New Frontiers is the perfect programme for anyone that wants to turn their business idea into a company.
Through a combination of workshops and 1:1 sessions with excellent mentors who are domain experts, the programme helped me to develop a clear value proposition, a comprehensive sales and marketing strategy and a detailed business plan.
It helped me to test key assumptions about my target customers using lean methodologies. With feedback from customers over the course of phase 2, we developed our offering to suit the specific needs of our beachhead market. The structured nature of the programme, with clear milestones and goal setting accelerated the process of customer development and ultimately led to the signing up of our first customer for a pilot by the end of phase 2.
A key part of the course was working with my Enterprise Ireland assigned mentor in 1:1 sessions that were specific to the needs of the business. During these sessions we developed creative solutions to overcome technical challenges without committing to expensive development efforts. We also developed a clear plan to identify early adopters and acquire them as customers.
We had expert help from the New Frontiers mentors to perfect our pitch, for both customers and investors alike. I found this has helped enormously when out chasing those early customers.
Having access to office space at the Colab provided an ideal working environment with great networking opportunities. Being surrounded by other like minded entrepreneurs at various stages of their business, from start-up through to scale-up, is a great source of inspiration and motivation.
Additional benefits such as AWS credits allows us to extend our runway by being able to develop and test our cloud offering without incurring hosting costs.
Overall the New Frontiers programme was a fantastic experience for me and I feel privileged to have been able to take part in it.
Dara Burke ShowhouseVR New Frontiers alumni 2017/2018
At ShowhouseVR we create virtual reality experiences that can place you inside a building before it is built. Our solution is built on the latest real time rendering technology which allows users to have a fully interactive and immersive experience of an unbuilt development.
We develop 3d VR environments, which we deliver to our customers as an integrated VR software and hardware solution using cutting edge VR headsets, 4k HDR Displays and high end real time rendering hardware.