May Monthly Update and Funding Opportunities

1st monthly update and funding opportunities!

We are starting this monthly update to give you some insight into Dium platform updates and new tools that we release to empower you and other great founders. We will highlight any new or impactful updates up top, followed by any funding opportunities that we are aware of, and then a list of more minor changes and bug fixes.

We hope this gives you some transparency on what were are working on, and funding opportunities to help you get going or to accelerate your growth.

Dium + AI

There is a lot of noise around ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, so we started thinking about how founders can use AI to help with their marketing, sales, business, and product needs. Typically founders are asking ChatGPT direct questions with not a lot of prompt engineering to help produce the best results. Understanding what makes a good prompt is quickly becoming its own area of study. So we wanted to handle the prompt engineering for our founders, so they can jump right in, ask their questions, and still get the best answers

To get things started, we set up ChatGPT on Dium with 9 chat personas to help you tackle:

• General business help

• Idea generation

• Software development

• Web design

• Sales

• Marketing

• Fundraising

• Accounting

• User interview JTBD analysis

Each of these has a starting prompt that is set in the background, to help maximize the AI's ability to provide answers to questions in each of these categories, and has access to your company info to better align its answers to your company needs. These prompts are our initial release prompts and we will be actively taking feedback and adjusting the prompts

Note the General Business Help persona is available as an AI Help bot on all areas of the platform so you can ask it for help if you need additional guidance through the curriculum or on what to do next.

Where to find and how to use the AI Assistant

You can find instructions on where to find the AI Assistant and how to use it in our blog post here: https://www.startdium.com/post/dium-update-ai-startup-assistant-and-bug-fixes

Funding opportunities & more

• Applications for the first cohort of the Harlem Capital Founder Launchpad are closing soon! The Founder Launchpad program will equip operators interested in becoming founders with the community and knowledge required to launch companies that change the face of entrepreneurship. Applications are due May 2nd. We encourage those interested to apply here!

• Forum Ventures is hosting a LIVE pitch competition on May 11th in Toronto for the chance to win $100K and admission to their Accelerator program. Submit your pitch deck by May 3rd here.

• Applications are open for The CUNY Public Health Innovation Accelerator, an initiative of Firefly Innovations at the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy and operated with support from coLab. Learn more and apply here by May 7th. *This competition is only open to early-stage B2B SaaS founders who have raised under $1M USD.

• If your EdTech startup is seeking to grow to the next level then the Learn Launch Fund + Accelerator program is built for you. Applications are due May 12th. Learn more and apply here!

• Applications are open now for The Idea Accelerator by Builders + Backers! Learn more and apply here by May 22nd.

• Applications are now open for a new 13-week accelerator starting this September in New York: Techstars Economic Mobility Powered by Samvid Ventures. Learn more and apply here by June 7.

Bug fixes and updates this month

• Support for iOS devices, there were style incompatibilities that have now been fixed

• Update to Account and Company UI for improved navigation and experience

• The most recent level you worked on should now show up correctly on your dashboard, instead of only the first, Explore, level always being on your dashboard

• The level progress bar will now update after each question is answered, there was a bug preventing it from updating unless you refresh the page manually

• Dium tasks should not be duplicated in your Checklist the first time you get to the End Step of a level or if you revisit the End Step before you hit "Next" to move past the End Step.

• Users should now be able to 100% the Explore level if they answered "Yes" to the 1st question (Do you know your problem?). If you are already past this level but want to 100% it, please go to and answer the 2nd question through the journey level table of contents or the level one-pager. For context, the 2nd question in the Explore level that most are missing, is the one that asks "Do you have a solution?"