Gregor Sinai

Maybe this is a familiar scene: a founding team has a promising technology, a polished pitch deck, and a product roadmap that grows more ambitious every week. The prototype works. Advisors are encouraging. A few potential customers have said, “Interesting.” Then comes the difficult part: nobody buys, pilots stall, and the team discovers that “interesting”

The most expensive startup mistakes are often the ones someone could have warned you about.   A wrong assumption about the market. A product nobody really needs. A decision that sets you back months. Founders need to make mistakes to learn. But do they always have to be their own? This is where mentoring comes

  Building a startup in a crowded market can feel a bit like arriving late to a dinner party where everyone is already talking at once. The instinct is to speak louder. That is usually a mistake. Startups do not lose because the market is full. They lose because their difference is vague, cosmetic, or

Adaptronics, COSMOKE and TECHiFAB took the top three places at the Infineon Startup Challenge 2026 Demo Day on October 6 at EBSCON in Graz. Their technologies address three practical challenges in robotics: gripping objects, sensing touch and controlling movement. INiTS supported the challenge as one of its business coaching and pitch training partners. The program

There’s a considerable distance between „I have interesting technology“ and „I want to start a company.“ Many researchers know it well: you have a promising research result. And then what? Too often, good ideas stay in the drawer, not because they’re bad, but because nobody shows what the next step could look like.   AI:SPiN

  Some startups do not fail because the idea is bad. They fail because every week produces motion, but not enough progress. Meetings happen. Tasks multiply. Decisions circle back. The product roadmap expands. Nobody is quite sure who owns what. The team is working hard, but the company has started to resemble a hamster wheel:

  A promising solution is not automatically a viable business. Pressure-testing your business model means examining whether a clearly identified buyer will pay, whether you can reach and convert customers through a realistic route to market, and whether the resulting revenue can eventually support the costs of acquiring, delivering to, and serving them. A startup

    At the beginning, every startup is partly fiction. The customer segment is a hypothesis. The problem is a hypothesis. The product is a hypothesis. The price, channel, adoption process, and market timing are hypotheses too. Starting with assumptions is the nature of building something new. The danger begins when assumptions quietly get promoted

  If your product risk is high, the problem may be real. But your solution may not yet be the right one.   Before adding features, validate whether users understand, use, and value the core solution enough to change their behaviour. A common early-stage trap looks productive from the outside: the team keeps shipping. New