Ex-Blackberry Director Empowers Startups with Validation Program Launch

Jun 30, 2023

Ex-BlackBerry Director, Steven Fyke, and Digital Marketing Expert, Rob Farnham, join forces to redefine how entrepreneurs and businesses innovate products and services with Business Validation Program.

Former BlackBerry Director, Steven Fyke, and Digital Marketing Expert, Rob Farnham, are on a transformative mission to revolutionize how entrepreneurs and businesses approach building innovative products and services. With 50+ years of combined experience collaborating with both corporate giants and budding startups, the University of Waterloo Engineering graduate/current CEO of SnapPea Design and award-winning marketing entrepreneur grew weary of the conventional ways that had long governed the industry. Thanks to the introduction of the SnapPea Validation Program, gone are the days of squandering fortunes on product development before leveraging verified data to validate business ideas.

The SnapPea Validation Program aims to provide a scientific approach for businesses to unlock data. This will help them identify pain points that people want to have solved, find the right messaging that will resonate with their target audience, and build solutions that people will pay for. Access to the Validation Program can be found over at https://learning.snappeadesign.com/. The program has already been put to use by 122+ businesses in the Ontario region since it was launched in September 2022.

The program is comprised of two life-time access courses that emphasize a hands-on approach for businesses to implement as a part of their daily practices.


Course 1 focuses on validation of the problem, the market fit, and customer acceptance in a truly unique way:

   •Talking to target customers and removing bias from the conversation. Build an understanding of what people do (not what they say they do), discover their pain points, how they solve problems today and their aspirations for tomorrow.

Course 2 focuses on everything needed to get a product built, a consistent funnel of traffic, and managing the balance between marketing and product development:

   •Identifying the unique value proposition, any risk/threats to the business, and potential business opportunities.

   •Building a plan of record for what will be done, creating digital real estate, defining the product solution, figuring out whether or not the business will be profitable, building the product and optimizing the traffic funnel.

The complete and comprehensive program has been gaining widespread recognition across Canada. Here’s what people had to say:


“Too many accelerator programs are spent on advice, opinion, and planning companies into oblivion. The SnapPea course completely retaught me how to interview, think about pain points, measure them quantitatively, and how to be objective about my company and why we exist. It's helped us right the ship, and stopped ourselves from pivoting out of great ideas that were just written slightly wrong.

I'd recommend this course to any founder, and indeed anyone who cares about startups at all. Because if more people approached their hypothesis with the kind of attitude Steve and Rob have, we would have less billion-dollar flops.” Terry Wang - Cios


“When imagining our future success and daydreaming about getting an award for our achievements, the first people we will thank in our acceptance speech are Steven Fyke and Rob Farnham. They have taught us incredible tools to validate our assumptions, refine our value proposition, and helped us pivot. Their process has been invaluable; we believe it has changed our business for the better and know unequivocally that it has changed us for the better.” Mikelle Ethier - Encompass Health

Steven and Rob hope to carry this successful momentum into 2024 and to continue to transform the way businesses approach building products and services.

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