Work with me

This accelerator is designed to get you off the ground fast and help you avoid the mistakes that kill most startups.

It’s based on the sessions I do for 500 Global, one of the worlds leading Venture Capital firms. Those are only available to the top 1% of startups.

This accelerator is open to everyone and is free.

There are 11 sessions over the 10-week course. These are an hour long and take you through the building blocks of a startup. At the end of each session, there is a short Q&A and you will get some homework.

Curriculum

1. Why startups fail (Bonus)
2. Ideas, Problems and Getting Outside
3. Personas and Pain
4. Value and Validation
5. Business models and strategy
6. Teams and I, Mindset and Me
7. MVP and Tech
8. GTM, Marketing & Sales
9. Storytelling (and more sales)
10. Investors and Pitching

You can sign up for additional mentoring and group work. The mentoring is with 1:1 with me and we deep dive into your startup. Weekly, fifty-minute sessions.

The group work is with your peers working through the homework, moderated by me.

If you tick the boxes in the form I’ll tell you more about them, with no obligation

Signup Here

With a short runway, speed is everything for most entrepreneurs. Go too slow and you run out of cash, or don’t hit the metrics needed to raise it. Go too fast and you hit the trainwreck of not knowing enough.

My workshops, either as stand-alone or delivered as part of an accelerator help startups master complex and critical subjects quickly. In these three hour sessions, you learn what you need to know.

Feedback

Denis lectures are great, Interesting and intellectual

Charming, intelligent and funny, with great life experience

Practical approach , willing to share his knowledge and focused in details

Startup Strategy

Building the big picture of where you want to go and a Stairway from Heaven^TM to create a strategic map for your startup.

Lean Startup

The principles of Lean Startup validated learning and applying it to your startup so that it’s more than wishful thinking and delivers results

Business Model Basics

Build a business model that accelerates your value proposition and makes it harder for your competition to stay in the market.

Business Model Advanced

Looking at the competitions’ business models and market forces to improve your business model’s impact. Also includes hypotheses, metric-driven models and scenarios.

Customer Discovery

How to validate your problem by getting out of the building and talking to real people. This workshop is an initial workshop with follow-up sessions. These help improve results and provide actionable feedback.

Jobs to Be Done

Using Clayton Christensen’s JTBD framework this is designed for startups wanting to create a killer product. The customer discovery workshop is a prerequisite or sufficient validated learning from your own customer discovery process.

Value Proposition

Designing a powerful value proposition that wraps around the product to solve all the customer’s pains and deliver more than they ever dreamed of. A value proposition canvas for a single segment/persona.

Market Sizing & Growth Model

A two-day interactive workshop that sizes the market opportunity (TAM/SAM/SOM) and creates an excel driven growth model that supports the GTM and provides financials for the pitch deck.

Go To Market

Deciding which channels you are going to use, how to quickly validate them and then scale them effectively.

Competition

Systematic analysis of your competitors. This works well taken with the customer discovery workshop and feeds into the fundraising and sales workshops

B2B Personas

A deep dive into the B2B personas of your target segment looking in-depth at who you will be selling to and how you organise a sales strategy around that.

B2B Sales for Startups

An introduction to B2B sales for startups learning sales methodologies, management and strategy to get the fastest return on investment from your expensive sales team.

Fundraising

An introduction to startup fundraising, how to do it, what you need, and what you shouldn’t be doing. Ideal for entrepreneurs raising pre-seed or seed rounds.

Pitch Deck Design

Totally focused on your deck and working out how to use it to tell a story that has a high investor impact. We can start with nothing or a deck that needs improvement.

Mindset

How to take care of your mind, body and soul so that you perform better than ever when times are tough

Delivery

Where you need to create an important document – you’ll get a good first draft done that can be polished and used. Where the workshops are problem-focused then you leave them with concrete actions.

Workshops can be delivered as learning-focused where 2/3 or more of the session is driven by me or action-focused where 2/3 or more is interactive. Workshops can be customised to meet your exact needs.

Accelerators can be put together quickly based on the below, or to your exact curriculum.

Workshops and accelerators can be in person anywhere in the world or virtual.

All of the below can also be done as 30 minute or 1-hour webinars on a paid/free basis

If what you need isn’t shown here reach out. The above topics are where I have existing workshop content. For most early-stage startup challenges I am able to put together additional workshops easily.

What would you do if you had a million pounds in your business bank account? Would you hire a better marketing team? A VP of Sales to turbocharge enterprise sales? Or get your clunky MVP replaced with something smooth that users love?

At the moment that cash is in an investor’s pocket and you need to figure out how to get it into yours. Startup fundraising is all about learning the approaches, processes and tips to be able to create a good pitch, get to the right people and present to them with clarity and effectiveness.

If you don’t know who to reach out to, have no well-heeled contacts or a deep network that you can ask for introductions fundraising can be tough. It doesn’t matter how good your deck is, if the people looking at it don’t care and don’t have the cash.

If the deck doesn’t excite someone when they see it why will they book a call with you? Where will the opportunity to pitch come from if you can’t tell a clear and powerful story that gets investors excited? It’s easy to put a deck together, and harder to tell a story that is compelling to investors. That leads to disappointment and heartache.

