United Social Ventures believes the best way to bridge the pioneer gap is to provide a pathway for entrepreneurs to build social start-ups that are ready for, and attractive to, funders. This is achieved through global best-practice trainings – based on a toolkit with 100+ hours of content, grounded in Human Centered Design and Lean Start-Up, as well as 8 years of experience with young entrepreneurs in Uganda – and ongoing low cost advisory support to innovative young entrepreneurs which makes it accessible from the very start of their journeys.
Our approach is to offer ’venture building investment’ as a bridge over this pioneer gap based upon three design principles: (1) we can increase the commitment of founders by investing in their success; (2) we can accelerate product-market fit with a standardised venture-building process; and (3) we can increase the number of investors by presenting validated(/de-risked) start-ups they are more likely to fund. We have three core offerings. Design, Build, and Grow. Design is a Human Centered Design training program we’ve led as physical workshops, webinars, and e-learning videos for participants to create innovative concepts. Build (for pre-launch ventures) and Grow (for founders already full-time) are advisory offerings for individual founding teams. USV invests in initiatives by getting them to pay for our services from future funding. We then (i) define, (ii) analyse, and (iii) validate the venture’s model with 30+ rapid tests, before creating a pitch deck (for Build) and a strategy deck (for Grow). These documents are then shared in DealBooks to generate funding. In running programs, we’ve partnered with institutions including EWB Canada, Resilient Africa Network (Makerere University), the International Trade Center, Hive Colab, Stanbic Business Incubator, and Uganda Green Energy Finance Accelerator, WFP Ignite.
