100X Founder Workshop · Starts June 9, 2026

Love The Problem

A 4-week founder sprint. Run V.I.B.E. end-to-end with AI leverage at every step.

AI made building cheap. It did not make knowing-what-to-build cheap. Vet → Interview → Build → Experiment, in 4 weeks, with the AI moves that turn the same tools from poison into cure. Two teams of 5 founders, working a real idea to a pitched mafia offer.

Enroll now → See what's inside

June 9, 2026 · 10 seats · $1,495 per founder

Charged at checkout. Full refund within the first 7 days of the cohort — no questions.

Taught by Ash Maurya — creator of Lean Canvas, author of Running Lean + Scaling Lean, founder of LEANSTACK.

A decade ago, capital was the constraint.

Then execution.

Today, AI has made both cheap.

The scarce resource now is problem clarity — knowing who has the problem, how badly, and whether they'd actually pay you to solve it.

That can't be prompt-engineered. It has to be uncovered.

"

A problem well defined is half-solved.

— Charles Kettering

AI made building cheap. It did not make this cheap. The constraint moved.

Every validation effort — every real test of whether someone will pay to solve the problem — rests on this one skill: defining the problem well enough to know what to build, and what not to build.

Most founders skip it. Four weeks here fixes that.

The framework

V.I.B.E. — the AI-era founder's validation loop

When building was expensive, mistakes were rate-limited. Now you can build the wrong thing in a weekend. Every AI-era founder needs all four steps — in this order.

  1. Vet the problem

    Stress-test the business model before you talk to anyone. Lean Canvas, riskiest assumption, the smallest segment that could carry the business. Then point AI at it — comparable-company sizing, conversion benchmarks, a Monte Carlo on the unit economics. You walk out with a defensible range and the three assumptions that have to be true, not "I think there's a market." Most ideas should die here. That's the point.

  2. Interview for evidence

    Now talk to customers — but not cold. First, point AI at the public corners where your customer is already complaining: Reddit, App Store reviews, support tickets in adjacent tools, "I hate when…" searches. AI clusters the language and counts the frequency. You walk into interviews with a hypothesis shaped by behavioral data — five to ten sharp conversations instead of a hundred fishing trips. AI does the breadth. You do the depth.

  3. Build a demo

    Now — and only now — you vibe code. An interactive demo, in half a day, that does the one thing your interviews said matters. Not the ten. The one. Same tools that ruin founders at step one are the highest-leverage move at step three. The only thing that changed is the order. The demo isn't a wireframe people have to imagine. It's the offer they just used.

  4. Experiment for demand

    Pitch a mafia offer to real early adopters. Five components, timeless. What's new is the iteration speed — AI clusters objections from your recorded pitches, simulated customer audiences stress-test the offer before a real human sees it. The version that hits the prospect is the twentieth, not the first. Level 3 evidence: they paid, or committed something scarce — money, time, reputation. Where opinions stop and signal begins.

Some founders leave Week 1 with a sharpened problem. Some leave with permission to drop it. Both are wins.

"Speed without validation is just efficient failure."

The building part — the part AI makes 100x faster — is step 3 of 4. Not step 1. In this workshop you run all four, in order, in four weeks.

Myths worth killing

You've been told problem discovery is slow and complicated

Most of what you've heard about customer research was designed for market research at scale. Founder problem discovery works differently.

"You need to run a survey."

Surveys measure what you already know to ask. Interviews discover what you don't. At the problem discovery stage, you don't know the questions yet — so surveys are worse than useless.

"You need to talk to 100 people."

With the right process, ten well-chosen early adopters tell you more than a hundred random respondents. The skill isn't volume; it's picking the right ten.

"It takes eight weeks or more."

With AI doing the breadth — mining public language across Reddit, reviews, support tickets — and you doing the depth on 5–10 sharp interviews, eight-week discovery compresses to two. LEANSpark holds both streams in one place.

Who this is for

Founders

You have an idea. You're tired of guessing. You've read the books but reading isn't the same as doing — and doing without structure is how founders burn six months on the wrong problem.

Product managers

Problem discovery is your real job — but most PM training skips it or treats it as survey-writing. Whether you're shaping the next roadmap at work, pitching a bold product bet, or quietly building what you'd launch on your own, the skill is the same.

You don't need to have quit your job. You don't need a co-founder. You do need to be willing to interview real humans — not just prompt an AI and call it research.

The 4 weeks

V.I.B.E., end-to-end, in four weeks

One half-day live session per week. Real work between sessions, in your team of 5, inside LEANSpark.

  1. Vet

    Stress-test the business model

    Sharpen the canvas. Pick the riskiest assumption. Narrow to the segment that has to carry the business.

    You leave with: a defensible canvas you can interview against.

  2. Interview

    Move from said → shown → paid

    10+ real customer interviews per team. Live capture in LEANSpark. Synthesis from said → shown — the move most founders skip.

    The AI move this week. Before the first interview, you run an AI mining sweep in LEANSpark — Reddit, App Store reviews, forum threads in your category. Claude clusters the pain language and the workarounds. You walk into every interview with a hypothesis shaped by what customers already wrote, unprompted. The interviews get sharper. The transcripts go back into LEANSpark for synthesis. You leave with two evidence streams that agree — or disagree, which is also useful.

    You leave with: a narrow-match pattern, not a vibe.

  3. Build

    A demo of the outcome

    Vibe-coded, landing-paged, or walked through. Cheap enough nobody falls in love with it. Real enough to test an offer with.

