MAP Accelerator Program — Week 1

• Next Week: Week 2

This is the first part of a multi-part series about our experience in the MAP Accelerator Program 2022. The goal is to provide some insights into our journey and hopefully we can help other start-ups or potential start-ups to understand better how not to fail. To set the scene, here’s a little introduction:

Solstice AI

After the IBM Research Lab in Australia closed in early 2021, Julian de Hoog, Maneesha Perera and myself decided to create a new company — Solstice AI — with the mission to enable the effective integration of renewables into the electricity grid. Solar power is quite difficult to predict and we’re breaking the problem down into 2 parts: identifying all solar panels from satellite images and then forecasting their output for the near-term (next few hours).

MAP 2022

MAP stands for the Melbourne Accelerator Program and they are a program of the University of Melbourne that aims to help start-ups through their early phases with tons of mentoring, educational sessions, some office space at Melbourne Connect and A$20,000 in funding.

Week 1

Obviously the first event in the first week was an introductory event. The team from the accelerator program working with us introduced themselves and their respective responsibilities/expertise. A few administrative things were mentioned and the remainder was focused on finding a good protocol for getting along in the co-working space. Nothing too surprising here, but you can already notice that you recognise a couple of the faces and you realise that you’re going to spend the next couple of months with these people. I still only know a few of their names, even though plenty of them introduced themselves, but you can’t memorise everyone on first contact, right?

Mental Health

The next event was the best of the week. The focus was on mental health and how to deal with the stress of a start-up. Something we’ve already experienced even without any customers or employees to worry about. The administrative overhead, multi-tasking and the feeling that we haven’t achieved enough this week or we haven’t worked hard and focused enough on various things. They all introduce stress. The presenter talked about first-hand experience how this can build up over time and escalate. The things to look out for and how to avoid certain things. The things that stood out most for me were:

• You are not the company.
• Sleep, exercise, good nutrition and less alcohol keeps your mind healthy.
• Meditate and spend time with your friends and family.
• Create processes around common tasks that automate/streamline as much as possible.
• Rely on your colleagues, let them help you carry the weight.
• Weekly list of things to do, celebrate when you strike them off your list, don’t panic, if you don’t.
• There’s no point having a too rigid organisation of your week (hour-by-hour), as things always change and you have to remain flexible.
• Take days off and enjoy nature every once in a while — it helps reset your mind

The two golden nuggets for me personally were meditation — something I wanted to do for a while now, but never got around doing — and the weekly schedule to better plan and make sure that you’re progressing. Currently I’m still waking up in the morning, get a coffee and then ask myself “Alright, what’s up next?”. This leads to not having a good overview of progress, lessens the feeling of accomplishment when finishing a task and overall keeps me in a permanent state of high alertness and uncertainty, which is not healthy or sustainable.

General Housekeeping

Another event went across several subjects. The main takeaways were:

• Do monthly investor updates and
• send them not just to your active investors, but also interested parties (you can have a separate report with confidential information that is only for the active investor’s eyes), but
• be careful about how you phrase things. Especially as technical people we tend to make assumptions. For example, if I say “the front-end design of the application is not very polished yet”, investors, who are not software engineers, might interpret this as bad UX, which is a much bigger red flag than just something that’s not that pretty yet.
• Raising capital can take months to finalise, so start the conversation early enough.
• It’s not a bad idea to follow some of the VC firms on LinkedIn or Twitter and understand how they think, check out the material they publish to understand their world better.
• Find mentors to help with investor language — especially in this early phase.
• Look into what tools can help us to optimise our workflows, e.g. a CRM, Cake Equity Management System, maybe Notion as corporate Wiki/TODO, etc.
• It’s tax season, talk to an accountant — so I immediately scheduled a session.
• There are also R&D tax incentives provided by the government, which apparently gives you some money back for R&D expenses (43.5% of it).
• Create a wishlist of customers — ideally with priorities — to keep ready when people have connections and can introduce you to someone.
• Engaging with a customer — especially big customers — takes a bit of patience. You start talking to lower-tier employees and solve a problem they have, which allows them to talk to their superior about you. Even if they don’t do that, it’s useful to have already engaged with them to allow the superior (when you finally talk to them) to go down the ladder and ask how the other group’s experience with our solution was.
• Create a small POC for free and then expand the scope of the POC piece by piece. At each step you can ask the prospective client for more (give us feedback about our performance, pay some small amount to pay for X, give us some data in return, etc.)

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• Next Week: Week 2