The Alacrity Foundation
The venture programme Intuitix came out of. Newport and Cardiff, September 2019 to November 2020, backed by Wesley Clover.
Four of us built a company from first principles, inside a twelve month programme that paid a stipend and expected a business at the end of it. Intuitix is what came out of it.
The method was Bill Aulet's Disciplined Entrepreneurship, the twenty four step process out of MIT. We worked the first thirteen steps between November 2019 and early 2020, writing a document for each one, and that is the formal grounding I have in taking a business from a market question to a plan you can deliver against. Aulet came to the ICC in Newport to speak while our cohort was running, and I met him there and took part in a workshop he ran.
Most of the year went on market sizing and customer discovery for infrastructure innovation funding, starting with gas networks, then electricity, then water. That was possible because the funding is regulated, so what the networks are allowed to spend on innovation is published. I sized the market from the regulators' own documents, starting with Ofgem's price control.
Our first customer was Wales and West Utilities, built pro bono in exchange for their help defining the product. Nobody handed us that. I found them through my own interviews with a gas network innovation manager and direct outreach on LinkedIn, and two of the people I spoke to were in market and willing to spec the product with us. Intuitix was incorporated in June 2020, while the cohort was still running.