Nine hours, one Saturday, three gates.
Gate one is the market. Prove the problem exists and that it costs somebody something. Gate two is the product. Prove your solution answers it. Gate three is commercial. Prove someone will pay.
Most ideas die at gate three. Getting there in a day is the whole exercise.
There is a short briefing on the Friday evening, so nobody spends Saturday morning deciding what their idea is.
Building software used to be the bottleneck. It is not any more, which means the scarce thing has moved. What matters now is knowing which problem is worth solving, and that has always sat with the people inside an industry rather than the people building the tools.
So we took the part of starting a company that usually takes three months and compressed it into a day. A Sprint Day is the fastest test we know of whether somebody has a business or an interesting observation.
Ten years or more inside one industry, pre-revenue, B2B or B2B2C.
We are particularly interested in recruitment, legal, accounting, financial services, HR, marketing, IT services, e-commerce, dentistry, and funeral care. Also haulage, logistics, shipping, and the quieter corners of manufacturing, where knowing how it actually works is worth the most.
Two founders from the SPARK cohort at King's College Cambridge are joining us, after we spent five weeks on that programme in September.
£20k of Tramlines incubation support. Three months working with our senior team, and a fast track to our January investment committee to pitch for £250k.
Four runner-up teams get breakfast with Albert Azis-Clauson, our chief executive.
For more info click here
Applications, I am afraid, are now closed but we will be organising more MVB events in the future so watch this space.