For Accelerators & Incubators
Program directors pour resources into promising teams, yet cohort after cohort, startups launch to silence. Bandos gives accelerators a standardized platform to ensure every founder does the hard work of customer validation — before Demo Day.
The Problem
You cannot sit in on every customer interview. You rely on founders reporting back — but it is dangerously easy for early-stage teams to fake discovery. Bandos solves this by making the entire discovery phase visible, traceable, and impossible to fake.
Program directors rely on founders self-reporting discovery progress. There is no way to verify what questions were asked, how many real conversations happened, or whether any of it was rigorous.
Founders hide behind screens, prompt AI to validate their assumptions, and mistake friendly feedback for actual market signal. When they claim to have talked to users, there is no record of whether they asked hard, objective questions.
Too much time in mentor meetings is spent figuring out what a team has actually done. By the time the real picture emerges, the session is over and no strategic advice has been given.
Managing outfits that match occasion and weather is mentally exhausting
Conflicting or insufficient dataUlwick Opportunity Score
Step 1 · Opportunity Scoring
You need a single, comparable number to judge which teams are finding real traction and which ones are just building on gut feeling. The Ulwick Opportunity Score is that number — importance minus satisfaction, surfacing exactly how wide the gap is between what users need and what the market currently provides.
Because every team in your cohort uses the same framework, you can rank them, compare them, and make objective program decisions. You no longer have to debate a founder's intuition against another founder's conviction. The data speaks.
Step 2 · Solution Scoring
Once a team has confirmed a real user need, Bandos scores their proposed solutions with an ICE score— Impact, Viability, and Low Friction. Every dimension is grounded in actual interview data, not a founder's wishful thinking.
You walk into every mentor session already knowing which solutions have evidence behind them and which ones need to be cut or rethought. You stop having to ask the question — the answer is already on the screen.
AI-powered wardrobe assistant that builds outfits from your existing clothes
ValidatedICE Score Breakdown
Program Management
Instead of wasting a mentor session figuring out what a team has done all week, open their Bandos workspace before the meeting starts. Everything you need is already there.
Every team's Bandos workspace gives you an instant bird's-eye view of their entire discovery: which assumptions are validated, which are contradicted, and where they urgently need to pivot.
Ulwick Opportunity Scores and ICE ratings replace gut-feel debates. You walk into every mentor session already knowing which teams have real traction and which are building on hope.
Every survey, interview insight, and score update is logged. Discovery cannot be faked. You see the evidence behind each assumption score and can hold teams accountable to real data.
Build better cohorts
Give your program the infrastructure to produce startups that validate before they build.
Related: Idea validation for solo founders · Customer validation surveys · How Bandos works