MAP Accelerator Program — Week 9
There was really only one main session this week, so I thought I’ll use the chance to also reflect a bit more generally on our participation in the accelerator programs. But let’s start with a quick summary on that one session.
Growth Marketing
Marketing is a very broad topic and can take many different shapes. When it comes to growing a start-up into a sustainable business, the recommendation is to start with a market niche, rather than going for the big market right away. The chance of success in the big market is a lot smaller, because the task is bigger and competition usually a bit more fierce than in a niche, where you can dominate with relatively little effort and potentially uncontested.
A concept or structure to guide you through these initial phases of growth are the following 4 steps: (1) MVP (minimum-viable-product), representing the idea, (2) product-market fit defines the solution, (3) channel-product fit to gain traction and increase revenue and (4) maturity to reach scale. To gain traction requires a good product, some revenue, a good team and systems in place to grow and eventually transitions into maturity/scale.
The session then focused a fair bit on channel-product fit (step 3 above), which is about trying to find the ideal marketing channels for your product and the market(s) you are addressing. There’s a broad spectrum of marketing channels available from social media, posters, advertising, direct-mail, etc. Not all of them apply to any given business, so finding the right one is critical. This can be done by trial and error, basically trying out all of them and then evaluating what traction they create.
To evaluate traction, the concept of a “North Star Metric” was introduced, which is a single metric that best quantifies your growth and can be used for the evaluation of different marketing channels to determine their viability and even crazy ideas (channels) that you think might never work can be tested this way. Picking this north star metric therefore is very important and should be carefully thought through.
Accelerator Programs
This week’s growth marketing section was a good case-study for us at Solstice AI to evaluate what content of the accelerator program is the most useful.
But let’s start with some context first. Start-ups can be classified in different dimensions:
- The type of customers: B2B (busines-to-business) focusing on enterprises, B2B focusing on SMBs (small to medium businesses) and B2C (business-to-customer).
- The business model: subscriptions, one-time services, physical products vs. digital, etc.
- The target markets: local, regional or international.
- The stage of the start-up: ideation phase, pre-revenue, MVP, product ramp, multi-product, …
And you can probably come up with more dimensions to differentiate start-ups. The combination of these classifications will determine what sort of content is most relevant to you. As an example, this week’s marketing session was most important for B2B focusing on SMBs and B2C, but less relevant to B2B focusing on enterprises, which requires a more direct and iterative approach in order to sell your product/services, whereas last week’s sales pipeline session fits perfectly for B2B focusing on enterprises, but becomes a lot simpler (to the point of trivial) if you do B2C of physical products.
And this applies to a lot of different topics that are covered by accelerator programs. As a start-up you have to understand that there will be content that does apply less to you than it does to some of the other start-ups in the cohort. In an ideal world, you would receive only tailored content to your specific needs, business model, target markets and stage of your start-up. But in reality, the accelerator programs have to find a good mix that benefits most of the cohort and covers everyone’s needs. And often you don’t know in advance how relevant a topic is or when you might need that insight. Some of the things I’ve learned I have to store in memory to access at a later stage. The whole hiring topic will eventually come up for us, but right now seems like a distraction, because we are too early in our development.
All this leads me to a few suggestions and recommendations:
Suggestions for start-ups:
- Accept that you will learn about stuff that might not apply. Classify that content in terms of relevance and timing and focus on the most relevant, most urgent topics to dive deeper into and follow up on.
- Document lessons learned that are less relevant or are only relevant at a later stage. This is very important and can take different shapes: from a simple text document to a wiki page to a blog series documenting your journey — sounds familiar this one ;-)
Suggestions for accelerator programs:
- Design content to be as generic as possible with the ability for start-up founders in your cohort to ask specific questions at the end of the session. This depends a lot on the presenter of course and might not always be under control of the program, although guidance can be given to the presenter(s).
- Provide guidance or even tools to start-ups to help them classify themselves and the relevance of the program content. It might not always be clear to the start-up what they need or when they need it.
- Understand your cohort well and classify them. If there are outliers that have a special need for lessons that don’t apply to most of the others, potentially try to add custom content just for them. This doesn’t have to be just a single start-up, but could be a small group/bucket of start-ups in your cohort.
Overall, I think accelerators are great. We as Solstice AI are very lucky to be accepted in such programs and without them we’d be 3 blind people walking in the dark. One of the first things you get told when you start a start-up is how many of them fail: 9 out of 10 fail and even failure can take time — up to 10 years in some cases. I think participating in an accelerator program can dramatically increase your chance of survival and I feel very lucky that we get our chances bumped from 10% to something maybe a bit closer to 30%. This of course depends on the quality of the program.
Reasons for this increased chance are the stuff you learn that can help you rectify some of your false assumptions you started with, they connect you with people that can help you and they also lend some credibility to your company, especially if they’re a reputable accelerator program.
