Our Techscaler Catalyst Experience

A journey through problem discovery, market validation and commercial execution.

We arrived at Catalyst with a working MVP. That turned out to be the problem.

Having something built makes you feel further along than you are. It is easy to mistake a functioning product for a validated one, and easier still to answer questions about your market by describing your features.

On 19 February 2026, J-Pool was accepted into the Techscaler Catalyst programme. We expected to be told to keep building. Instead the programme asked us to step back and look at the product more honestly. Was the problem as clear to everyone else as it was to us? Did our commercial model reflect how customers actually buy?

The Build phase

Build was taught through a series of virtual sessions, and it took us back to foundations. The recurring theme was that an MVP is a testing instrument, not an achievement.

Testing assumptions. Rob Gelb’s Problem Discovery session set out how to separate what you know from what you merely believe. We had already begun that work through our own research, where an early survey showed us how much of our thinking still rested on assumption. The session turned it into a discipline rather than a one off exercise.

Prioritising the market. Simon Greany’s Market and Customer Discovery session led to the most significant change we made during the programme. We redefined our target market.

Part of that came from a distinction we had not been making clearly enough: the user of a product is not always the buyer. We had been describing J-Pool almost entirely through the eyes of the person taking the journey. That is the right way to build the product. It is not the right way to sell it.

The other part was security. Working through who we were actually serving made clear that security is not a feature sitting alongside the others. For the communities we want to serve, it is the precondition for everything else. Our own survey had already told us this. People described trust in practical terms: verified identities, control over who they travel with, real accountability. Redefining the market made us treat that as a starting point rather than a reassurance.

Solution discovery. Ceri Shaw’s session covered using the MVP to observe how people actually respond to a product rather than how you expect them to, which showed us what still needed refinement.

Pitching at CodeBase Stirling

In March I pitched J-Pool at CodeBase Stirling. Only a selected few founders from the cohort were chosen to pitch there at all, which meant the room was already a filtered one before anyone stood up.

The difficulty was not the questions. It was standing up there at all.

Being visible is not a natural setting for me. There is a particular discomfort in speaking about something you have built to a room of experienced founders and investors, and in accepting that the work no longer speaks only to you. That was the part I had to push through, and it is the part I would not have chosen without the programme requiring it.

It also forces a specific kind of clarity. The problem, the opportunity and the commercial proposition have to hold together as one story, and any join you have papered over becomes visible the moment you say it out loud.

The Grow phase

Progressing into Grow moved our attention firmly towards commercial execution.

Revenue experimentation. Moe Hanafy’s session is where I learnt to build a financial model, and it was the standout session of the programme for exactly that reason. It did not point at the work and leave us to find our own way into it. It taught the thing itself.

It also challenged most of what I thought I understood about business. I had a clear sense of what J-Pool was for and who it served. What I did not have was a grasp of how any of that translates into numbers someone else can interrogate. A financial model is indifferent to what you meant. It only responds to what you can justify.

I want to be specific about why the work was hard, because “financial modelling” sounds like a task and it is not. First there was the terminology, an entire vocabulary that had to be learnt before the work could begin. Then the assumptions, each one a decision about the future that had to be defensible rather than convenient. Then the tweaking, because changing a single assumption moves everything downstream of it. Then the testing, which is where you find out which of your assumptions were actually load bearing.

It was slow, unglamorous and genuinely difficult. It is also the work that made our commercial thinking real rather than aspirational.

Going live. Ifeoluwa Ogunbufunmi’s session covered customer acquisition, and particularly the value of identifying genuine champions. Adoption inside a trusted community does not start with a campaign. It starts with someone inside that community willing to vouch for you.

Founder led sales. Fraser Wilson framed early sales as disciplined discovery rather than persuasion. Prospect conversations are for listening, and what you hear should change both the product and the message.

Operational focus. Claire Rampen’s session was a reminder that early stage teams have to prioritise the work that matters most and resist adding complexity that feels productive but is not.

Grow completed. Raise next.

Beyond the sessions themselves, one of the programme’s real strengths was learning alongside a cohort of founders working through the same problems at the same time.

Being chosen to pitch at Stirling was the first filter. Coming through that pitch and then through Grow was the second, and a smaller group again came out the other side. We are in that group, and we came out with a redefined target market, a financial model we understand from the inside, a clearer view of security as foundation rather than feature, and a founder rather more willing to be visible than the one who started.

We are putting all of that into practice through live pilots in Aberdeen. When those are complete, our attention moves to the next stage: Raise.