Your alumni finish with a product. Not a pitch deck.
Twelve weeks. Twenty participants, recruited from your own alumni, graduates or researchers. Every one of them ends with working software at a live URL, on a programme that runs under your name.
Talk to usTwo problems nobody could solve.
One person can now build real software.
Directing AI, without writing code and without hiring anyone. This is not a projection. The platform this programme runs on — the applications, the curriculum delivery, the assessments, the participant tracking — was built by one person, alone, directing AI, for about 3,250€ in tooling. You are reading this on it.
Start with alumni, not students.
The instinct is final-year students, and it is the weakest fit on offer. The whole method rests on one claim: that earned domain expertise is the input nobody can buy, prompt or download. A twenty-two-year-old has not had time to acquire one. A forty-year-old alum has — along with savings, a professional network, and a problem they have watched an industry fail to fix for fifteen years. Run it with students and you get capability and employability, which are real. Run it with alumni and you get ventures.
Four budgets. One corridor.
Engagement, and ventures attributable to you
Measured in participation and companies formed, rather than newsletter opens.
Employability at the point it is measured
A demonstrable AI capability outcome, in a market where entry-level technical roles are contracting.
Capability, delivered for credit
A module that ends in twenty deployed products rather than twenty business model canvases.
Commercialisation without a licensing negotiation
Researchers build the thing and find out whether anyone wants it, before anyone argues about terms.
Sell one, then walk it down the corridor.
These are four different budget holders inside one institution, each measured on something different, all of them served by the same twelve weeks. The curriculum does not change. Only the recruitment pool does, and with it the person whose reporting line the outcome lands in.
Outcomes, not hopes.
Deployed products, counted
A live URL per participant is a binary fact, not a judgement.
Venture formation, counted
Businesses that exist at the end of a term, attributable to the institution.
A demonstrable AI capability outcome
For graduates entering a market where the entry-level technical roles are contracting.
Alumni engagement that is real
Where the cohort is drawn from alumni, measured in participation rather than newsletter opens.
A demo day with something to demonstrate
Working software, shown to customers first. Investors optional.
Reporting, per participant and per cohort
From the platform. Nothing to assemble by hand at the end of term.
A written problem statement and a scoped idea.
Twenty named buyers, five documented conversations.
A working end-to-end product.
Payment processing live, pre-launch audit passed.
A live URL and real users giving feedback.
A pitch deck and a 90-day plan.
Ten to twelve hours a week.
One 90-minute live session, recorded, and small peer groups between sessions. It fits alongside a full course load, a research position or a job. There is no technical prerequisite — participants do not need to code, and they are not taught to. They are taught to direct.
Not a certificate.
A working product
Deployed, at a live URL, that anyone can open.
The ability to keep building
Without the programme, and without hiring anyone.
Evidence, either way
Documented proof that real buyers want it — or documented proof that they do not, which is worth the same and costs a term instead of a decade.
Everything they built
Their own account, code, domain and customer list. The programme takes no equity, no licence and no revenue share.
A 90-day plan
For the day after the term ends.
Three tiers. You choose how much you run.
Everything, under your brand. You recruit the participants and we do the rest. For a first cohort, or where no staff are available.
We run the live sessions and the curriculum. Your staff run the peer groups and the pastoral care.
You run the programme every term. We provide the platform, the facilitator training and certification, and the updates.
NO FUND, NO INVESTOR RELATIONSHIPS AND NO ENGINEERING STAFF ARE REQUIRED AT ANY TIER.
What we provide, and what you provide.
We provide — the curriculum
The full twelve-week curriculum and every weekly deliverable.
We provide — the platform
Applications, selection, curriculum delivery, participant tracking and reporting.
We provide — the live sessions
Delivered by someone who has built and shipped the thing being taught.
We provide — facilitator certification
Training and certification for your own staff, so you can run it yourselves.
You provide — the participants
Recruited from your own alumni, graduates, students or researchers.
You provide — your name
The programme runs under your brand, not ours.
You provide — one or two staff
To be trained as facilitators, depending on the tier.
You provide — the room
For demo day, if it is held in person.
Your policy applies, unchanged.
The programme takes nothing — no equity, no licence, no revenue share, from the participants or from the institution. Your existing student, staff and researcher IP policy governs whatever gets built, exactly as it does today. We will state that in writing at the start rather than leave it to be asked about halfway through.
No university has run this yet.
The consumer cohort is the first one and it has not run. There are no alumni and no case studies, and I am not going to invent any. What exists is the method, the platform it runs on, twenty years of building products for other people, and one worked example: mine. The first institution to run this is buying a pilot, and should be priced like one.
Luis Gonçalves
Twenty years in digital product development. Led the agile transformation at Nokia. Teaches at Porto Business School. Before this, a venture that lost about 250,000€ — which is where the method comes from. Then the platform you are reading this on, built alone, directing AI.
Accelerators were built for a bottleneck that is gone.
Your participants can build now, and a working product with real users does not need a funding round in order to exist. Which means the programme can finally be measured on something the university produces.