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expert product strategy
on demand

When it's time, send it

Up Coast

Up Coast is bringing in a new way of thinking about your small business' product needs. No matter where you are on the app development journey, why dedicate full-time resources to product management before you're ready?Free yourself from the stress of product strategy and planning. Hire an experienced professional for only what you need. And when you need it, send that work Up Coast!

Find out more

From Passion to Product: The Complete App Strategy Course

6-Week Live Intensive for New App Founders

Sponsor a six-week journey that turns 200 serious new app founders into long-term, high-intent users of the tools they choose at launch.

About Abbey & Up Coast

Abbey Jackson is a former Staff Software Engineer at Rivian, where she personally designed and built the company's entire multi-team mobile release system and is a co-inventor on Rivian's first patent for the mobile app's communication architecture with the vehicle and cloud. She also led early product discovery for the mobile app, running the initial user interviews and competitive research. Before Rivian, she worked on Intel's Vaunt AR smart glasses and anti-fraud SDKs at Mastercard.Abbey is now bootstrapping Up Coast as a social venture to open app leadership skills to a much wider range of founders and to help first-time founders build healthier products and teams. "From Passion to Product" is the free, live, 6-week entry point into the Up Coast Leaders network, designed for new and aspiring app founders who are serious about learning and ready to do the work.

Who this reaches

200 vetted, serious early-stage app founders, indie developers, and operators who commit six weeks of live time to validating, scoping, and preparing to build or relaunch their apps. The cohort intentionally attracts a mix of non-traditional founders, underrepresented folks, and engineers who want to build healthier products and teams, not just chase hype.

Why it's valuable for you

You reach highly engaged new app founders at the exact moment they are choosing their core stack, analytics, crash reporting, infra, payments, support, research, and the tools they adopt now are the ones they are likely to grow with for years.Unlike conferences where most visitors are browsing for swag or jobs, Up Coast sponsors get direct, in-context access to an audience that's actively building. Depending on your sponsorship level, that includes 1-3 live guest teaching sessions (10-30 min each) where your team can share expertise in adjacent topics, not just a logo on a banner.

About the program's 6-week journey

Week 1:
Setting your foundations, strategy foundations (customer-led vs product-led growth), online user research, and building initial user personas.Week 2:
Understanding the competitive landscape, analyzing competitors across business and product experience, teardowns of competitor apps, competitive mapping.Week 3:
Connecting with real users, how to recruit and run effective customer interviews. Students schedule and conduct their own interviews to uncover real problems.Week 4:
Turning research into solutions, synthesis techniques (card sorting, grouping), solution design concepts, brainstorming and narrowing in on app concepts that address real user needs.Week 5:
Design to development strategy, prototyping and validation (wireframes to clickable prototypes). Technical strategy: web vs mobile, hybrid vs native, hiring vs AI/no-code, and how to document requirements for engineers.Week 6:
Roadmapping, launch, and staying close to users, prioritization frameworks, scoping a good v1, Scrum basics for founders. Launching and growing: crash monitoring, continued user discovery, app marketing and retention fundamentals.Throughout:
Weekly Q&A sessions (advanced question submission, then live answers for each) and 3 open office hour sessions. Attendance at live classes is required so the cohort can support each other in real time, with Q&A sessions being optional.

Core cohort sponsor package

List price: $5,000 USD
Founding sponsor rate (inaugural cohort only): $3,000 USD in exchange for light feedback and, if it's a fit, a short testimonial.One cohort sponsorship available.What you get:

Exclusive "Presented by [Sponsor]" placement for the entire 6-week cohort
Logo on all 9 live class slides + all 6 Q&A session slides
Logo on all session recordings sold post-cohort and on Q&A clips posted to YouTube
Verbal acknowledgement at the start of every live session
Logo + thank-you in all cohort-wide emails (welcome, weekly, wrap-up)
Up to 3 guest teaching sessions (10-30 min each), which can focus on your team's broader expertise, not just your tool, so students experience you as a trusted partner
"About [Sponsor]" blurb + large logo/link on the course landing page and "tools we love" resource list

Module Sponsorship

List price: $1,500 USD per module
Founding sponsor rate (inaugural cohort only): $1,000 USD in exchange for light feedback and, if it's a fit, a short testimonial.6 module sponsorships available, tied to specific weeks. Modules consist of 1-2 live classes and one Q&A.What you get:

"Module sponsored by [Sponsor]" logo on that module's slides + that week's cohort email
One 15-min guest teaching segment during the relevant class (case study or best-practice lesson, not just a product demo)
Inclusion in the "tools and resources for this module" list shared with students
Verbal acknowledgement at the start of live sessions during sponsored module
Logo on all session recordings sold post-cohort for the sponsored module
"About [Sponsor]" blurb + small logo/link on the course landing page and "tools we love" resource list

Interested in sponsoring?

Abbey Jackson, Founder, Up Coast Digital Products, Inc.
[email protected]
www.upcoastleaders.ca