Start is Solution Sandbox’s Upper Valley launch program for people ready to leverage the future. You might have only an idea, a rough prototype, a half-baked product with serious promise, or a wild new fix to an industry or company. It doesn’t matter where you begin. It matters that you begin.
Vision has no age limit
Start is open to high schoolers, college students, and up.
You won’t be building alone
Everyone in Start works alongside world-class startup founders, engineers, and builders. These are people who have shipped products, found customers, raised money, and scaled companies. But more importantly, they are people who have a good understanding of what the future is likely to bring, and they can help you take advantage of that future.
Support built around what you need
Start is approximately 15% curriculum and the rest focused-freelance work so you are moving at the pace you need, and where you need to be working. We look at where you are and focus our efforts there:
- Still shaping the idea? We help you test it against real problems and real people before you invest months in it.
- Need to build? You get hands-on engineering and product help, plus training in AI and modern prototyping tools, so you can get a working version in front of users quickly.
- Have a product but no traction? We focus on go-to-market strategy, product augmentation, finding your first customers, sharpening your positioning, or getting your sales motion working.
- Already growing? We help you with what comes next, whether that’s fundraising, hiring, or scaling.
As your venture changes, the support changes with it.
Question everything
Good starting points include a frustration you know firsthand, fixing a process that wastes people’s time, an assumption nobody has questioned, or something that only recently became possible.
Your idea doesn’t need to be a trillion-dollar vision. A tool that gives a local shop owner their evenings back is just as valuable to us as reinventing an industry. A problem doesn’t have to be global to be worth solving.
What you’ll walk away with
You’ll leave Start with real progress from wherever you began: a validated idea, a working product, paying customers, or a company ready for its next stage. You’ll also have the skills and relationships to keep building long after the program ends. Who knows, you might walk away with an investment from an investor on pitch day.
$10,000 to keep going
Each class awards a $10,000 prize to one participant to push their work forward.
The world is not finished. Help build what comes next.