    The AI move this week. You hand Claude (or your vibe-coding tool of choice) the narrow-match pattern from LEANSpark — the one outcome your interviews said matters most. Half a day later you have an interactive demo of that single outcome. Not production code. Not the ten features that sounded impressive. The one that earns the reaction "wait — when can I have this?" The demo IS the offer you'll pitch in Week 4.

    You leave with: something real to put in front of someone.

  4. Experiment

    Pitch a mafia offer

    Construct the offer. Pitch it to the cohort. Pitch it to real prospects if your team's ready. Capstone: each team presents the offer and the signal.

    You leave with: a pitched mafia offer + the V.I.B.E. loop in muscle memory.

The next time you have an idea, you don't read the books. You run the loop.

What's included

Three things in your $1,495

  1. Live with Ash and your team, for four weeks

    Four half-day sessions (3.5 hours each) plus a 30-minute 1:1 in week four to pattern-match your team's signal. Everything recorded; everything designed around doing the work, not watching it.

  2. LEANSpark for two months

    Canvas, mining, interview capture, and the cohort community all live in the same app you use for the work itself. You leave with real artifacts, not slides — and keep using them after the cohort ends.

  3. A pitched mafia offer

    A capstone where your team presents your mafia offer to the cohort with the signal data behind it. A LEANSTACK certificate. And the V.I.B.E. loop in muscle memory — the next time you have an idea, you run it before you build anything.

Who this is not for

  • Founders looking for launch hacks or growth loops. Those come after you've defined the problem well. This is upstream of all of that.
  • People who want validation without interviews. If you're not willing to talk to real humans, this won't work.
  • Anyone expecting AI to do the discovery for you. AI helps with mining and synthesis. It doesn't replace the conversation.
  • Founders who won't work on a teammate's idea. Two ideas get picked from the cohort to run V.I.B.E. on. If yours isn't picked, you're running the loop on someone else's — that's the apprenticeship.
  • Teams shopping for an off-site. The commitment is individual: about 10 hours per week for four weeks.
  • Founders without a starting idea who don't want to pick one. Pre-work will help you pick one — but you do have to arrive willing to commit to a hypothesis.

Taught by

Ash Maurya

Creator of Lean Canvas. Author of Running Lean and Scaling Lean. Founder of LEANSTACK.

"I'm not teaching this workshop because it scales. I'm teaching it because problem discovery is the one thing I can't yet hand off to the app — and it's where most founders lose the most time."

Fifteen years of teaching the messy work of finding problems worth solving. Coached founders across three continents, six funds, and a couple thousand businesses. LEANSpark — the AI co-founder platform you'll use during the workshop — is the system I've been refining the whole time.

Founding-Cohort Pricing · Locked through July

$1,495

Per founder. Includes 2 months of LEANSpark.

Enroll now →

Charged at checkout. 2 teams of 5. Founding-cohort pricing locked through July; $1,995 thereafter.

Questions

What's the time commitment?

One half-day live session per week (3.5 hours) plus about 6-7 hours with your team between sessions inside LEANSpark. Plan for about 10 hours per week for four weeks. If you can't put in 10 hours a week, don't enroll — it's built for people who can do the work.

When are the live sessions held?

Tuesdays, 9:00 AM – 12:30 PM Central Time, for four consecutive weeks: June 9, 16, 23, and 30. That's 14 hours of live time across the cohort. Recordings posted within 24 hours if you have to miss one.

How are teams formed?

You arrive with a canvas built in pre-work. On Day 1, every founder pitches. Two ideas are selected — based on channel ease and market size — to run V.I.B.E. on. Teams of 5 form around those two ideas, balanced for skill mix. Ash assigns; you don't have to draft.

What if my idea isn't picked?

You run V.I.B.E. on a teammate's idea instead. That's the apprenticeship. By week 4, you've executed the loop end-to-end on a real problem — and the next time you bring out your own idea, the loop is muscle memory. The skill is the asset, not the cohort idea.

What if I miss a session?

All live sessions are recorded. You can catch up async. But with only 4 sessions total, missing more than one meaningfully sets you back — and your team feels it too.

Do I need to have a startup idea already?

Yes — you need to arrive willing to commit to an idea by the end of Week 1. If you don't have one yet, pre-work (sent two weeks before the cohort starts) walks you through picking one from your domain expertise. What won't work: arriving idea-less and uncommitted. The four weeks move too fast for that.

I'm a product manager — is this for me?

Yes, explicitly. Problem discovery is the PM skill most often skipped in training and most punished in practice. Whether you want to lead product better at your current company, pitch a bolder bet internally, or eventually build your own thing — the craft is the same.

What happens after the four weeks?

You leave with V.I.B.E. as muscle memory and 2 months of LEANSpark to keep running it — on the cohort idea or your own. A future 100X Founder cohort (90-day) will pick up where this one ends, focused on scaling the mafia offer into traction with a peer group.

What's the refund policy?

Full refund within the first 7 days of the cohort — no questions. After week 1, no refunds. A mid-cohort refund hurts everyone's experience, so if you're not sure, use the first week to decide.

Can co-founders enroll together?

Yes — each co-founder enrolls separately. You may end up on the same team or different teams depending on how Ash balances the two teams after Day 1 pitches.

Why "Love The Problem"?

Because most founders fall in love with their solution and spend months building it for a problem that doesn't exist — or exists but nobody will pay to solve. Loving the problem is the only thing that keeps you on course long enough for the solution to matter.

10 seats.
2 teams of 5.
June 9 start.

Founding-cohort pricing locked at $1,495 per founder.

Enroll now →