Flexibility for Founders and a Focus on Growth: An Overview of the Dreamit Program
Dreamit makes offers to startups on a rolling basis and onboards only one new startup in each vertical every month. Startups are a race against time. Dreamit On Demand enables startups to launch their next growth phase when the timing is right for them, beginning any month. With investors asking “What’s your traction, burn rate, and how much runway do you have?” startups can’t wait six+ months to start a process that will help them grow, refine their model, gain customer exposure, and get in front of qualified investors. Unlike rigid cohort-based programs that only accept new startups once or twice per year, Dreamit startups begin attaining customer, investor, and model refinement benefits immediately giving them more of what they need most: time. We focus on accelerating customer acquisition and access to capital.
The all-consuming, day-to-day structure of most programs are not built to accommodate the needs of startups that are actively selling and already finding product-market fit with their initial customers or pilot partners.
Dreamit crafted a “sleeves-up” venture fund model and growth program that enables founders to accelerate customer and partnership relationships, raise venture funding, and implement practices that allow them to scale their processes while managing the other responsibilities they have as a founder.
At a high-level, there are three pillars to the Dreamit program:
Customer Sprints® - During two-week, customer-focused sprints Dreamit startups build their customer pipeline and partnerships, get feedback, and enhance their industry networks. Startups typically pitch a total of 15-25 executive-level decision-makers accelerating relationships by months. Two-week Customer Sprints occur four times per year and startups go on two sets of Customer Sprints.
Investor Sprints® - During Investor Sprints, founders have curated, one-on-one meetings with top US venture capital firms. Typically each founder meets a total of 20-30 investors. The process is extremely efficient and accelerates the fundraising process enabling startups to gain rapid market feedback on what it will take to close their next round. Leading up to the Investor Sprint, founders go through an intense prep process including Mock VC Meetings to maximize the probability of successfully raising a round. Two-week Investor Sprints occur three times per year enabling startups to choose the timing that works best for them.
Coaching - During weekly MD Meetings, startups work with a highly experienced Managing Director and Program Manager to pressure test key assumptions, refine their customer-facing and investor-facing pitches, and work through the challenges that arise when scaling their company.
We know founders have little time to spare, so we designed each of these key program pillars with a complete focus on helping startups acquire customers and capital in an efficient way.
Deep Dive
The Dreamit Deep Dive provides an opportunity for the Dreamit team to quickly get deep into your business model, customer-facing pitch, investor pitch deck, and more to identify potential weaknesses and areas for improvement so we all know where to focus time and energy during the program. As well, there is some highly specialized, short-form content we’ll ask you to watch so we can put it to immediate use during our meetings.
Time Commitment: Four hours. Deep Dive meeting will be over Zoom.
Customer Sprint® Prep
During Customer Sprint prep, your Managing Director and Startup Success Manager prepare you for meeting with discerning enterprise organizations by critically analyzing and reshaping how to best present your company and product. We’ll dig deeply into how you present your problem statement, value proposition, differentiation, use cases, and more. We find most startups need highly refined changes in how they talk to customers in order to grow their pipeline materially. The Dreamit team will challenge your key assumptions just like a customer might test them, and will provide suggestions to streamline and hone every aspect of your customer-facing pitch.
Most companies come into Dreamit with early sales under their belts yet still see a dramatic improvement in interest levels from customers after undergoing Customer Sprint Prep. This work helps founders drive conversations forward to secure pilots, proofs of concept, and sales more quickly.
Time Commitment: One hour remote video calls each week with your Managing Director and Startup Success Manager typically over four weeks along with however much time you need between calls to put the recommendations and learnings into action.
Customer Sprints®
Dreamit’s customer network includes top enterprise organizations in our core verticals. During two-week Customer Sprints, founders present to C-suite executives and SVP-level decision makers to initiate partnerships, discuss pilots, and gain customers accelerating relationships by months. Customer Sprints occur four times per year and each startup can go on two sets of Customer Sprints.
Time Commitment: Over one or two weeks, founders meet two to four customers each day. These meetings last anywhere from two to three hours and take place over Zoom. If accepted into Dreamit, you must complete at least one week of Customer Sprints before going on Investor Sprints. If you can’t spend two weeks in meetings with customers, you have the option to defer one week of Customer Sprints to a later Customer Sprint date.
Investor Sprint® Prep
In advance of the Investor Sprint, Dreamit startups receive intensive pitch prep from their Managing Director and Startup Success Manager to refine their stories, sharpen their decks, and challenge their most essential underlying assumptions. After pitch prep, founders go through demanding Mock VC Meetings with the Dreamit team and experienced investors from the Dreamit community. We usually see deeply material changes to startup pitch decks, how they answer questions, and how they handle themselves in investor meetings.
Time Commitment: One to two one-hour video calls with your Managing Director and Startup Success Manager each week, plus any additional time a founder might need to make changes to presentations. Three or four Mock VC Meetings conducted via video calls that typically last approximately 30 minutes each.
Investor Sprints®
During two-week Investor Sprints, founders have curated, one-on-one meetings with top US venture capital firms. Typically each founder meets with 30 investors to accelerate the fundraising process. By meeting with so many investors in such a condensed time frame startups are able to gain rapid market feedback on what it will take to close their next round. Two-week Investor Sprints occur three times per year enabling startups to choose the Investor Sprint timing that works best for them.
Time Commitment: Two weeks of investor meetings. You will typically have investor meetings daily lasting 30 minutes each. If you are not yet ready to raise your round, you have the option to choose one of the three Investor Sprints we run annually based on what works best for you.