Announcing our 21 Day Deep-Dive Discovery Program

SINGAPORE, 2 June 2014—Joyful Frog Digital Incubator (JFDI) launches a 21 day program this week called JFDI Discovery to help business startup founders take a deep dive into their market in a quest to achieve ‘problem-customer fit’. The program will run every month and teaches participants to apply the formal methods used with success in JFDI’s main 100-day accelerator program.

Delivered every month through a blend of self-directed activity and online support, JFDI Discovery is available to anyone, anywhere, any time. There is no need to attend physical meetings or group webinars unless participants want to, so it can run alongside existing work commitments.

Hugh Mason, Co-founder and CEO of JFDI said, “Meng Wong and I were inspired to set up JFDI by the fact that it’s now possible to systematize innovation and to teach entrepreneurship like never before. The information you need to do it is all open source and online but, like trying to get fit, anyone who’s tried it on their own will know that it’s not easy to get results. Our experience is that it helps a lot to have a coach and a community and that’s what JFDI Discovery provides.”

JFDI Discovery’s appeal is the chance it offers entrepreneurs to “Shape Up My Startup” and answer three key questions in less than a month. Individuals and teams find out:

• Are we serious about entrepreneurship?
• What problem are we fixing in the world?
• Who would pay to have that problem fixed?

JFDI Discovery was piloted from January 2014 by Ray Wu, JFDI’s former accelerator manager, who is now a JFDI mentor alongside running his own startup. The pilot immediately resulted in two startup teams being offered and accepting places in JFDI’s main Accelerate program. As a result they have been able to get further, faster. So, from today onwards all teams applying to JFDI Accelerate will be encouraged to get up to speed first, starting as soon as they can with JFDI Discover.

JFDI’s new team members Adrian Tan and Huang Chi-Kai are now building on the successful pilot program, incorporating the learning from JFDI’s work accelerating 40 startup teams and mentoring over 150 teams at the events it has organized and supported across APAC.

Adrian Tan was part of that learning, leading startup team Remember in 2012. He now rejoins JFDI as Lean Startup Coach, acutely aware of how challenging it is to develop a startup rigorously based on evidence.

Adrian Tan said: “Working across the region, JFDI’s experience has been that Lean Startup methods which work so well in the West don’t always deliver ‘out of the box’ in the East. They need adaptation for Asia. Asking customers explicitly about their problems, for example, could easily result in a loss of face in some cultures or stalling and failure to capture accurate information. The private online community we have set up for JFDI Discovery participants helps everyone share insights and find workarounds when they meet these kinds of issues.”

Every participating team that completes its assignments gets a weekly “Office Hours” call from the mentor team to keep them moving forward. A key objective is to help teams find out for themselves if they have what it takes to succeed and teams that don’t achieve the goals they set themselves can try again. Like signing up for a gym, working with a coach helps them to decide “how hard do we want to push ourselves this month?”

Huang Chi Kai said, “Events like Startup Weekends and Hackathons are great for introducing strangers and forming energetic new teams. But there comes a moment when you need to know if your new friends are serious. JFDI Discovery creates a relatively short but intense commitment which teams can try part-time. They make promises to us and each other and then whether they deliver or not is down to the team That way they can find out if they really want to be entrepreneurs and if they really want to work together. It’s also deeply reassuring for them to get hard evidence that they have something solid to work on before they tell family they plan to quit their jobs.”

However JFDI Discovery is not just for first-timers. It also helps experienced teams that feel they are facing a road-block, or who want to put new hires who are not the original founders through a start-up experience.

Hugh Mason continues: “Even teams that have been together for years often struggle to achieve close ‘problem-customer fit’. After early success, or a positive initial response on a crowdfunding site, growth stalls and they just don’t know why. JFDI Discovery shares how we apply powerful techniques like the OKR (Objective Key Results) method, Lean Canvas and Customer Discovery to understand what really drives the business forward.”

Individuals and teams interested can join the next JFDI Discovery or JFDI Accelerate programs online, or contact us online for more information.