Why you should join a tech accelerator and my experiences.

First off, what is a tech accelerator? A tech accelerator does what it says on the tin. In theory it takes a startup in and provides rocket fuel for growth, but it really depends on the stage of your startup. Accelerators give you access to mentorship, investors, workshops, a huge network and much more… you may have noticed I discounted “cash”, this is because you should not go onto an accelerator for cash. The money is less than 10% of an accelerators worth, but instead everything else that it comes with should be put first.

So who am I and why does what I say even matter? I’ve been through a number of startups and a few failures. I’ve also been through two tech accelerators, which include Ignite100 and TechStars.

I started my first startup back when I was 18 I raised seed investment from a VC in Oxford. This startup later failed for a number of reasons. Number one I was a lone founder for the majority of my journey, something that I would not recommend to anyone as you can’t do everything on your own. I did not have a technical guy, but instead freelanced the work out to Romania (worst mistake of my life). Finally I chose a bad investor, one that did not get tech and usually invested in Pharmaceuticals.

Now onto my second startup Sourcely. Sourcely was a way for students to rent e-textbooks online instead of purchasing them outright . I was at University last year when myself and my co-founder came up with the idea and we decided to apply for accelerators and jump ship from University. We managed to get into the Ignite100 accelerator based in Newcastle for the Winter 2015 class, a big win for us! We then dropped out and said good bye to University.

Ignite was a unique experience, but one which has helped us massively and made a huge contribution to where we are now. We actually started the accelerator with a completely different idea to what we finished the program with. Ignite helped us learn fast how to validate an idea through the art of conversation, if you’ve read “The Mom Test” you’ll know what I mean. If not go and buy it like now. These types of conversations helped us find quickly that Sourcely was a bad idea, we knew a market did not exist and quickly pivoted to what our audience wanted. After a few weeks, we again drawn blank. We found that students in general won’t spend a penny on anything unless its alcohol or domino’s pizza. That kinda flawed our product, which was aimed and students and was reliant on them purchasing it.

After continuous mentorship, trial and error and trying to make the product work we knew it had to end. After a long day of mentorship, my business partner and I went for a Thai. We both looked at each other and asked ourselves do we have a passion for what we are building? The answer was no. We knew it wasn’t going to work and knew we had to change. Within 24 hours we came up with a new idea, launched a website and started to make sales, which is my current business today, known as Repairly. Repairly provides on-demand smartphone repairs throughout London. Considering we were on week 10 of a 14 week accelerator, we knew we had to get traction fast to have any chance of survival. We finished the accelerator with a small amount of traction but not enough to raise a seed round.

Throughout the accelerator we were tested mentally, coping with the stress of failure while seeing others succeed. It did however create a fire in my stomach to make a success of our time on the accelerator, which we did. Mentorship and customer development were the two key takeaways from my time on the Ignite accelerator.

Mentorship gives you access to amazing people who have been there and done that, its also an interesting experience when you hit “Mentor Whiplash”, this is essentially when someone tells you contradictory advice. One person will tell you white, one person red and another pink, then you have to filter through the information to see what is of actual value. The key here is to have a mixture of coach-ability and resilience. On one hand you don’t want to be too coachable as you will crash and burn. And on the other hand you don’t want to be too resilient and not listen to some amazing advice.

After finishing the accelerator we knew we could not raise. We instead looked to join another accelerator, one that could help us grow and have a strategic footing. This is when we applied for the TechStars Virgin Media Accelerator, even before sending in our application we opened a dialogue with the MD of the accelerator back in mid November 2015. We continuously sent bi-weekly updates showing our progress and shown that we could hustle. After sending in our application in January 2016 we eventually went through multiple interviews before eventually being offered a place in February 2016. As PR for the programme, Virgin Media flew the CEO’s out to San Francisco to meet with Sir Richard Branson and Marc Benioff alongside some other cool stuff.

We started the TechStars accelerator on March 27th and are currently in week 5 of the accelerator. There are many many differences between Ignite and TechStars but also a few similarities, such as mentorship. However TechStars run this in a different way, mentor madness being the first 3 weeks and then you are assigned with 5 lead mentors, which you meet on a weekly basis throughout the programme. Our lead mentors are awesome by the way! So far there has been a huge emphasis on growth instead of breaking apart an idea. A huge emphasis on 10x for all key metrics and an even bigger emphasis on raising a large seed round after the programme. My network has grown much more international with access to the whole TechStars family. If I want a introduction to anyone within the family it happens.

Interestingly this particular TechStars accelerator is also a corporate accelerator run in partnership with Virgin Media & Liberty Global. This has given us access to exec’s within both companies and a direct communication with decision makers. They have both been really hands on and actively supporting the startups to see where everyone can work together. You can see this in all of the 10 companies on the programme, they have been invested in for a reason as they align with the corporate strategy of both Virgin Media & Liberty Global.

I strongly believe that an accelerator is the perfect breeding ground to hatch your startup and make it grow. Surround yourself with amazingly smart people from around the world, all of whom have the same goal… to build an awesome company.

If you have any question regarding Ignite, TechStars or accelerators in general fire away!