When you are presenting is your pitch smooth and exciting? Do you pause, stutter, stammer or look worse than Richard Nixon on TV? Does your delivery deeply undersell your startup and blow any chance you have of getting funded?

On the side, you’ve got to run the startup and get the traction that investors demand. If you don’t have the numbers…

No wonder entrepreneurs would rather keep working on the business than do the fundraising grind. But it has to be done to give you the runway and the ability to grow fast!

Startup Pitch Deck Review

Making your deck great is the first thing that we do. It’s easy to see how the deck works when you are immersed in the business. I look at your deck with crystal clear focus. Does it work? What are the problems? How does it need to change? What can we cut? What are the questions you haven’t covered?

In the review, I go through your deck with an axe. 30 – 60 minutes of detailed feedback on each slide and how the deck works. That’s a screencast, so you can watch, pause, make changes, or give it to your designer.
Just with this feedback, and doing something about it, your deck will be better than 80-90% of all the other startup decks out there.

Why does it work? I have reviewed thousands of decks for big VCs, helped hundreds of startups make their decks better, and given feedback to startups on their pitches at dozens of demo days. Your choice is to learn by experience or learn from my experience

Investor Outreach

It’s hard when you need to raise money and you have no idea who to talk to. Perhaps you’ve already asked, even raised money from friends and family, but you need to spread the net wider.

How do you do it?

I’ve been in that position in the past and it sucks. You can get hot leads at networking events, that are tepid by midnight and icy by dawn. You can grind through LinkedIn and VC websites, writing beautiful, relevant and customised introductions, and sit watching your empty inbox to become more exciting than the Maidan in Kyiv. (It doesn’t)

Or you can grab me for a call and we help you reach out to our database of angel investors and venture capitalists. There are more than three thousand of them, across the world. With our outreach, you can be talking to Sequoia in a couple of days or have term sheets worth more than £300k in just over a week.

That’s not to say that the network is everything, your choice of problem and solution and the mistakes you’ve made along the way matter more, but it certainly helps. Do you want to get the round closed, and do it quickly?

Pitch Presentation

Are your palms sweaty and your bladder full as you wait for the call to start? Do you launch with meaningless platitudes boring the investors within sixty seconds? Do you go on wonderful, irrelevant tangents or lose the plot and struggle with what to say next? Do you punctuate your sentences with umms and ahhs for dramatic effect?

If you do it’s certain that the pitch sessions aren’t having the impact that you want. Ghosted after the first date.

In the pitch presentation package, you send me a video of you delivering your deck, after we’ve polished it. Then I give you direct feedback to help you be more compelling, convincing and converting.

As a Toastmaster and public speaker, there are clear rules on how to make a presentation effective. You will learn what you are doing and what you need to change. There are different rules for making a startup presentation powerful.

You’ll have these explained by screencast and be able to use them to hone and refine your pitch.

Startup silver tongue ain’t got nothin’ on ya!

I do fundraising services with Professor Andy Pardoe at Wisdom Works Ventures

Fundraising Quiz

Are you stuck? Are you frustrated that things aren’t moving faster? Are there too many decisions to make? Are there too many ideas to consider?

Do you feel alone? Do you make plans and not stick to them? Do you miss someone asking you the hard questions? Is there no one to bounce ideas off?

Do you know what you don’t know? Do you know what you need to panic about not doing? Do you know what you can safely put off till later?

That’s a lot of questions. If you are like many of my mentees you’ll be nodding as you run through them.

Typically you are super smart, hard-working and with a lot of experience in business. If you have a co-founder they are likely to be good at tech, but not a great foil for the business decisions you have to make.

The important thing is you want your startup to work. You don’t want to put years of effort, and your savings in, and not get anywhere. Even worse you don’t want to give up. It’s even harder when a spouse is putting a brave face on as they support you; harder still when they aren’t.

Every single point above I’ve faced, failed, survived and solved.

What does a startup mentor do?

Startup mentoring does a bunch of things.

• support
• knowledge
• contacts

Being an entrepreneur, running a startup is insanely tough. There’s always more that you can do. There is always a reason to work harder longer hours. Part of my role as a mentor is to help you judge when to suck it up and push harder, and when you really need to take a break and recover.

In most businesses, it’s clear what you need to do to succeed. Increasing sales and margins have many clear well-documented paths in most industries. As a startup for a long while, you may not know who your customers are, what they want or what you are going to sell them. There are lots of tools that help you do this faster

Finally, a startup mentor typically knows a lot of people. Potential customers, suppliers, employees, investors and more. These contacts and relationships are often the difference between banging your head against a brick wall, and smoothly closing your first deal.

How does startup mentoring work?

Startup mentoring is normally weekly or fortnightly. It’s a regular face to face meeting or zoom call. At the start of each session, you talk through what’s been happening, report any metrics and talk about how things that were covered in the last mentoring session are progressing.

