Startup Rocket was birthed out of the frustration of re-inventing the wheel every time we, the partners and advisors behind Prota Ventures, started validating a new idea, building a team, launching a product, and accelerating a business to a place where it made sense to raise outside capital.
On the other side of the table, it also came out of countless conversations with early-stage founders seeking to land their first significant round of funding.
Not surprisingly, there are a common set of mistakes that most founders make that are avoidable with the right coaching.
At the end of the day, all startup operations — especially those in the pre-launch days — are a chaotic mess. Our team has been involved in dozens of startups (i.e. business ventures seeking to grow big and fast to the point that it, if successful, will attract investors).
We can say for sure that the process of going all the way from the original idea to successfully bootstrapping and/or pitching investors is hard, inefficient, and accomplished only by the most ambitious (and lucky) founders.
While there are plenty of resources to be found on the Internet diving into what it takes to pull this off in principle, we have yet to find a comprehensive online guide that is practically helpful when it comes to idea-to-funding execution. There are traditional business plans (or lean canvas/business-model canvas guides) to help with the ideation stages, but guidance through the nuances of actually building your business is hard to find.
What is needed for many new founders is a framework to think about how to proceed researching, validating, building, and growing their business, including the critical first step of finding a co-founder (i.e. don’t pay an agency your life savings to build you a prototype!).
Thus, Startup Rocket provides customizable operations frameworks, a collaborative web app, business mentoring, and a comprehensive set of resources to help founders efficiently get their idea off the ground.