It Is All About The Founding Team.

Fundamentally, accelerators don’t really invest in ideas. They invest in people. The founding team is the most important aspect of any startup. No questions asked.

When selecting a co-founder, it’s insanely important to really know and understand who you are starting the company with.

I urge any entrepreneur to really think long and hard before committing to a potential co-founder.

Don’t just look for a complimentary skill-set, find out if their motivations and work habits truly align with yours.

Don’t mistake constant disagreements as a sign that you’re not compatible. There is such a thing as being “dysfunctionally productive” where you’re able to come to a decision and move forward despite having arguments along the way!

Talk to a customer.

Seriously, I’m not saying it because I just finished reading Eric Ries’ damn book. I’m saying it because it will be the difference between success and failure for your company, especially if you’re building a B2B product.

One of our strongest teams ended up pivoting 1/3rd of the way through the programme…

Why?

After talking to over 200 customers they realised that the market size wasn’t as big as they initially expected. There was no room for them to grow!

They ended up pivoting and are now creating new technology for a market that is set to be worth $480 billion by 2018.

If they didn’t talk to those customers early on they would have continued blindly building a product that ultimately wouldn’t have grown.

Helping others will benefit you in ways you can’t imagine.

I always preached that an accelerator environment allows for greater collaboration and support between founders.

What I didn’t know was just how important that support would actually be.

We had one team come onto the programme with over 2,500 sign ups for their SaaS product and over 100,000 unique views on their blog per month.

Any startup would kill for those type of numbers 3 months into their journey. Did I mention that the team hadn’t even released their MVP yet?

Instead they spent 3 months researching the market, sizing up the opportunity and talking to potential customers!

A lot of the other startups on the accelerator were close to releasing beta/public products and wanted to learn more about acquiring users.

The SaaS team shared their insights and techniques as to how they grew so quickly. This wasn’t just a few hours of help, it was a continual process of advice and suggestions.

The result of their collaboration? The rest of the startups seen a significant increase in adoption of their apps and sites with one increasing their user-base by over 80%!

Take advice from mentors “In The Round”.

Mentors can help you shape everything from product development, marketing campaigns, strategic partnerships and design philosophies. They can also help with hard-to-get introductions that would normally take weeks for you to successfully approach yourself.

Having said all that… They can also ruin a startup too.

It’s extremely easy to take a mentor’s feedback as final. Just because one mentor says you need to change your products UI doesn’t actually mean you should.

If another says you’re selling to the wrong market and should focus on a different one then it’s up to you as a founder to investigate that. Don’t blindly dive in, instead, go back to your desk, and look for evidence that will either back up the mentors advice or discredit it.

Don’t look for evidence that only supports/refutes their claims, make sure you take a neutral stance when researching it. You’ll only be cheating yourself if you don’t!

Record as much as you can!

A handful of our startups recorded all the information they collected from mentor meetings, workshops and 1-on-1's.

It allowed them to refer back to the information at crucial points.

It’s okay to use pen and paper during the workshops and meetings. But afterwards, you really should digitise it. It’ll allow for easier searching, analysis and referencing. Make sure the data is easily accessible for the rest of your team (I recommend EverNote or Google Docs).

I remember asking one team what a highly relevant industry mentor advised them to do next. The founder spent 5 minutes flicking through notebook trying to find the page where he wrote the feedback down. By then I was already disengaged and thinking about other issues.

Become Thought Leaders In Your Industry

This seems like a no brainer… But really, I can’t emphasise it enough.

If you’re building a tracking tool. Then you should almost certainly be tracking your own data!

Furthermore, you should be using yourself as a case study by sharing the data and writing about it! This will help build your personal brand along with your startups.

Use The Accelerators Delivery Team Effectively

It’s our job to support you and help you succeed.

If there is something you’re stuck on or if you just want to get a second opinion, then tell us. We are here to listen and give feedback.

The delivery team will do a certain amount of this proactively. There were dozens of occasions when we noticed a problem teams were having and proceeded to help them reach a solution.

One day we’d be advising a team on marketing strategies, the next we’d be dealing with co-founder disputes and then the week after we’d be discussing how best they could manage their data.

At the beginning of the programme a founder asked to speak to the CEO of TripAdvisor… This was a pretty tall ask, neither of us had any direct connections to him. Despite that… I still managed to pull it off.

5 days after her initial request she ended up having a 30 minute Skype chat with him!

Ultimately, the teams that gained the most value were the ones who asked for support/help when they needed it. So don’t be afraid, just ask away ☺