Using design to help you get unstuck on what matters most

Startup by Design

A 6-month venture-building group for early-stage founders, aspiring founders, and creative entrepreneurs ready to build momentum—without burning out.

 
 

September 2025 - February 2026

For people with a spark of an idea, a beta offer, or an early-stage venture who want to build with clarity, intention, and support.

This program meets you in the early, uncertain stages by offering structure without rigidity. You’ll experiment your way forward—at your speed—in a way that’s aligned, sustainable, and energizing.

(Asks three questions and prompts you to schedule a call with me. If you can’t find a good time, click here to begin.)

This is for you if...

You’re building something new—and you want to do it with intention.

Whether you’re:

  • Exploring an idea: You’ve got a spark, but it’s still taking shape. You want support moving from vision to early traction.

  • Just launched a beta: You’ve tested something out and want accountability and momentum to refine it.

  • Serving early customers but unsure what’s working: You’ve got signs of traction but aren’t ready to scale. You need space to test, reflect, and redesign.

This is a place to build thoughtfully—with structure, support, and space to experiment.

Some of the curiosities that you might bring to this program include: 

  • Identifying what your business or product might be

  • Help validating or refining an idea before investing too much

  • Understanding customer feedback and identifying what’s resonating

  • Refining positioning, audience fit, or offer delivery

  • How to stabilize or grow without breaking what’s already working

  • Looking to go from spotty to recurring or more sustainable revenue

Whether you’re in the very early stages or are already serving early customers, this experience has something for you.

We’ll be grounding in experimentation and iteration designed to support your business and you as a founder. 

  • Experimentation isn’t just for ideation—it’s also for evolving something that’s already live.

  • Iteration is a powerful part of the process, whether you’re still mulling an idea or already launched. 

  • And getting clear on what are assumptions and what is fact before you scale will save you headaches later

(Asks three questions and prompts you to schedule a call with me. If you can’t find a good time, click here to begin.)

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What we’ll do together

We’ll meet for six months of lightly structured but high-impact collaboration:

  • 2x/month 90-min group calls

    • One with a practical construct

    • One exploratory discussion and debugging space

  • Three individual 30-min coaching calls

    • Month 1, Month 4, and Month 6

  • Optional prompts between sessions to keep you moving

  • A private Circle space to share insights and questions

All group calls will be recorded and all content shared in a central space for future reference.

The spirit of this group experience is to help you access momentum and confidence, at a pace that works for you. Show up for all or some of the calls, do all or part of the activities. Use this as a container to help you create the momentum and accountability you need. 

Each month builds on the last, offering new lenses to test, evolve, and design your way forward:

  • We begin by sharing our ideas (or starter ideas). This is not a time to do a lot of market analysis or to statistically identify the best business. It’s instead a chance to listen to what’s pulling you forward. I believe that you’ll be most successful building something you want to see in the world, and so that’s the driver.

    Also this month, we’ll discuss what’s holding us back. Every one of us (myself included) will have things that are keeping us from moving forward with ease. Let’s get those surfaced so we can design for them.

  • This, my friends, is the oft-forgotten step that never fails to deliver. This month, we’ll take the time to really get clear on why we want to build any business, and why this business. It’s this that will serve as a foundation and a pillar of support as you go through the inevitable highs and lows of building a business.

  • Here’s where we start to get really tangible. I’ll introduce the experimenter’s mindset and the tools that go along with it. You may have experimented in the past, but probably not with the structure I’m going to recommend. Depending on where you are in building your business and how quickly you want to gain insight that moves you forward, from here you can kick off your first business experiment. Or you may choose to make your first experiment not about your business, just to begin building your experimentation muscle.

    In subsequent months, I’ll be introducing new concepts building on this. But this is the month we lay the groundwork for market-driven experimentation, so you can get data that helps you move forward.

  • This month, we’ll begin to uncover assumptions. What assumptions is your business built on? Getting honest with yourself here can yield a great set of questions on which to experiment.

    You may continue to run last month’s experiment, start a new one, or some combination.

