Prota Ventures, a venture-building and early-stage investment firm with offices in Chicago, Seattle and Jacksonville has announced the launch of Startup Rocket, an independent venture that focuses on providing founders with a better process for growing ideas and validating their startup.
Startup Rocket also aims to give founders the tools and resources they need to build desirable products, accelerate growth, and land funding.
“Startup Rocket offers a framework that serves as a comprehensive and practical guide for bringing a company to life,” said Will Little, managing director of Prota Ventures. “The framework was developed based on decades of startup experience within the Prota Ventures team. It is designed to help founders save time and avoid the common mistakes that plague most early-stage startups.”
While aimed at startups building a software products and aiming to raise capital, the framework has also proven to be extremely helpful for many different types of for and non-profit ventures. Startup Rocket details the critical steps necessary to validate an idea, recruit a team, design and build a product, acquire customers, iterate toward product-market fit, and successfully bootstrap or land funding.
“There are plenty of resources out there that cover the topics that founders need to know in theory, but practical guidance through the nuances of building a business is hard to find,” Little said. “Our goal is to help founders build upon the traditional business plan and ideation tools out there to focus on executing what matters – acquiring and retaining happy, paying customers.”
Launching startups
Some founders provided with early admittance to Startup Rocket have already benefitted from better access to resources, team, and advisor network. Through Startup Rocket’s collaborative exchange, entrepreneurs can learn about best practices for navigating the chaos of startup operations and prep to land their first round of funding.
“Bringing an idea to life takes a small army, and even then, things slip through the cracks,” said Levina Li, Founder of IDE Group, and an early user of the Startup Rocket framework. “Startup Rocket keeps things focused and moving forward. Their framework and community are invaluable resources for any new team or company.”
Speaking to Startup Beat, Little said that Startup Rocket hoped to address issues experienced by founders that were “pre-traction”.
“All of the major startup accelerator programs out there have extremely low acceptance ratios,” Little said. It’s clear there is a major need to assist founders that are still pre-traction, pre-product, or pre-team.
“Many aspiring entrepreneurs don’t have a framework to think about how to refine and validate their idea, let alone how to create a product or service and scale their customer acquisition efforts.
“Startup Rocket exists to practically assist founders through each of these common stages and problems.”
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