What is this program about?

Building a successful startup starts with understanding your customer BEFORE building a product.

Discover is a 4-week, highly interactive program designed to help early-stage founders slow down in the right way by grounding their ideas in real customer insight, evidence-based validation, and problem clarity.

Throughout Discover, participants use the Lean(er) Canvas to structure their thinking and decision-making. The Canvas provides a clear way to document customer insights, assumptions, and learning, while helping founders communicate who the customer is, what problem they are solving, how the market currently addresses it, and where to focus next.

From the very first session, participants begin customer discovery and conduct ongoing customer interviews each week. Through hands-on exercises, structured breakout sessions, AI-supported exploration, and coach feedback, founders continuously refine their assumptions and direction based on real evidence — not guesses — leaving the program with clarity, confidence, and a clear path forward.

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Joe Williams

Board Member

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Joe Williams

Advisor

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Why Register

By the end of Discover, participants leave with:

Target Audience:

  • A clear, evidence-informed understanding of their customer, problem, and early adopters
  • A completed Lean(er) Canvas that captures customer insights, assumptions, and validated learning
  • Synthesized learnings from customer discovery and feedback loops
  • Identified riskiest assumptions and a plan to test them
  • Confidence communicating their startup thinking, learning, and next steps to stakeholders
    ‍

Discover is intentionally pre-product and ideal for founders who want to build the right thing, for the right people, at the right time.

Program Schedule

Week 1: Customer Discovery Foundations

Clarify the problem and identify who you need to talk to

  • Understand what customer discovery is (and what it is not) and why it comes before building
  • Define a clear problem, early adopters, and focused customer segments
  • Learn how to recruit customers and prepare for meaningful interviews using the Lean(er) Canvas

Week 2: Competition, Value Proposition & Feedback Loops

Understand how customers solve the problem today and how value is created

  • Explore competition through the customer’s lens, including existing alternatives and workarounds
  • Develop and test a clear value proposition grounded in real customer pain
  • Learn how feedback loops support learning, iteration, and better decision-making

Week 3: Assumption Mapping, MVP Development & Lean(er) Canvas Communication

Identify risk, explore solutions, and prepare to share your learning

  • Synthesize customer discovery insights and identify key patterns
  • Map and prioritize your riskiest assumptions and explore MVPs as learning tools
  • Use AI thoughtfully to refine ideas and strengthen how you communicate your thinking through the Lean(er) Canvas

Week 4: Lean(er) Canvas Presentations & Next Steps

Share your learning and determine what to test next

  • Present your Lean(er) Canvas and customer discovery insights to peers and coaches
  • Receive structured feedback focused on learning, assumptions, and direction
  • Identify practical next steps, experiments, and relevant resources to continue your startup journey

‍

Register Now

Week 1: Customer Discovery Foundations

Clarify the problem and identify who you need to talk to

  • Understand what customer discovery is (and what it is not) and why it comes before building
  • Define a clear problem, early adopters, and focused customer segments
  • Learn how to recruit customers and prepare for meaningful interviews using the Lean(er) Canvas

Week 2: Competition, Value Proposition & Feedback Loops

Understand how customers solve the problem today and how value is created

  • Explore competition through the customer’s lens, including existing alternatives and workarounds
  • Develop and test a clear value proposition grounded in real customer pain
  • Learn how feedback loops support learning, iteration, and better decision-making

Week 3: Assumption Mapping, MVP Development & Lean(er) Canvas Communication

Identify risk, explore solutions, and prepare to share your learning

  • Synthesize customer discovery insights and identify key patterns
  • Map and prioritize your riskiest assumptions and explore MVPs as learning tools
  • Use AI thoughtfully to refine ideas and strengthen how you communicate your thinking through the Lean(er) Canvas

Week 4: Lean(er) Canvas Presentations & Next Steps

Share your learning and determine what to test next

  • Present your Lean(er) Canvas and customer discovery insights to peers and coaches
  • Receive structured feedback focused on learning, assumptions, and direction
  • Identify practical next steps, experiments, and relevant resources to continue your startup journey

‍

Register Now
“You have to be willing to be very wrong. Critically assessing the data gathered is key to getting benefit from this program. Doing it right may result in robust discussions among partners - and it’s worth it!”
Nora Brittney, Senior Manager, KPMG Canada
“Discover provides a solid framework for engaging customers to better understand the market potential and needs. It has saved us months in the process of starting our new business.”
Derrick Keoing, Founder & Chief Product Officer, Ontopical

This program is for

Startup Founders

  • Early-stage founders who need to refine their customer discovery process, better understand their market, and clearly define their value proposition to improve their chances of success.

Aspiring Entrepreneurs

  • Individuals with a business idea or early-stage startup looking to validate their concept, identify their target audience, and develop a solid foundation for their business model.

Innovation and Product Teams

  • Teams within established companies or organizations aiming to launch new products or services, who need to conduct thorough customer discovery and validate their ideas before moving forward.

‍

Register Now

Startup Founders

  • Early-stage founders who need to refine their customer discovery process, better understand their market, and clearly define their value proposition to improve their chances of success.

