Note: for the first time we are holding this event virtually. This is the most popular of all our quarterly workshops. See our blog article about why every founder should take this workshop before prototyping.
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​"Customer Discovery"

​Join us for an interactive workshop designed to equip early-stage entrepreneurs with essential skills in customer discovery. Understanding your customers is so crucial for success that Venture Mechanics won't even accept a startup into the incubator unless a substantial amount of customer discovery has already been documented. This workshop will guide you through practical strategies and tools to identify, understand, and validate your target market effectively.

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‍Key Takeaways:

• ​Gain confidence in identifying and understanding your target market.
• ​Learn practical techniques for conducting meaningful customer interviews.
• ​Acquire tools to iterate and improve your product based on customer feedback.
• ​Network with fellow entrepreneurs and share insights.
  

​Who Should Attend:

• ​Early-stage founders looking to validate their business ideas.
• ​Entrepreneurs seeking to refine their product-market fit.
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About Angie Parker:

Angie Parker is an experienced leader blending Air Force aviation background with startup operations and venture expertise. As the former Executive Director of the Alliance of Angels she drove strategic growth for the Pacific Northwest's largest angel group, investing $4-6 million annually in early-stage tech, hardware, and life sciences startups. Previously, she handled community, operations, and marketing at Context Ventures and served as Chief of Staff for veteran-founded startups. Her decade-plus in BizOps and brand strategy makes her ideal for guiding founders through customer discovery workshops.

About Catherine Bhattachar:

Catherine Bhattachar is an entrepreneurial operator, marketer, and startup advisor with experience spanning early-stage ventures, high-growth technology companies, and global consumer brands. She recently served as Director of Marketing and Operations at Decathlon, and previously co-founded Tiny Earth Toys, where she helped lead product strategy, operations, and customer growth. Her background also includes strategy consulting at L.E.K., product and business analytics at Wayfair, and operational leadership at Invisible Technologies. A Duke Fuqua MBA alumna, Catherine brings a practical, evidence-driven approach to customer discovery, helping founders uncover genuine customer needs, challenge their assumptions, and turn what they learn into stronger products and go-to-market strategies.

Founders are often their own bottleneck. Looping thoughts, relational friction, and lack of clarity drain energy and capital — often without you realizing it.

In this 90-minute workshop, you'll quantify what your stalls are actually costing you, see what's really blocking you, and build a plan to move past it.

Key Takeaways:
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• Where you're stalled — and what it's costing you, in dollars and cents
• Your role in the stall, and what you can shift
• A time-bound action plan to turn new self-awareness into next steps
• Seeing the cost of stalling in black and white is often the motivation founders need to grow beyond these unconscious patterns — before they compound into avoidance and missed opportunities.

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Who Should Attend:
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• First-time founders navigating unfamiliar terrain — especially those with scientific or engineering backgrounds — who find themselves stalled because they're not sure they can trust their own judgment
• Founders looking to build faster clarity and better relational response time under pressure

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About Ryan Glassmoyer:
Ryan Glassmoyer is the founder of SPACE, a coaching methodology that turns founder stress into usable data. She fills the gaps that technical and commercialization training leave, working from the premise that founder capacity determines company trajectory. As a certified somatic leadership development practitioner (trained at the Strozzi Institute for Somatics) and with additional training in neuroscience for business and conflict mediation, Ryan helps founders understand their nervous system's response to new and uncertain experiences — building faster clarity and response time, and equipping them to make the small, quick shifts that deepen their most critical relationships.

Your LinkedIn profile is one of the highest-leverage assets you're probably underinvesting in. At the earliest stages of a startup, your personal brand isn't separate from your company's brand -- it is your company's brand. Before you have a marketing department, a PR agency, or a recognizable logo, people are deciding whether to trust your startup based on whether they trust you.

That attention has real economic value. LinkedIn advertising typically costs $30-$50+ per thousand impressions (CPM). Reaching one million people with paid ads can easily cost $50,000-$100,000 if you're targeting executives or investors. Founders who consistently produce thoughtful content can generate that same level of reach organically while simultaneously building credibility that advertising simply can't buy. Paid impressions disappear when the budget runs out. Your reputation compounds.

This workshop is a hands-on session for founders who want to turn LinkedIn into a genuine distribution channel for customers, investors, future employees, strategic partners, and the media. You'll learn how to develop a point of view that reflects your founder-market fit, build a content system you can sustain without sacrificing your weekends, and use AI to transform ideas into polished posts that still sound unmistakably like you.
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You'll leave with a working system rather than a notebook full of ideas: a content strategy built around your company's strengths, AI workflows that dramatically reduce the time required to create high-quality posts, and a practical plan for attracting the specific audience that matters to your business.
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What we'll cover:
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--> Why founder brand and startup brand are the same asset at the early stage, and how to build both with one system
--> Defining your content pillars: the 3-4 themes that make you the obvious voice in your category
--> Using AI tools to draft, refine, and personalize posts fast, without sounding generic or robotic
--> Growing the right audience, not just a big one: targeting the investors, customers, and partners who actually move your business forward
--> A repeatable weekly system so this becomes a habit, not a one-time push
--> Live workshopping: bring a draft post and leave with a sharper one

Who should attend:

Early-stage founders, startup executives, and small teams who want LinkedIn to generate real business results—whether that's customers, capital, recruiting, partnerships, or industry visibility—and who are willing to invest a small amount of consistent effort each week to build an audience that becomes a long-term competitive advantage.
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For those curious about how LinkedIn can be used to help find investors please read the Field Manual for Raising Funding in Public before the workshop date.