What's the Sprint Check: the Innovative Roadmap for Italian Startups

If you’re an entrepreneur, or aspiring to become one, you probably already know this sad fact: every year in Italy thousands of startups are founded, and 90% of them fail within 3 years.

For anyone who wants to embark on this journey, it’s definitely a discouraging number: it means risking losing time and money, but also seeing your brilliant idea fade away without ever reaching its audience.

But there’s an alternative. How can you prevent your startup from becoming just another statistic in the long chain of failures? What mistakes should you avoid, and what steps should you take to give your idea the best chance of success? Let’s find out together.

What’s wrong with Italian startups: the 3 most common mistakes

If you’ve already had a failed business in the past, at least you can find comfort in knowing you’re not alone. But it’s precisely from failure — your own or someone else’s — that you can draw valuable insights on what does NOT work.

Most failed startups share common traits: the same gaps that inevitably lead to failure. Identifying early on which aspects require extra attention is the best way to avoid falling into the same traps.

Lack of strategy

Do, do, do — but what to do exactly? From the start, it’s essential to understand which direction to take, otherwise you risk wasting resources.

Strategic mistakes also include choosing the wrong team to collaborate with and poor ability to track objectives: only 65% of startups consider relying on KPIs (key performance indicators) essential, and 40% don’t even know what should be monitored to get useful insights.

Incubators and accelerators are designed to guide new companies on their path, but only 30% of startups gain access to them, either because spots are limited or because they don’t meet the requirements. The result? Founders confused about the direction to take, and a project that is full of holes.

Lack of funding

How do you finance a startup? With initial capital, with investors, but most importantly with a solid business plan. Adopting a sustainable business model is crucial to avoid running out of budget.

Many factors come into play when sustaining a new business: entering the right market for your idea, or choosing the right moment for fundraising. The problem, for many entrepreneurs, is the difficulty in finding reliable information on how to approach financial matters correctly.

Lack of mentoring

As mentioned, only a minority of startups gain access to structured growth and acceleration programs. That’s also why 63% of startups don’t have a trusted mentor to rely on.

So what do founders do to figure out how to move forward? Many turn to workshops, podcasts, or even courses for aspiring entrepreneurs. But although 90% of startups use e-learning tools to understand how to navigate the business world, completion rates hover between 25% and 40% — a sign that they probably don’t get the value they expected.

How to make your startup work with the Sprint Check

If everything up to this point sounded discouraging, don’t worry. We didn’t write this article to depress you, but rather to show you a new path, made by Mabiloft. Our solution is called Sprint Check, and it’s unlike anything you’ve seen before.

Sprint Check is an innovative tool with which we analyze your idea, validate it together, and suggest step by step how to move forward to grow your startup. No abstract theories or impossible goals: we only provide concrete guidance, starting from your current situation and based on the real resources you have.

How much would you pay to have someone telling you what to do — and what not to do — avoiding vague words and misinterpretations? Well, in this case, you don’t have to pay anything: our Sprint Check is completely free and without commitment.

Why we provide a free service

At Mabiloft, we believe in building an entrepreneurial ecosystem where running a business is exactly how we always dreamed it would be. After years of working with different companies and contributing to each other’s growth, we’ve learned how crucial it is to have the right guidance, and today we want to give that value back.

Besides, we love staying up to date with the most innovative ideas. We hope to be your allies for a short time, but if we find the perfect match between your project and our expertise, we might even decide to build a longer-term collaboration.

Why trust us

We don’t give you the answers you want to hear, nor the ones that benefit us — but the ones you actually need. For example, a fintech startup we worked with saved €30,000 after discovering through the Sprint Check that 70% of the features they wanted to add to their product were unnecessary.

We have experience, and we want to share it. We’ve already supported over 80 startups in the past 6 months, with encouraging results. We work side by side with the startups we follow, adapting to their needs and offering tangible value.

What if I don’t have a startup? Can I do the Sprint Check?

Sprint Check is not only for startups, but also for SMEs and for anyone with an idea they want to bring to life, at any stage of the journey. In any case, we’ll do our best to help you understand the right direction to reach your goals.

The Sprint Check method: what to expect

We’ve explained what Sprint Check is for — but how does it actually work? If you want to do a Sprint Check, the first step is filling out the questionnaire, which you’ll find here.

The questionnaire includes questions about your business, the market sector you operate in, your product, and more; it’s an invitation to reflect on what’s already there and what’s missing for your idea to become reality. Filling it out takes about 30 minutes, but trust us — it’s time well spent.

Within 24 hours of completing it, you’ll receive a detailed report on your situation, and we’ll schedule a call. You’ll finally feel heard: we don’t have a pre-packaged recipe, so we want to know everything about your specific case. From this, we’ll be able to deliver:

• A map of your critical issues
• A summary of the blocked areas of your project
• A maturity score to build from

Only after thoroughly reviewing the questionnaire will we be able to define a strategy. The strategy won’t be a set of generic tips, but a real operational plan — a roadmap with clear goals, ordered within a timeline, all aligned with the resources you already have and can use in your product.

Finally, the implementation phase: it’s up to you to put yourself on the line and apply our suggestions, but we’ll support you in taking action with our professionalism. It’ll be like having a tailor-made accelerator for your project.

Convinced?