  • As you begin to get information from experiments, you’ll start to make new decisions about your business. This month, we deep dive on sense-making. There’s an art to gathering feedback from experiments. The most useful insights aren’t always the most obvious things that pop up as you experiment. So, we’ll use your real life experiments to talk about the different kinds of insights and what they can offer.

    As with previous months, you may be also launching a new experiment or iterating a previous one.

  • None of us are under any illusions that you’ll have your startup done and dusted after 6 months. But my goal is to provide tools that help you as you go. In this final month, I want to share about the stages of intentional venture design. This is a framework I’ve used with many client companies (and my own) and which will help you consider what approaches are warranted when.

    As with all previous months, you may be also launching a new experiment or iterating a previous one.

Pending interest and practicalities : I may add a 3-day retreat in Florida (Feb/Mar) to deepen the work.

(Asks three questions and prompts you to schedule a call with me. If you can’t find a good time, click here to begin.)

What makes this different

Startup by Design doesn’t assume your path. It helps you design one.

It’s a co-created container that gives you:

  • Real tools to experiment in a way that is both doable and provides you the data you need to move forward

  • A space to reflect, recalibrate, and refine what you’re building

  • Practices for navigating ambiguity with clarity and momentum

It’s funding agnostic.

We take the stance that it’s ideal to be grounded in what your customer needs and what your product is before looking for funding. In that way, you’re in a powerful position to decide if you want growth to be funded by the business itself or by outside means. 

If you have or are seeking venture funding, you’re very welcome. Just know that we won’t be working to VC-focused growth goals.

Our objective here is different: immersing you in a set of skills that you can use over and over as your business grows, whether your objective is identifying product-market fit, increasing annual sales, or navigating a change trigger (a merger, a sudden market shift, etc.). We’re not vying to get you to your next traunch: we’re setting the foundation for a robust approach to running a business in an ambiguous world.

We treat uncertainty as the raw material of growth—not something to rush through, but something that creates space for real innovation.

This experience is a space to experiment with intentionality and structure in a way that gives you confidence without needing clarity. 

 
 

Why I built this

Hi, I’m Amy Bonsall.

I’ve spent my career helping some of the world’s most recognized companies—IDEO, Google, John Deere, Old Navy—navigate growth and change. 

In my decade at IDEO, I built and ran a Venture Design practice, launching many corporate ventures. From there, I led new ventures at Old Navy and spearheaded the re-launch of a underperforming business.

I’ve shared my expertise in spaces such as Entrepreneur Magazine, Harvard Business Review, SXSW conference, IDEOU (you may know me from the popular IDEOU course on designing a business), and more.

But there’s something different about building a business yourself. It’s personal. While my product isn’t me, it also isn’t not me. There’s a vulnerability in that that makes it feel higher stakes.

As I’ve built this business, I’ve weaved far more than design thinking into it to make it work for me. Besides design, I’ve leveraged science (neuroscience, biology, behavior change) and embodied practices (somatics, mindfulness, etc.) to make building a business sustainable. And from there, I built tools that actually work—especially in the foggy, in-between moments.

Startup by Design is the program I wish I had when I first started my business.

It’s practical, paced for real life, and designed to help you move forward without burning out.

Let me save you the years of trial and error. Let’s build what’s next—on purpose.

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How to join

$600/month* · 6-month commitment

Includes all programming, group sessions, individual coaching, and community support.

Next cohort: Sept 2025 – Feb 2026

Reserve your spot by applying here:

(Asks three questions and prompts you to schedule a call with me. If you can’t find a good time, click here to begin.)

*A note on pricing
I’ve set the price to reflect the care, thought, and experience I’ve put into this program—while still keeping it accessible for early-stage founders. My hope is that it’s sustainable for both of us: enough to support my time and energy, without putting pressure on your business before it’s ready.

My goal is to help both our businesses grow in a way that lets us choose whether or not to seek outside funding—not depend on it.

If the cost feels like a stretch right now, just let me know in the application. We’ll figure out what’s possible.