Coaching and online community platform AppThink will launch its first official cohort June 27.
The entity aims to train non-technical and first-time founders on validating startup ideas, especially in the Birmingham community.
"Our startup ecosystem is growing in vibrancy," said Kellie Clark, CEO of AppThink. "On-ramps that equip first-time founders are more necessary now than ever. Naturally, more people in our community are curious about starting software and tech-enabled businesses.
"AppThink exists to harness that curiosity by guiding aspiring founders through the fundamentals of making the right decisions early. This includes understanding how to validate an idea and bring it to market with confidence."
The platform was launched by Harmony Venture Labs, a venture studio led by a team of founders and experts who launch B2B SaaS startups, grow a portfolio of brands and support SaaS entrepreneurs.
AppThink delivers a cohort-based learning environment, live online work sessions and a self-paced curriculum. Over two weeks, aspiring founders learn the basics of how to identify their customers, test their business assumptions and explore available options for creating an MVP without the use of code.
The "Foundations" course consists of five live virtual sessions that provide tools and frameworks for founders to conduct user research, understand risks and develop a 30-day lean roadmap with recommended experiments.
The platform also hosts workshops. The most recent one was titled, "How to Come up With Good Ideas."
"The purpose of that one is to get all these like-minded folks in the room who want to eventually launch some sort of technology or tech-enabled company, but also get folks really working on ideas, because ideas don't come to you through osmosis or "aha" moments unless you're really lucky," said Kellie Clark, CEO of AppThink. "There's a method to it and you have to have a lot of ideas to come up with one good idea."
AppThink is privately funded by the Harmony Ventures fund and does not have any immediate plans to raise outside capital. Its next steps include transitioning to a membership model in 2023.
And Birmingham has been a welcoming community to the new business, Clark said.
"I think that it's very inexpensive to start a business here," Clark said. "I think that we are in a saturated market, and Birmingham, quite frankly, is an open frontier."
Shegun Otulana, founder and CEO of HVL, is looking forward to AppThink's potential contributions to the local tech ecosystem.
"I'm excited to see what’s in store for the aspiring founders who engage AppThink,” Otulana said. "AppThink's curriculum and approach adds value to early-stage founders individually, but it is also poised to contribute immense value to the energy and growth of our tech ecosystem.”
