Building Sollos: Venture Building
5 min read
Venture Building, Product Strategy, Business Models, Startups, Innovation, Leadership, Sollos
Turning a validated idea into a real venture meant running product, business, brand, and operations in parallel, not sequence.
Turning a validated idea into a real business?
In July 2022, the project was greenlit to move from concept to reality.
Up to that point, Sollos had been an internal initiative. A strong case, validated science, a compelling deck, but still largely theoretical. That changed when funding landed and we were backed to build it as a real venture.
That meant designing a product, shaping a commercial model, building a brand, and putting the foundations of a company in place at the same time.
I moved into BCG X’s Charlotte Street office with one key helper and began co-running the venture build with a small, focused team. The pace was high and the scope was broad.
On the product side, we shaped the MVP through fast iteration. We mapped user stories, tested features, refined flows, and ran the algorithm against real musical inputs. Decisions were made quickly, informed by direct feedback rather than assumptions.
In parallel, we worked through the business model. Pricing tiers, revenue streams, licensing options, customer acquisition routes. We built detailed financial models, tested assumptions, and pressure-tested scenarios to understand what scale could realistically look like.
Alongside that sat the venture mechanics. Structure, governance, hiring plans, and the legal building blocks needed for a standalone business. We scoped early roles, explored ownership models, and planned how the venture could eventually be handed over.
Nothing ran in isolation. Product decisions shaped brand choices. Commercial assumptions fed back into feature prioritisation. Governance decisions influenced how fast we could move.
This phase was intense. Small team, long days, constant trade-offs. But it was also where the idea became tangible. The work stopped being hypothetical and started behaving like a real business.
The biggest lesson was simple but hard-won: ventures don’t succeed by stacking workstreams. They succeed by running them together. The product isn’t ready until the business is ready. And the business doesn’t exist without a working product.