Sessions work best when you bring a set of questions or challenges. Sometimes they can be solved in a few minutes. other times we come back to them month after month. In either case, you describe what the problem is. The mentor then asks probing questions to try and understand the problem and perhaps the underlying challenge that the mentee isn’t aware of.

Most problems aren’t easily solvable. The startup mentor will often introduce new ways of thinking, different models, and examples from their experience. Where appropriate he/she will then give specific advice on what to do next.

The real skill of a startup mentor is quickly understanding the information you provide and then seeing the core of the problem; then forcing you, in the nicest possible way, to take action to solve the key problem not the fluff around the edge.

How do you choose a startup mentor?

Here are a few points to consider when choosing a startup mentor

• experience
• expertise
• trust
• challenge
• domain expertise
• language
• stage

A startup mentor needs to have run startups. If they haven’t been the CEO or Founder then they haven’t been through what you are going through. That empathy based on experience is important. having done the job they will have also faced many of the same problems, and know what the solutions are and where to find them.

There is a reasonably well-established set of startup tools around what we call Lean Startup. If the mentor doesn’t know these, hasn’t taught them, and can’t guide you in their use then they will underdeliver. The ideal startup mentor will mentor and deliver accelerators for one of big VCs – Y-Combinator, Techstars and 500 is good experience to look for.

Trust is critical. You and the mentor are going to be working on everything that is going to be at the core of your billion-dollar company. Sometimes you are going to cry on their shoulder. She needs to know a lot to help you, and if you don’t trust her, then you can’t give her enough info to do her job.

Challenge is important. Your mentor is there to challenge you. The harder you work to justify what you want to do in mentoring sessions the better the quality of everything that you do. If a mentor isn’t asking you hard questions they aren’t giving you enough value.

Domain expertise. Your startup mentor doesn’t need to know much about your industry. You may have a business mentor to give you industry-specific knowledge. Your startup mentor provides knowledge and advice on how to start and grow a technology business. These kinds of businesses have similar problems across industries. The possible exceptions are medical devices due to the market and regulatory structure. Most startup mentors will have worked with dozens of startups in your industry

Language. Working with someone in your native language is best. If you aren’t fluent in your mentor’s language then you need 30-50% more mentoring sessions to get the same results.

Stage – startup mentors tend to specialise at different stages based on their experience. There is a huge difference between the problems faced pre-seed and Series B, between pre-product market fit and ate stage growth

Humility – There is always more that startup mentors don’t know

What does successful startup mentoring give you?

I wondered about this for years. As an engineer, I like numbers and metrics, as you’ll discover. Mentoring sometimes seemed like a nice chat with no measurable outcomes.

What I see in my mentees is this

They move faster. Even when we don’t solve problems together, we do exclude bad solutions quickly. That increases the speed at which you do everything.

They are more confident. Because decisions have been made thoughtfully and risks have been managed they don’t worry or try and second guess.

They execute better. With less anxiety and stress performance improves. There are fewer unforced errors, and far more is right first time.

They make better decisions. Talking them through, cutting to the core and identifying the best approach pays dividends

They know more. They have more tools, insights and methods to use. This makes almost every challenge easier to overcome

Every single one of these points improves the metrics that matter to the business. So I don’t worry any longer if I can point to the change I’ve created. My mentees do.

One final point – there is an insane correlation between the number of sessions and the impact. Mentees who skip sessions frequently fail at 3-4 times the rate of those who turn up to every session.

Mentoring with Denis

I’ve had over 1,000 hours of mentoring rated by entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and client managers. Every single one has given me a perfect score so far. I don’t expect that to last. Someday someone won’t like me.

Why do my entrepreneurs score me so highly?

I don’t come into sessions knowing the right answers. I let you take the lead with what concerns you, and then we work together to find solutions to work for you and your startup.

A lot of entrepreneurs say that they like the way I make them connect the dots in different ways, my energy and enthusiasm.

Others talk about how I motivate and inspire them.

You may feel like this, or I may leave you cold.

The only way to know though is to have an introductory call to see whether there is a fit

Pricing

Starter

Mentoring every fortnight for solopreneurs when resources are tight

£

599

/mo

• 2 sessions / month
• 50 minutes
• Problem-focused
• Action Steps
• Email Support

Balanced

Weekly mentoring to create rapid change

£

999

/mo

• _{Starter plus:}
• 4 sessions / month

Premium

Weekly mentoring with on-demand additional support

£

1,499

/mo

• _{Balanced plus:}
• 4 on-demand support calls
• Free workshop every 3 months
• Key startup books package
• WhatsApp support

Which plan should you choose?

If you do a lot of delivery choose the cheapest. Meeting more than twice a month will give you too much to do and think about on top of everything else.

If this is your first startup/business go for 4/month for 1-2 months and then drop back down to 2/month once you get momentum.

If there is a lot going on, and you need feedback and advice quickly choose the premium package. The support calls are only 15 minutes, but I will normally be on the phone to you within a few hours (scheduled calls permitting)

If you aren’t sure which is right for you, don’t choose until you’ve had a chat with me.

I do discount these rates for some entrepreneurs – typically in developing countries or where you are running a B-corp/ Non-Profit / Impact / Charity. It’s a gift from me.