The Business Incubation Center at the University of Peshawar will hold the second session of its Cohort 3 programme tomorrow, Thursday, 15 October 2026, at 2:00 PM at the center. The session is Module 2 of the Startup Launchpad Bootcamp and is titled Customer Discovery, under the idea that founders should understand the problem before building the solution. Maarij Ali will lead the session as trainer and guide the founders through the fundamentals of finding out what customers really need.
The session covers six areas. Founders will practise telling problems apart from solutions, identify customer segments and early adopters, learn how to conduct customer interviews without bias, look at customer jobs, pains and gains, record evidence and find patterns in what they hear, and learn the common mistakes that teams make during discovery. The aim is to help them check their startup ideas against real world evidence, since many early stage ventures fail because they build a product that nobody asked for rather than because of a weakness in the technology.
The session is practical. Teams will prepare customer interview guides and practise interviewing another team, and they will use artificial intelligence to summarise interview notes and spot patterns across several interviews. The expected outcome is ten customer interviews and a one-paragraph problem statement from each team by 29 October, which gives founders two weeks to leave the classroom and speak to the people they hope to serve.
The Business Incubation Center was established in September 2024 as a university-backed incubation hub for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and it selects its cohorts through applications and pitch-based interviews, with Cohort 3 interviews held in late August. Sessions of the bootcamp are part of the structured training that selected founders receive, and the customer discovery module sets up the work that follows on validating ideas and building a product.
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