Startup Studio 2.0. Founders Club by Rocket DAO

We are pleased to announce our modified progressive format: Founders Club 2.0, which is a new wave startup studio within the Rocket DAO ecosystem! 

A little over a year has passed since we launched Founders Club as a platform for developing startups and raising investments. During this time, the club has undergone many external (updating the team, relocating to Kiev) and internal (changing the model of work and positioning) changes. But one thing has remained unchanged. Everything we do is still orientated exclusively to the needs of present and future startup founders.

Today we are pleased to announce our modified progressive format: Founders Club 2.0, which is a new wave startup studio within the Rocket DAO ecosystem.

Having started as a community of founders, the Founders Club team decided to take a more systematic approach to growing startups and transform into a full-fledged "factory", basically a start-up studio responsible for the whole process from coming up with an idea to scaling and selling a startup.

Of course, we followed the general rules of building start-up studios, but there are also features that distinguish Founders Club from others. These are our three pillars, three main elements that our startup studio is based on:

1. Discussion groups, community and Telegram bot.

2. Mentors.

3. Rocket DAO MVP Fund.

In short, the work of a startup studio is structured as follows:

Everything starts with a raw idea or hypothesis that comes from the Rocket DAO team or Founders Club members. 

Then the Founders Club team and mentors turn it into a high-quality idea. After that, this idea is given to a group that starts working on it. The members of this group will then build a startup based on this idea or become its founders. 

After careful research and several weeks of discussion, the group has a pitch deck. They go through a cycle of meetings with mentors, revisions, improvement of the pitch deck and voila, they have already received the investment for their MVP!

Isn’t it great? Let us show you each stage in more detail.

We form groups of 2 to 10 people within the Founders Club, each of which is supervised by a finder. Finders are future founders of a startup who find an idea and turn this idea into their own startup during a series of meetings.

Finders choose a specific topic for a future project and start a cycle of discussion meetings with a group with the purpose of creating an idea for the project. As soon as this idea is approved by the Founder Club mentors, the group moves on to the research stage. It delves deeper into the topic, studies the market and its current players, refining and developing the idea.

The next stage is a meeting with mentors to present the first version of the pitch deck. After detailed feedback, suggested changes and comments, the group gets to revise their work. The number of meetings before the final pitch deck is not limited. Our goal is to end up with a high-quality startup with strong hypotheses and an expert team, so we devote time and energy to working through each stage.

The final pitch deck gets to the final vote by the Founders Club mentors. This is when a key decision is made as the project will either receive an investment from the Rocket DAO fund to create an MVP, or need to improve their pitch deck.

Our onboarding form and Telegram community is an important part of Founders Club's work. We use the community to publish the results of each meeting and share insights and problems that groups face on the way to success.

The Founders Club Telegram channel is a closed community of experts and people from the startup industry who constantly discuss, brainstorm and create powerful products with our help. The channel will be useful both for project founders who want to broaden their horizons and receive important insights, and for those who are just starting their journey into the world of venture. To join and keep abreast of all events, register in Founders Club. 

Our community is actively growing and developing. The primary task of the onboading form is to select and register people to the community. We are not trying to recruit as many people as possible. It’s quality that matters, not quantity, so we only welcome really interested people in the community. If you want to share competencies with others, be the first to get insights and look for experts and co-founders, you've come to the right place.

Another important element of the work of our startup studio is mentors. A group of five mentors has already been formed, who brainstorm raw ideas weekly and then process and improve them. These ideas are then passed on to the finders and their teams for further research and pitch decks.

There are also weekly calls between mentors and finders, where mentors help groups move in the right direction as quickly as possible (raw idea ⇒ valid idea ⇒ research ⇒ pitch deck ⇒ investing in MVP).

The result of the discussion group's work is a detailed pitch-deck, which gets to the final vote of the Founders Club mentors. And then a key decision is made with a mentoring vote on whether the project will receive investments from the Rocket DAO fund to create its MVP. If the decision is positive, then the Rocket DAO MVP fund comes into play.

Rocket DAO has created its fund to quickly invest in teams that need money to develop an MVP. Each discussion group led by a finder can receive up to $100,000 to create an MVP for its project in case they successfully complete all stages.

Stay tuned for our next article to learn more about the fund. 

Of course, Startup Jedi is an integral part of all the mega-processes taking place in a startup studio.

The editorial board already receives the most interesting insights from closed discussion groups, we give our expert authors the most relevant topics to carefully analyze and research, and only after that turn them into publications. Stay tuned for our first article next week!

We will also introduce you to the people who set the new Founders Club course and became mentors in our startup studio soon.

Stay tuned to always keep abreast of the latest trends and topics discussed.

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Register in the Founders Club bot to get a chance to:

• access mentors who are startup practitioners, not theorists;

• find cool ideas and hypotheses for your future startup; 

• access quick financing of your project;

• find a team of strong specialists and experts;

• create your own project or join an existing one;

• and of course be the first to get the insights! 

What are you waiting for? Go for it!