For even the most confident founders, successfully launching a startup begins with truly understanding and validating that there’s a market for your idea. From there, engaging with actual potential customers to evolve your hypotheses—and maybe even redesign your approach from the ground up—is often the next step.
On this episode, we feature two founders who understand deeply what goes into validating startup-worthy ideas in the first place.
Understanding why startups fail
First up is Lloyd Bureau, who is a Venture Associate and Validation Program Lead at District 3 Innovation. There, Lloyd helps nurture and develop multidisciplinary teams that harness emerging technologies to create businesses with a global impact.
As of today, Lloyd has run 4 cohorts of the D3’s Validation program, an early-stage startup program designed to help founders validate their business models through hands-on market research. He has also worked with a portfolio of 35 growth-stage High Tech startups and their coaches to prioritize activities through OKRs, all while providing coaching on sales processes, value-selling, customer success, and improving pitch decks.
Lloyd is also a founder in his own right, joining D3’s program in 2016 to build TRYNYTY, a Montreal-based freestyle scooter brand leveraging 3D-printing for product development, with a mission to support the growth of the freestyle scooter community.
Needless to say, Lloyd knows the startup and innovation community better than most, and his insights into what it takes to succeed and achieve growth are invaluable.
Joining Lloyd is Mina Mekhail, the award-winning CEO and Founder of Freshr Technologies. Mina participated in D3’s Validation and Launch & Grow programs at Concordia University’s District 3 Innovation Center when he was starting his company back in 2018.
Meet with users to cultivate the perfect solution
Based out of Nova Scotia, Freshr Technologies is a biomaterials innovation startup that’s focused on developing sustainable active packaging to prolong the shelf life of fresh proteins, with a focus on fresh fish. Mina and his team at Freshr are developing solutions that increase the return on investment for the entire value chain, while reducing food waste and reliance on traditional plastics.
In this episode, we pick Lloyd and Mina’s brains on past projects, exciting initiatives they’re both currently involved in, and what’s on each of their roadmap for the next year-plus.
Watch the full episode of Lloyd and mina’s conversation on Boast’s Youtube Channel here.
To learn more about how startups can better navigate their journey through the startup lifecycle—from hitting key milestones to understanding the available sources of funding at each step—download our latest guide.
To learn more about partnering with Boast and others in our startup ecosystem, talk to an expert today.
