​SESSION 5

​Refining Around Your ICP

​Interviews, validation & MVP — testing your hypothesis with real humans

​Your Ideal Customer Profile is not a demographic. It's not "SMEs aged 25–45 in the tech sector." It is a precise, psychographic portrait of a specific human being with a specific pain — and if you haven't met that person yet, you're not ready to build.

​Session 5 of The Psychology of Startups: Building Something Meaningful is the most hands-on session in the series. We cover structured user interviews, the psychology behind getting honest feedback (not polite feedback), and how to build a Minimum Viable Product using modern no-code tools like Bubble and Lovable — without writing a single line of code.

​Led by Morné Maritz, who has guided hundreds of founders through the validation process and watched too many skip it, this session will either accelerate your confidence or save you from a very expensive mistake.

​✅ What You'll Learn

• ​How to build a psychographic ICP that's actually useful in product decisions

• ​The Mom Test framework — how to ask interview questions that survive social politeness

• ​How to design a 5-question hypothesis-testing interview from scratch

• ​A live walkthrough of Bubble and Lovable for rapid MVP development

• ​How to score your evidence and make the go/no-go call with integrity

​🎤 Your Facilitator: Morné Maritz — Founder & CEO, Cogniate | Organisational Psychologist | EdTech founder with LOIs from BDO, KPMG, and Fortune 500 L&D departments. Morné's platform reduces enterprise course creation from 160 hours to 1.5 — built on the validation principles taught in this very session.

​🎤 Your Host: Diane Gogoleva — [Networking Expert & Events Curator | Founder of ________ | Passionate about connecting founders with the real humans their products are built for.]

​Session 5 of 9. Bring your prototype concept — you'll use it in the live exercise.