Aspiring Entrepreneurs

  • Individuals with a business idea or early-stage startup looking to validate their concept, identify their target audience, and develop a solid foundation for their business model.

Innovation and Product Teams

  • Teams within established companies or organizations aiming to launch new products or services, who need to conduct thorough customer discovery and validate their ideas before moving forward.

‍

Register Now

The Startups

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SEPT
Law firms with 8-15 employees can efficiently manage their entire practice, from our software, from legal work, resource allocation, billing, and financial accounting. Firms can build zero-code automations to automate full admin/Non-Value workflows letting them focus on billable initiatives.
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Red Iron Labs
Red Iron Labs is a VR game studio founded in 2016, evolving over the past nine years through VR development services and original game creation. Since launching Muffin Fight in 2021, we’ve expanded it based on player feedback— Gen Alpha loves playing it, and users appreciate its mix of social interaction and friendly competition as a positive, immersive experience. Recognizing the pressing need for innovative engagement tools in K-12 education, we are transforming Muffin Fight into a VR-based social engagement tool that helps K-12 students build soft skills, collaborate, and connect in digital spaces—while also paving the way for future applications in higher education research, corporate training, and esports.
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IMOnline Technologies Inc.
IMOnline is an AI-powered platform that enables entrepreneurs and small businesses to create and manage conversion-ready e-commerce and portfolio websites in minutes. With no coding, design, or copywriting required, it offers AI-driven content creation, design, analytics, marketing tools, and essential integrations to streamline online business management. Our unique combination of multimodal and Agentic AI, along with an intuitive mobile app, empowers users to effortlessly build, manage, and scale their online presence.
Learn More
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People Connect
Interview Box streamlines your hiring process by intelligently pre-screening candidates through AI-powered resume scoring and one-way video interviews. Our platform analyzes candidate fit, providing a percentage match for each role, and facilitates seamless collaboration among hiring teams. This helps you quickly identify top talent and make data-driven hiring decisions.
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ACS Automated Cleaning
ACS is the future of industrial cleaning. We specialize in delivering cutting-edge cleaning, maintenance, and restoration solutions through proprietary robotics and automation, tailored for the oil & gas, railway, and mining industries. Our suite of innovations—including the Eliminator washdown cannon, the Cyclone circulation system, and the Overseer software—reduces labor needs, enhances safety, and drives efficiency in high-risk environments. We help our clients scale by modernizing traditional methods and adopting robotics and automation so they achieve faster turnaround times, superior results, and significant cost savings to our clients.
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Shark Indicators
Shark Indicators has specialized in providing software solutions to home-based retail traders using the NinjaTrader platform for over 12 years. Our products are unique in the ecosystem and have empowered nearly 4,000 customers to develop automated trading strategies without code.
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Made It Legal
Made It Legal is an online tech platform that creates contracts and other legal documents for businesses and enables internal and external teams to collaborate on how they write, sign, and manage their contracts. When needed to supplement our tech offering, we also have on-demand lawyer support through our Lawyer Marketplace. Our platform saves large to small businesses hours (even days) of time and thousands of dollars by making their legal work automated and efficient.
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Optave AI Solutions
Optave improves up to 7% of corporations' net profit by giving A.I. superpowers to their support team.
Learn More
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Tarkka Manufacturing Solutions Inc
Tarkka Manufacturing Solutions is revolutionizing adaptive seating with our innovative Tetrx™ system that significantly reduces MDRPI (Medical Device-Related Pressure Injuries) and enhances patient comfort. We serve healthcare providers, therapists, and wheelchair users by delivering personalized, cost-effective seating solutions that streamline clinical processes. By leveraging cutting-edge manufacturing techniques and advanced materials, Tarkka is poised to transform the $1.35 billion U.S. wheelchair seating market and set a new standard in adaptive mobility solutions.
Learn More
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Meet the Experts

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Our Achievements

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Frequently Asked Questions

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Knowing your customer enables you to develop products that address their needs, pain points, and preferences, ideally resulting in product-market fit and paying customers!

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Knowing your customer enables you to develop products that address their needs, pain points, and preferences, ideally resulting in product-market fit and paying customers!

Register Now

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Program Details
Program Details
Schedule

4 Sessions

Cohort
Fee

$99/person + GST

Location

Virtual

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  • Hours
  • Operating Hours (General Public)
    ‍    Monday - Friday: 8:30 AM - 4:30 PM

    ‍The Platform Innovation Centre & Platform Café are closed for statutory holidays.
Programs
Startup Essentials: Startup 101
Startup Essentials: Discover
Alberta Catalyzer
Platform Incubator
Raising Capital 101 & 201
The Peer-to-Peer Program
10X Future Founders Scholarship
CEO Roundtable
Global Startup Visa

Land Acknowledgement

We honour and acknowledge Moh’kinsstis and the traditional Treaty 7 territory and oral practices of the Blackfoot confederacy: Siksika, Kainai, Piikani, as well as the Îyâxe Nakoda and Tsuut’ina nations. We acknowledge that this territory is home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3 within the historical Northwest Métis homeland. We respect all Nations who live, work, play, innovate and build things on this land, and in so doing honour and celebrate the territory.

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