James O'Connor Helps Entrepreneurs Validate Their Big Idea

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UPDATE: his event was held and recorded on July 23, 2020. The recording of the event is below.


James has been a builder of software his entire adult life. With seed funding from Steve Blank, he cofounded Innovation Within to realize his vision of helping entrepreneurs validate their big idea by getting out of the building and talking to customers. After a lengthy journey of customer discovery James applied the insights gained to build the Discovery Platform™ used by startups, accelerators, universities, enterprises and government agencies. James has a deep passion for customer discovery and loves to share his insights with fellow entrepreneurs.

Innovation Within’s mission is to help you inform & validate your vision with the voice of the customer. Build products customer love based on insight not guesses. 

The Discovery Platform™ was created to tackle problems people were experiencing in their customer discovery processes. Rather than build a platform that would addresses known issues, Innovation Within Founder and CEO, James O'Connor set out to build a platform using the very methodology it would serve. Through an extensive customer discovery process, the Discovery Platform™ was born. With continuous feedback the platform is still evolving to help teams validate their business models and find product market/fit.

In the next Santa Cruz Works Clinic (Innovation Within Lean Startup) James O'Connor will demonstrate Discovery Platform including:

  • Introduce the "Skinny" canvas. An easier approach to finding product/market fit

  • Empathy and curiosity, the two magical forces for successful interviews

  • The Do's and Don'ts of successful customer discovery

  • Quick tour of the Innovation Within platform

Matthew Swinnerton