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🐝    Tanishqa Bobde     ︎     ︎    

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Coaching an Early-Stage Mental Health Venture from Concept to Launch: Sukoon (Part of Forward Incubator)




Context

  • Sukoon (https://oursukoon.com/) is an early-stage social enterprise providing accessible, culturally sensitive psychological support for Arabic-speaking communities in the Netherlands, particularly people affected by migration and exile.
  • I was selected as a Business Coach for Forward Incubator’s 5 month venture validation programme, of which Sukoon was a part.
  • I coached Sukoon’s founder and the Student Consultants who supported her through the development of the venture from an early concept toward a validated and operational social enterprise.

My contributions

  • Supported the founder with human-centred design, value proposition refinement, customer understanding, co-creative experiments, goal-setting and prioritisation.
  • Helped translate broad ambitions into realistic plans and milestones, while navigating team dynamics, volunteer capacity and the practical constraints of building an early-stage venture.
  • My coaching approach combined empathy and deep listening with structure and constructive challenge, helping move uncertainty into clearer decisions, actions and priorities

Outcomes

  • Over the course of the programme, Sukoon progressed toward launch with its first psychologists and clients onboarded, co-creation activities underway, and an Arabic/English landing page live.
  • The work also resulted in a clearer value proposition, more focused priorities and an actionable plan for continuing beyond the incubator.

Key Challenges 

1. Founder overwhelm and burnout risk

Sukoon’s founder was juggling incubator expectations, deadlines, validation work and comparison with other ventures, which was creating pressure and making it harder to prioritise. 
My approach:
I helped reduce the work into a smaller set of meaningful priorities, starting from the venture’s purpose and defining the three most important outcomes to focus on. We reviewed progress already made, identified what actually needed attention now, and used prioritisation tools such as an Eisenhower matrix to separate urgent work from lower-value pressure. I also encouraged focusing on the highest-learning, lowest-effort experiments rather than trying to do everything at once.

2. Turning a meaningful idea into a testable venture

The mission was emotionally compelling, but the founder needed to translate it into clearer assumptions, experiments and practical next steps.
My approach:
I supported her in refining the value proposition, identifying key assumptions around desirability for customers and therapists, feasibility and viability, and designing co-creative experiments to learn directly from potential users. We worked toward a clearer model of what needed validating before investing more time or resources.

3. Team dynamics and capacity

As the venture developed, questions emerged around collaboration, roles, capacity and the need for additional support or a potential co-founder.
My approach:
I helped make those issues explicit rather than treating them as secondary. We discussed communication and team dynamics and I facilitated a team retrsopective to encourage open communication/feedback. I adviced to add the need for a potential co-founder to the venture’s feasibility assumptions.

4. Preparing the venture story and pitch

The founder also needed to communicate Sukoon clearly to others without losing the emotional purpose behind it.
My approach:
I supported pitch preparation by helping structure the story around the problem, target community, value proposition, evidence gathered so far and realistic next steps. The focus was on making the pitch both emotionally compelling and concrete — showing not only why Sukoon mattered, but how it could become viable

Learnings
🔨️How to balance empathy, psychological safety and constructive challenge, especially when supporting a founder through pressure, burnout risk and difficult team dynamics.
🔨️ Strengthened my ability to reduce complexity, prioritise what matters and turn broad ambitions into realistic, testable next steps.
🔨️ Learned to move intentionally between coaching, advising and facilitating, supporting decisions without taking ownership away from the founder.
🔨️ Improved at adapting my approach to the founder’s energy, capacity and context, while keeping momentum and accountability.
🔨️ Strengthened my ability to shape a compelling venture story by balancing purpose, evidence, feasibility and practical next steps


︎ If you want to enquire further about my work on this project, click here to drop me an email.

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