channel selection, how to test distribution hypotheses systematically, and how to design experiments that measure genuine acquisition potential before you commit to scaling budgets.
Day one covers GTM fundamentals and strategy. You'll understand how customers actually discover solutions, map where your target users spend time, identify which channels match their behaviour, and learn frameworks like AARRR for building comprehensive acquisition and retention strategies. The focus is on strategic thinking, understanding what GTM actually means and how to formulate approaches that work for your specific user base.
Day two is practical application. You'll build evidence-based personas from real data sources (e.g. CRM, past user feedback), conduct desk research to validate channel hypotheses, map testable distribution channels, design retention and return mechanisms, and devise metrics for running controlled experiments. You'll leave having set up tests you can execute immediately post-course.
By the end, you'll have persona templates that you can later ground in real user data, channel mapping frameworks showing where to test first, experiment design protocols with clear success metrics, and execution plans for validating your highest-potential channels systematically.
This course is for Seed-stage founders with product-market fit who need to prove which acquisition channels will scale. Particularly valuable if you're growing through unsustainable methods, building marketing budgets on untested assumptions, or unclear about how users will discover you beyond your current cohort.
Dates: 7–8 April 2026 | 29–30 July 2026 | 9-10 December 2026
Limited to 12 participants per course, two full days, 9.30am to 4.30pm UK (GMT)
Writing Successful Grant Applications
Over 70% of Innovate UK grant applications get rejected, not because your tech isn’t innovative, but because the commercial section is weak. No market evidence, too much reliance on “tech push”, and lack of competition analysis. Make your application stand out.
This two-day course draws on Dr Chloe Sharp’s extensive experience in grant writing, having won over £10M in funding. It teaches you to build market evidence through customer discovery, translate technical innovation into assessor-friendly language, and write applications that score highly on the commercialisation criteria that boost your funding success. You'll learn what assessors look for and what they reject and, critically, how to handle resubmissions.
Day one covers building evidence from discovery. You'll understand Innovate UK assessment criteria and learn to define problems and market opportunities in terms that assessors trust. You'll learn to build your commercials with credible routes to market, customer validation evidence, and pricing models and unit economics grounded in real willingness-to-pay.
Day two focuses on application writing. You'll draft key sections with peer review, learning to make technical content accessible. You'll complete financial sections, milestone-based, and resource allocation. We end with submission checklists, AI use best practices, common errors, what happens post-submission, and how to reapply successfully if rejected
By the end, you'll have an annotated Innovate UK application template including a customer interview guide designed, financial model templates covering unit economics and market sizing, commercialisation section examples from funded applications, and market sizing frameworks.
An optional 60-minute application review call is available for £150 (contact us for details).
This course is for founders applying for Innovate UK grants. Particularly valuable if you're deep tech or technical founders who can explain your tech but need to strengthen your commercials, or if you've been rejected previously for weak market validation.
Dates: 23–24 March 2026 | 20–21 July 2026 | 7–8 December 2026
Limited to 12 participants per course, two full days, 9.30am to 4.30pm UK (GMT)