My first venture was a crash course in everything not to do.

Despite winning multiple awards and being selected for prestigious FinTech accelerators, we struggled with the fundamental issue that plagues most startups:

Achieving genuine Product-Market Fit.

As a first-time Founder in the FinTech space, I stumbled through the typical mistakes:

• Building without proper validation

• Assuming I knew what customers wanted

• Burning through precious runway before achieving true Product-Market Fit

I poured time, effort and resources into building what I thought was the perfect product.

But I learned.

These painful lessons became the foundation for something far more valuable than the venture itself.

I took these hard-won lessons into my next venture, where I built scalable methodologies and solutions for a Big 5 Professional Services Firm, leveraging my FinTech expertise.

The venture after I helped build a strategy practice competing with McKinsey, using structured validation processes for which large corporations paid €150K+.

This approach worked brilliantly and clients saw immediate results in venture validation.

In these practices, we were charging €70K-€150K per engagement, delivering deep market validation and structured scaling strategies.

But the process remained inaccessible to the very people who needed it most:

Founders and early-stage startups.

The truth is that most Founders don’t have €70K-€150K lying around.

I watched promising Founders struggle through the same painful cycle I had experienced:

Spending 18-24 months developing products based on assumptions rather than evidence, burning through capital before ever confirming Product-Market Fit.

By the time they realised they'd built something customers didn’t truly want, they had exhausted their resources, energy and team morale.

My goal crystallised:

Make these proven methodologies accessible to early-stage Founders at an affordable price.

This is why we built i13 Ventures.

Instead of 18-24 months of uncertainty, Founders now achieve clarity within 100 days - either validating their concept for rapid scaling or pivoting intelligently before wasting precious time and capital.

We stripped away corporate jargon, unnecessary research cycles and bloated deliverables.

What remained was the essence:

A lean validation process focused exclusively on the critical assumptions that determine venture success or failure.

We built specialised tools to turn customer feedback into actionable insights, developed frameworks for testing business models and created a repeatable process that consistently led to successful results.

We tested this approach with our first clients and within just 10 weeks, our Venture Diagnostic process helped completely transform their businesses through rigorous customer discovery and prototype testing.

The results were immediate - refined concepts resonated with both customers and investors, accelerating traction and funding decisions.

That’s when we validated:

We had created a system that delivers the same €150K+ strategic guidance large corporations rely on - at a startup-friendly price point.

The most rewarding aspect has been watching Founders secure their first customers and investment rounds within months of completing the diagnostic process across different continents.

What began as my own painful Founder journey has evolved into a mission:

To increase startup success rates by replacing lengthy, uncertain development cycles with rapid, structured validation.

Within 100 days.

Because at the end of the day…

Every Entrepreneur deserves a ‘fair shot’ at building something that matters.