Want to experience what it's like to start a new venture?

We want to help you succeed! We've been running Founder Labs, a pre-team, pre-idea incubator for a year and have a lot of lessons to share. We've watched teams go through the first phases of starting a startup -- that is, building your founding team and validating your idea.

With an 8 episode video series our goal is to share lessons learned that are both entertaining and educational while honoring the work of ordinary people who have taken on extraordinary challenges.  Follow the 5th Founder Labs class as they embark on their journey to build a mobile start-up company.

What is Founder Labs?

Founder Labs is a 5-week pre-incubator for new mobile ideas. Unlike startup incubator programs, Founder Labs is about building a team its the search for the right idea and the right people. Our secret sauce? Building diverse founding teams. Its true: research confirms that teams from varied backgrounds are more innovative and have the capacity to solve complex problems more effectively. 

Through weekly talks and access to mentors, as well as weekly team presentations and critiques, they learn the technical and lean startup skills needed to validate business ideas, figure out the right product-market fit, build rapid prototypes and test with real customers. This methodology, proven through four previous programs, has already resulted in multiple successful, funded companies.

The story isnt just the dry mechanics of building a product; its also about human relationships, team dynamics, and how they work. It is a unique angle on startup life never before portrayed in television treatments that appeals to a full spectrum of the viewing public.

Our mentors include many well-known names in Silicon Valley including:

• Eric Ries, founder of IMVU and creator of the Lean Startup Methodology

• Steve Blank, founder of E.piphany and creator of the Customer Development Methodology

• Pankaj Kedia, Director of Mobile Ecosystem Disruption at Intel

• Sarah Allen, founder of Blazing Cloud and RailsBridge and one of the inventors of Flash

• Shaherose Charania, founder and CEO of Women 2.0

• Shea DiDonna, venture capitalist at True Ventures

• Katherine Barr, venture capitalist at Mohr Davidow Ventures

• Conrad Wai, venture capitalist at Jump Ventures

• Ann Miura Ko, venture capitalist at Floodgate Ventures

• Randy Reddig, co-founder of Square

• Jenny Fielding, attorney and executive at BBC Ventures Worldwide

• ... and many more

What We Need

If we come in below our target, we will obviously still complete shooting, as we've already begun. However, we will have to find other ways to fund the expenses of post-production, and completing the project will take considerably longer as a result. We are running a very tight ship given the difficult nature of the subject - multiple teams often in multiple uncontrolled locations, unusual working hours, happens-one-time-only events, and long, long hours. We've tried to whittle the entire production down to the bare minimum to produce a great, fun, educational product.

We're raising $30-50,000 in contributions and sponsorships to fund the cost of shooting, editing and post-production, crew expenses, equipment rentals, consumables, and the other usual costs of production. Because the program runs for five weeks and includes considerable before-and-after work, we are anticipating shooting well over 100 hours of footage in the course of this series. In fact, as of this writing, the crew has already been footing the bill for shooting and has captured over 60 hours to date.

What You Get

$10 through $100: some great perks, have a look in the right column.

Further Details on the $500 - $699 range:

Our mentors have graciously agreed to schedule hour-long breakfasts with our contributors. During breakfast, you can review your pitch with them, sanity check your development model, get coaching on your business model, pick their brains about their industry and contacts... it's an hour about you forming a relationship with them.

In order to make these breakfasts workable, we have to limit the number of them that we give away from each mentor. So we're doing a Dutch auction:

1. Contribute at or above the level indicated for the person you want to meet (e.g., to bid on a breakfast with someone in the $500 range, contribute between $500 and $699).
2. We'll regularly post who has contributed the most at each level. If you get outbid, you're welcome to contribute more, and we'll aggregate your contributions to increase your bid.
3. Contribution scoring will close when the IndieGoGo campaign closes.
4. The top contributor at each level will get first pick of who they want to meet at their level. The next highest contributor will get the next pick. And so on.
5. We will introduce you to the mentor, and you can setup a time to go to breakfast with them, our treat.

Other Ways You Can Help

Tell your friends, family, co-workers and employers! Please share the link to this campaign on your blog, on Twitter, on Hacker News... basically anywhere you think there might be someone interested. Upvote us, retweet us, cross-post us, help us get the message out.

Know someone who's trying to raise money for the first time and needs a good excuse to contact people who have the contacts? Point them here! Someone who needs help sorting out their business model? Send them over! Put people in touch who need a mentor or a contact who just haven't found their in.

We'd especially like to hear from people working at companies that use Lean Startup methods and have success stories to share. If your company would be interested in sponsoring an episode, we'd love to hear from you. Sponsors will have the opportunity to be featured in episodes demonstrating how they successfully use the techniques we use in Founder Labs to grow and develop their companies.