Entrepreneurship & Startup
Search for a business model across five founder stages: interview AI customers, run experiments that cost runway, earn real customers and revenue, and compete for one fund at Demo Day, with Death March waiting if the cash runs out.
Inside Startup Forge
Screens from a class in progress. Click any screen to see it full size.
Startup Forge puts student teams in the founder's seat and moves them through five stages — Ideation, Customer Discovery, MVP & Launch, Pivot or Persevere, and Scale & Pitch — built on the idea that a startup is a search for a business model. The professor gives every team the same business type or assigns types from a pool (B2B SaaS, DTC Products, Consumer Mobile, Marketplace, or AI Product). Each industry has a hidden market of three or four customer segments, and only one has urgent pain and a budget. Teams interview AI customers who follow the Mom Test (the sim notes the facts they uncover and logs compliments to hypothetical questions as false positives) and, at Stages 2-4, spend cash on experiments (more interviews, a landing page, a pricing test, a concierge MVP, a paid pilot) that return noisy results from the real market; each hire adds one experiment a stage. From Stage 4 on, customers and revenue come from the sim, set by the target segment's real pain and budget, the team's price and whether its evidence backs it. Each stage also requires a written deliverable that an AI Critic scores. At Stage 4 each team is dealt one industry crisis that changes the market, and its persevere, zoom-in or pivot decision moves its cash. At Stage 5 (Demo Day) three AI investors vote on a deck whose traction the sim verified; two yes votes make an offer from the class's one fund, which backs only the best two or three teams. Teams answer each partner's question once, then accept, counter once or walk away from a SAFE or a priced term sheet (a priced round carves a 10% option pool from the founders' pre-money). Students can take light founder roles (CEO, Customer Lead, Product Lead, CFO) and write a short reflection after each stage that the professor reads; once a class uses roles, role work is 20% of each student's suggested grade. A runway clock ticks throughout, and when cash hits zero the team enters Death March. Scored on four pillars: Product Innovation (evidence + the Critic), Pivot Speed (how fast the team reached the segment its evidence supports), Investor Confidence (the Demo Day outcome) and Runway (default alive at the end).
Share this with your team— printable one-pager for a chair or procurement./for-your-team/startup-forgeWrite the problem statement, customer hypothesis, and TAM/SAM/SOM sizing. First Critic pass grades the framing before anyone touches an MVP.
Interview AI-played customers from your industry's segments and run your first experiments. Facts customers state count as evidence; compliments to hypothetical questions don't. Name the segment your evidence points to.
Scope the MVP for your target segment, set a price, and run pilots. A fixed-terms pre-seed offer opens if the MVP plan earns it; every hire and experiment hits your runway.
Each team is dealt one crisis that changes its market (an anchor customer churns, a regulator calls, a platform changes its rules). Test what changed, then persevere, zoom in or pivot: the call costs cash and pays off when it fits the evidence.
Demo Day: the deck carries the traction you earned. Three AI investors vote, ask one question each, and vote again; two yes votes make the class's one fund an offer. When the professor closes the stage, the fund backs only the best two or three teams.
A walkthrough from Jeff Forgrave, who built Boardroom Rivals.
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