A nine-day founder program
One weekend to build a working MVP. Five weekdays to put it in market — real ads, real spend, real customers. One weekend back to read what the market said. The market decides before the deck does.
Request an Exploratory Call →Most entrepreneurship programs end with a plan. Signal Sprint ends with a result. Twenty founders spend nine days doing what any real business eventually has to do — find out, in market, whether anyone wants what they're building.
The Structure
Days 1–2 · Weekend
Build
In person
Founders arrive with an idea and spend the weekend turning it into a working MVP — something real enough to put in front of a customer Monday morning. Day one starts by refining the idea and defining what a good signal actually looks like. Day two is spent building the smallest version of the offer that can go to market.
Days 3–7 · Weekdays
Field
Remote
Founders take the MVP into market — real ads, real spend, real customers, not just conversations. Each day includes a peer board check-in to troubleshoot and adjust course. What comes back is evidence: sales, sign-ups, clicks, or silence.
Days 8–9 · Weekend
Signal
In person
Founders return to read what the market said, working through the data with their peer board, and decide, with evidence, whether to keep going, change direction, or stop.
The Mechanism
Every cohort splits into boards of five. Alongside instruction, each board becomes a working sounding board for its members — reviewing decisions, pressure-testing assumptions, and holding each other to the plan. The board huddles daily throughout the nine days, in the field as much as in the room.
A detailed day-by-day curriculum is available on request — ask for it here.
Who It's For
Signal Sprint works as a standalone offering, an intersession program, or a complement to existing curriculum. Either way, founders leave with real market evidence behind their next decision — a concrete, visible result for the cohort, not just a certificate.
Nine days works for ideas that can move at nine-day speed — e-commerce and DTC concepts, digital products and apps, subscription and membership models, local service businesses, marketplace concepts, and retail ideas that can run a landing page or limited ad test. Ideas that need manufacturing lead time, regulatory review, or a long enterprise sales cycle need more runway than a sprint can give them.
Signal Sprint is run by Shabbir Sharaf, founder of Lake Washington Advisors. Shabbir spent eight years at Amazon at the inception of the third-party seller business, and has operated seven apparel brands over twenty-one years, deploying more than fifteen million dollars of his own capital along the way.
Lake Washington Advisors →