What is Kiuas Bootcamp?

We invite all promising accelerator applicant teams for a week of idea validation and customer discovery. During the week we offer you offline & online support and peer-to-peer learning to make sure you have a solid business case in your hands. The Bootcamp week will be kicked off on Monday 31.7. with a live day at Startup Sauna in Otaniemi, Espoo, Finland. During the week you will work remotely supported by our online activities. We will end the week on Friday 4.8. with an afternoon closing session and an afterwork event live at Startup Sauna.

At the end of the week, one team will get direct acceptance, a golden ticket, to Kiuas Accelerator Fall 2023 Program. The other 19 accelerator teams will be selected during the following week and announced in our Kiuas Community BBQ event on Thursday 17.8.

‍We will invite you to Kiuas Bootcamp if you meet the following criteria:

• You submit a complete application
• You are working on a company that eventually seeks rapid growth and global markets
• You are a full-time entrepreneur or you are seeking to become one given the chance

Why are we hosting a Kiuas Bootcamp?

After hosting over 30 programs and helping over 600 early-stage founders we’ve come to the conclusion that the biggest indicator of future success is in the founding teams’ ability to learn fast, execute well, and truly understand their customers. In the past, we’ve assessed teams based on a written application and a quick interview, but for a long time, we felt that it was not enough to find the right teams.

At this early stage, the idea a team is working on might change quite drastically. The initial idea usually goes through multiple iterations, including re-defining the product, market & customer segment, before reaching true product-market fit. This is why we want to focus less on the initial idea & market and more on the founders, who are capable of delivering something that customers really want and need. In the early stage, most of your time should be spent on talking to your customers, which is exactly what we ask the teams to do during the bootcamp.

During the one week bootcamp, we want find those 20 teams who are the most capable of understanding the market & their target customers, and based on those insights able to iterate their ideas into validated business cases.‍

What all is included in the Kiuas Bootcamp?

• On Monday 31.7. we kick off the week with a live day at Startup Sauna. During the day we host 2 workshops and provide mentorship to help you build your goals and plan for the week.

• By Monday evening each team submits their goals for the week. Depending on your stage the goal could be one of the following:

  • Conduct 25 customer discovery interviews
  • Close 5 new customers
  • Run a pre-launch campaign and grow your waitlist

  We don’t want you to spend your time on things that don’t move the needle for your company, so the goals should reflect your stage and current workload.

• You work on your goals independently and remotely for the rest of the week. Each evening you submit a very quick recap of how you are progressing on your goals. We assess your ability to set and reach goals as well as your ability to learn from your customers to properly validate your problem-solution fit.
• During the week we offer support via online office hours and Slack groups that you can use flexibly whenever you need help. We bring seasoned entrepreneurs online to share the story of their early days of validating before they built multimillion-dollar startups.
• On Friday 4.8. we close the week with a final submission where you share your progress and what you learned during the week. In the afternoon we will host a live end of the bootcamp session followed by an afterwork party at Startup Sauna.
• We continue to assess the rest of the teams based on their bootcamp performance as well as their written application and finally on Thursday 17.8. we are hosting a big Kiuas Community Summer BBQ event where we announce the rest of the teams that have been selected for the Kiuas Fall 2023 Accelerator Program.

What do I benefit from the bootcamp?

• You get a chance to be directly selected for the Kiuas Accelerator. We select one team already at the end of the week, fully based on their bootcamp performance.
• Participating Kiuas Bootcamp is an integral part of the accelerator application process. The team selection to Kiuas Fall 2023 Accelerator Program will be made largely based on the performance during the bootcamp week.
• You get to focus on the things that really matter to your company. You get the best resources available to focus on customer discovery for a week. In every program we see teams who clearly went into building mode too quickly. We then make them take a few steps back and ask them to talk to their customers more than they ever had before and they are always very happy that they did. In the early stage, most of your time should be spent talking to your customers, which is exactly what we ask you to do. Even if you are not selected for the accelerator you will gain valuable knowledge and skills to take your idea forward.
• Invaluable peer-to-peer founder network. We connect all participants via Slack group that becomes your founder-to-founder support group for the week. At Kiuas our motto is to never build alone, so we encourage founders actively and openly talk about their problems with other founders to speed up their learning.

Any questions? Read the FAQ or contact us.