The role
The role of a startup studio is to increase the speed and probability of success when building businesses. They do this by developing vertical-specific operating blueprints that foster a structured approach to company creation. These blueprints get put to use in multiple build-cases concurrently, being constantly recycled. This uniquely entails that the studio becomes more capital efficient with time, because the one-time cost of developing such blueprints is spread over more build cases.
Think for instance of startup Founders who have built multiple unicorns. The probability of building a billion dollar company is well below 1%, so naturally the odds of doing it more than once are extremely low. You can think about these Founders as a startup studio in themselves. They have a tried and tested blueprint for all the operational processes of building a company, and they use these processes and frameworks in vastly different contexts.
That’s not to say that every company should aim to become a unicorn, in fact, we lean towards the opposite, but it says that processes and frameworks have explanatory power over company creation success.
In our view, you need a lot of foundational pillars to establish a repeatable company creation process.
- You need a process to identify problems
- You need a process to hire a team that can build a solution
- You need a process to validate that your solution is in fact the right one
- You need a process to identify the best go-to-market motion
- You need a process to stay on top of finances
- You need a process to manage legal documents and processes
- You need a process to identify the ideal customer profile
This is a non-exhaustive list, so you can imagine how time consuming and costly it is to document and implement all these processes in the studio. During this time, focus is diverted from what’s actually important: building great companies. It also results in a bloated team with many functional specialists who are not entirely focused on building.
Bifrost Studios is a startup studio platform that provides the core operating blueprints to establish and run a startup studio. We do not provide the ‘best process’ for any type of studio, but we provide ‘a process’ that can be adapted and upgraded with time. By doing so, we accelerate the timeline of starting a startup studio from +1 year to three months or less.
We break these blueprints into two buckets: company creation and functional processes.
