Startup Academy
Your route to entrepreneurship.
The programme is specifically designed to immerse entrepreneurs in developing their ventures, through a range of structured sessions and workshops.
Gain insider know-how, tips, tricks and essential elements to go from idea to market, and build connections with fellow cohort members for a lasting business network to drive you and your business forward!
Please register your interest for the next programme!
What to expect from the eight-week programme
The Startup Academy consists of a series of workshops and sessions covering the following topics:
What Is a Great Business to you?
In this session, you’ll get to introduce yourselves to the rest of the businesses in the cohort. We will run through the schedule and course expectations. Before discussing definitions of business success and giving you time to think about your personal vision.
Discovering Customer Pains
This session focuses on effective ways to extract valuable information from customers about their pains. Founders will learn that success might depend on NOT listening to what customers say they need.
Nail it then Scale It
Three sessions focused around the theories of 'Nail It then Scale It' by Furr and Ahlstrom to identify the right problem to solve, identify the right solution to the problem and then the ways in which to build it.
Business Model Innovation
In this session, founders will understand the key elements of a business model and how they relate to one another. Using the business model canvas, we will begin to deeply analyse how your current business models work.
How to Present your Business
This session focuses on how to present your business idea. Founders will learn about various considerations needed when preparing to pitch.
Who's it for?
This kick-start programme is specifically designed for early-stage, high-growth businesses in Guernsey with scale ambition! If you are starting or have recently started your venture and are looking to scale, this programme is for you.
The information below specifies the application criteria for the academy:
- Applicants must be residents of Guernsey
- The applicant’s business must be looking to scale with growth ambitions.
- Applications can be from any sector or business type.
- Each application is allocated two participant spaces on the programme. If you have a business partner or team member who would like to take part in the Startup Academy programme with you, you must fill in their details when applying.
If you are unsure if your business qualifies for this programme or if this is the right level for the current stage of development, please email info@digitalgreenhouse.gg or call 01481 701010 for further advice.
Register your interest below to discover how you can launch and grow your business.
Startup Academy 2025 Graduates
Meet the Startup Academy alumni
Michelle Winn
2025 Autumn Cohort Founder of Peak PositivePeak Positive aims to transform Guernsey by building the coaching skills and positive culture that help people, teams and organisations truly thrive.
Michelle came to the Startup Academy with experience and ideas, but often hit a familiar entrepreneurial challenge, progressing alone without external feedback. The Academy provided a collaborative space to articulate ideas, test assumptions and build clarity around a bigger ambition.
Why would you recommend the Startup Academy?
“I saw the Startup Academy advertised and thought that being in a group with other entrepreneurs who have got shared issues and collaborating with them would be good. And just actually saying the things out loud to others, because when you're starting a business on your own you have these conversations in your head but you don't really have anybody to bounce them off and to validate them. So this programme provided quite a nice space for that.”
Other highlights included:
- Keeping the momentum with weekly sessions
- Iterating really quickly
- Permission to think bigger
- Confidence to talk about my business
Alex Rich
2025 Autumn Cohort Founder of KahveKahve replaces slow meetings and endless emails with a fast, structured, asynchronous decision workflow, producing informed, auditable results.
Alex joined the Startup Academy looking to reconnect with the excitement of building something from scratch. With a background that included a coding and development course overseas, he used the Academy to explore his business idea, pivoting and refining his thinking as he went. Alex’s journey reflects one of the Academy’s core strengths, helping founders uncover the problem they are truly motivated to solve.
If someone is thinking of applying for Startup Academy, what would you sort of say to them?
“I'd say jump in head first in, for sure. It doesn't have to be the world's best idea, but if you have something you're passionate about or you want to explore it’s a great programme to do that. It's been a really lovely experience and I recommend it to absolutely anybody.”
Lukas Laubscher
2025 Autumn Cohort Founder of Rock Talent Search & Move2GuernseyMove2Guernsey is a SaaS assessment platform that turns messy international hiring into a data-driven, eligibility-first workflow, built on hundreds of real candidate and permit cases.
Lukas joined the Academy with experience from a previous coaching programme and arrived expecting to refine an existing idea. Instead, he discovered that his project wasn’t solving a meaningful problem, leading to one of the most transformative pivots in the cohort.
What were the most valuable moments of the programme?
“I’ve previously been in a coaching academy and I understand the value that that brings. It’s really good to be in a room where you can actually just hear yourself back through other people. Participating in the accelerator as part of a cohort carries a lot more value.”
“The business idea that I thought I was building wasn’t actually right - I wasn’t really solving a specific pain… It was quite a transformational moment of realisation.”
“The piece of theory that landed with me the most was the concept of pretotype and prototype testing.”
