After completing the Treefrog Accelerator and later participating in the Schulich Venture Finance program, I had the opportunity to join JumpSTART, a program delivered in partnership with YSpace, the Schulich School of Business, and Treefrog Accelerator. The JumpSTART Program is made possible through funding from the York Region Innovation Fund.

JumpSTART was focused on helping entrepreneurs improve their business readiness, strengthen their market approach, and better prepare their companies for growth. For me, the most valuable part of the program was the chance to look at MindXR from a different angle and question some of the assumptions I had already built around the product.

My mentor during the program was Sandeep Todi. Working with him was useful because the discussions were not only about the big picture. We also looked at smaller details that I had not considered serious problems before.

Some of those details were actually important.

As a founder, it is easy to become too familiar with your own product. You know why every feature exists, what the idea behind it is, and how it fits into the larger vision. A customer does not see any of that. They only see what is in front of them, and they make a judgment very quickly.

During JumpSTART, I realized that some ideas I considered innovative could actually create hesitation, confusion, or even distrust if they were presented in the wrong way. At the same time, there were other parts of MindXR that had stronger value for customers but were not being emphasized enough.

That was one of the more useful lessons for me.

It made me think much more carefully about the difference between what makes sense to a founder and what makes sense to a customer.

Some of the feedback I received was about small things, but those small things could affect how the whole product was perceived. In some cases, the right decision was not to add more, but to simplify, change the way an idea was presented, or give more attention to the parts that already had clear value.

We also discussed ideas that were outside the immediate roadmap of MindXR. One of them was the possible use of crypto or token-based systems in the broader ecosystem.

I found the idea interesting, especially for things like participation, rewards, digital ownership, and future platform economics. But I did not want to add it just because the technology was available or because it sounded innovative. I decided to keep the idea for later.

For me, timing matters as much as the idea itself. A concept can be good and still be wrong for the current stage of a product, the current market, or the regulatory environment. I would rather keep an idea on the roadmap and use it when it actually makes sense than force it into the product too early.

Overall, JumpSTART was a good opportunity to use Sandeep’s experience to look at MindXR more critically.

It did not change the whole direction of the startup, and that was not really the point. What it did was help me notice things I might otherwise have ignored: what could create distrust, what needed more attention, what should be simplified, and what was better left for another time.

Sometimes those smaller corrections are just as important as the big decisions.

I have been working on MindXR for a few years now. During that time, I have gone through different accelerator and educational programs, refined both the idea and the product design, prepared hundreds of pages of business and technical documentation, and collected feedback from mentors, entrepreneurs, and potential users. At this point, I feel that the idea and design have been questioned, reshaped, and polished many times over. What I need most now is not another round of planning, but the right environment to finally bring it to market. Unfortunately, building and launching a global digital product from Iran comes with serious limitations and a much higher risk of failure, regardless of the quality of the product itself. What I need is a safe and stable environment and access to a functioning startup ecosystem where I can finally put these few years of preparation into practice.

The ongoing delays in the processing of Start-Up Visa applications by IRCC have been particularly frustrating. After spending years preparing MindXR for its next stage, the biggest obstacle we face is no longer the product’s design itself, but rather gaining access to an environment where it has a fair chance to thrive.

Behnam Razipour · February 7, 2025