At Konsultori, we believe that sustainable growth starts long before the pitch deck and the investor meeting. It starts with knowing exactly who you’re building for, what they truly need, and why your solution matters to them more than any alternative — including doing nothing.
That’s why we are proud to be part of the Growth Navigator – a program by the Vienna Business Agency designed for exactly this moment: when a startup has proven it can get off the ground, and now needs to figure out how to grow deliberately.
About the Growth Navigator
- Sprint 1: Product–Market Alignment
- Sprint 2: Sales & Go-to-Market
- Sprint 3: Investment & Financing
- Sprint 4: Operational Excellence & Organisation
Founders can apply for all four sprints or only the ones most relevant to their current stage. Each sprint combines expert input, peer learning with other growth-oriented founders, and individual coaching sessions. Flexible, focused, and built for action.
Konsultori experts are part of the program across all four sprints – and we couldn’t be more excited to contribute. Our goal is always the same: help founders build clarity, confidence, and the strategic foundations that make growth sustainable.
Sprint 1: Product–Market Alignment – Why It Comes First
The first sprint of the Growth Navigator focuses on Product–Market Alignment – and there’s a reason it opens the program. Before you can sell at scale, raise a round, or build operational systems, you need to know that your product truly fits the market it’s meant to serve. Most founders believe they’ve already figured it out. But as the data consistently shows, premature scaling – growing before you’ve truly understood your customer – is one of the leading causes of startup failure. The Startup Genome Report puts it at 74% of high-growth startup failures.
In this sprint, founders work intensively on their offer, their target segments, and their value proposition. They learn how to systematically use customer feedback to sharpen their product or service — and walk away with a solid foundation for their next growth decisions.
After this sprint, founders have more clarity about their market and customers, a sharpened value proposition, and a reliable foundation for scaling.
Petra Wolkenstein, CEO, Konsultori
Meet the Trainers
Petra Wolkenstein
Petra Wolkenstein is a CEO at Konsultori and one of Austria’s most experienced startup advisors. She works with founders across all stages on strategy, product-market fit, sales, and investor readiness. In Sprint 1, Petra leads the 360° Feedback and Value Proposition Canvas review session – the culminating moment where founders test, challenge, and ultimately sharpen what they bring to market.
Lucia Vilsecker
Lucia Vilsecker is an expert in brand building, innovation processes, and entrepreneurship, and the founder of BLACK SWAN MAGIC – a studio dedicated to innovation and entrepreneurship. In the Growth Navigator, she led the workshops “Defining the Core” (PMF Assessment, Value Proposition Canvas deep-dive, and Core Segment definition) and “Core Benefits” (Messaging and Benefits for Marketing and Sales), and ran the 360° Feedback sessions with participating founders.
In Conversation with Lucia Vilsecker: Product–Market Fit
We sat down with Lucia Vilsecker after Sprint 1 to get her perspective on what founders struggle with, what shifts in this sprint, and what it takes to truly be ready to scale.
When founders arrive at the Product–Market Alignment sprint, what are the most common misconceptions they have about whether they’ve already found their product–market fit, and what does that misalignment actually look like in practice?
The most common misconception is that founders don’t clearly understand what product–market fit actually means. Many equate first revenues or early traction with product–market fit. But those are not the same thing. Traction means that someone is willing to try or buy your product. Product–market fit means that you can consistently generate sales within a defined customer segment at relatively stable acquisition costs and ideally see repeat purchases or ongoing usage.
Another typical pattern is that founders believe that once they’ve defined a target group, that group will naturally convert. In reality, the intended customer is often not the actual buyer.
In practice, this misalignment shows up as: inconsistent sales, high or unpredictable acquisition costs, lack of repeat usage and messaging that resonates internally but not externally. The key is to stay open and treat everything as a hypothesis — and to validate those hypotheses early using real data and KPIs.
You work a lot with the Value Proposition Canvas and customer segmentation. Where do startups most often go wrong when defining their core customer segment, and what’s the one shift in thinking that tends to unlock real clarity?
The most common mistake is that everything is defined from the inside out, meaning from the product perspective or from the founder’s own thinking. Very often, the “core segment” is unconsciously just a reflection of the founder themselves.
The real shift happens when founders manage to think from the outside in: understanding how customers think, what they struggle with and what they actually want to achieve. Once you truly step into the customer’s perspective, clarity increases dramatically. And with that clarity comes specificity in communication, which is a prerequisite for any effective marketing or sales.
Can you describe a specific moment or pattern you’ve seen in the sprint where a founder genuinely realizes something about their customers or product they hadn’t understood before – and what changes for them after that?
A recurring breakthrough moment is when founders realize that customers are not waiting for their solution. Customers are already solving their problems – often in imperfect and maybe even inefficient ways. And those solutions are not just functional, but also tied to habits, feelings and context.
This leads to a powerful shift: Founders understand that their product doesn’t just need to be “better” in theory, it needs to be meaningfully better for what the customer is actually trying to achieve and feel. After that moment, the focus changes from product features to real customer outcomes.
After the 360° Feedback session and VPC review, founders leave with a sharpened value proposition. What does “sharpened” actually mean in concrete terms – what does a before-and-after look like?
“Sharpened” means that the value proposition is no longer defined from the product perspective, but from the customer’s perspective.
Before: feature-driven, internally logical, broad and only focused on what the product does.
But after you can see a switch to: benefit-driven, externally understandable, clearly focused on one core segment and centered around what the customer gains.
In concrete terms, founders move from: “This is what our product does” – to – “This is what it helps a specific customer achieve and why that matters to them”. That shift enables clear, relevant and effective communication, which is essential for product-market fit.
What’s the one question every founder should be able to answer confidently before they even think about scaling – and how does this sprint help them get there?
The key question is: What are you achieving for whom and at what cost (CAC – Customer Acquisition Cost) compared to the value you generate (Customer Life Time Value)?
If founders cannot answer this clearly, they are not ready to scale. Because scaling without this clarity means: scaling uncertainty and ultimately burning money. Only when both sides – customer understanding and unit economics – are aligned, does scaling make sense.
The Takeaway: Build Before You Scale
Scaling without product–market clarity doesn’t accelerate growth – it accelerates the wrong things.
What Lucia’s answers make clear is that product–market fit isn’t a milestone you reach once – it’s a lens you apply continuously. The founders who came into Sprint 1 with traction left with something more valuable: a clear, customer-grounded understanding of why that traction happened, and what it will take to repeat it reliably.