You have an idea on paper
A sketch, an opinion from a friend, and a sense that you should get a patent or raise a round.
Kick Start
Direction and funding for an idea you believe in.
For the founder with an idea and no project yet. We sanity-check the direction, give you a straight answer on whether it has legs, and hand you a curated shortlist of the funders who fit what you are building.
An idea, no project yet · Direction Letter · Funding Map
Who it is for
When this is the right one.
You do not know what to do first
Founders routinely pay a patent attorney before they have anything to patent, or a developer before they have a specification.
You are about to pitch
And you would rather find the holes in it yourself than have an investor find them for you.
You do not know who funds this
Grant, angel, venture and incubator money all exist for what you are building. Working out which one fits is the hard part.
What you get
The deliverables.
Direction Letter
One to two pages you can keep, share with a co-founder or hand to an investor. Our understanding of the idea, an honest read on its strongest and weakest parts, a recommended direction, and the open questions we could not settle.
Funding Map
A curated shortlist matched to this idea at this stage. Three to eight funders, each with why it fits, indicative stage and ticket size, what you need ready before approaching them, and a contact route where we have one.
How it works
Step by step.
- Idea briefA one-page brief through a private channel, covering the idea, your background, what you think you need, and what is stopping you.
- Idea scanWe read the brief and run a structured feasibility pass across the technical, market, regulatory, IP and competitive angles.
- Founder conversationForty-five minutes, recorded. We want the person and the reasoning, then we probe the assumptions underneath.
- WorkupFeasibility, market presence, regulatory red flags, a scan of the existing patent position, and the funding match.
- Direction sessionWe walk you through what we found, you challenge it, and we go through the funding map together.
- Written deliverablesThe Direction Letter and Funding Map, reviewed and delivered as a PDF.
On the recommendation
The letter says one of four things. Proceed and here is the path, validate these specific inexpensive experiments first, pivot and here is what we would reframe, or stop. We say the fourth one when we mean it.
Where it leads
The next step.
A Kick Start founder who validates the idea is the ideal Risk Review client six months later, once there is a prototype or a specification to look at. From there the path runs into a Discovery Phase.
Risk Review
For a project about to get expensive. An independent techno-commercial read on what could go wrong, with a recommendation against each risk and a view on whether deeper work is warranted.
Read more →Discovery Phase
The full definition exercise. Requirements, functional specification, system architecture and a development plan, ending in a fixed-price statement of work you can commit to with confidence.
Read more →If this is not quite your situation
Then tell us about the project anyway.
They exist so that starting with us is small and low-risk, and they are not the limit of what we take on. This one is a starting point, not a boundary. Describe what you are trying to build and we will scope something that fits it, or say plainly that we are not the right people for it.