Please note, this event is a series, participants will attend on these two days: March 7 & March 28, 4 to 6 pm.

The Yale Ventures Customer Discovery Intensive is designed to be an introduction to Customer Discovery for early-stage Yale founders. Participants will understand the iterative process of customer discovery, their potential customers’ needs and pain points and how to test hypotheses with qualitative customer research.  The goal of this session is to help early-stage founders ensure their idea is connected to real-world demand.  

The Customer Discovery Intensive will be led by Alex Mack PhD, a Yale Ventures EIR with experience developing customer-centered design, market research, and business planning for projects across verticals, including health care, retail, software, and financial services.   

Participants will learn to:

• Identify and understand your customer: understand your customers and their experience to ensure your product or service can address real and pressing needs.
• Refine your value proposition: articulate and refine your value proposition by understanding the benefits to your potential customers.
• Test hypotheses with qualitative research: understand where there is value, how that value needs to be delivered in order to be realized, and how you may need to pivot to create a product-market fit.

Who should attend:

• Faculty and students who are building a venture and need to understand the customer and their target market.  
• Yale faculty working to commercialize their discoveries and interested in participating in a Yale Ventures accelerator.
• Students who are interested in learning more about customer discovery from an academic commercialization perspective.