F6S
One of the most powerful tools I discovered during the early days of our startup was f6s.com.
What is F6S?
By their web description: f6s — the #1 free network where founders get deals, list & recruit Startup jobs, apply for funding (Accelerators, Funds, Angels) & Investors find great startups. And it does exactly what they say!
F6s helps early-stage startup founders discover opportunities such as accelerators, equity-free programs, and investors. You can create two types of profiles:
This is where you enter your startup details. From basic info such as name, place of incorporation/ city out of which you operate etc to co-founder/team details, product description, team video, market analysis, stat etc. The beautify of f6s is that you can choose to have information both private and public and the private info may only be viewed by accredited investors on the platform.
Investors and programs make use of this profile to easily identify the fit. So it is important to keep the information concise, clear & accurate.
Similar to the startup profile, each founder can create their own profile with short bio and experience. On top of that, when you link the founder profile to the startup’s profile, you can specify things such as “how long the founders have known each other”, “working experience together” etc. — We’ll come to why this is important later in the post.
Discovering the opportunity?
Now, this is important rather fun stuff! How do you start discovering and applying to programs? It’s as simple as clicking the apply button on the top left corner of the screen!
You can use the filters to find programs that fit your market, geography, type of investment (equity-free grants, accelerators etc). Click on apply and you can select the startup profile you created earlier and add your co-founder's profile to the application as well.
Most of the programs will have an additional set of questions (mostly standard) such as “market size”, “what problem are you solving”, ”what is your competitive advantage” etc and you’ll need to add a 1-minute founder video as well.
Now, these answers will help the program managers identify good startups and one major criterion they follow is to have a look at the founder synergy. This is true for any investments as in early stage, accelerators and investors bet on founders as much or even more than the idea itself. As mentioned earlier, f6s allows you to add this part to the profile so that investors get a clear idea about your background, synergy and if you have worked together in the past.
Pro tip: Most of the programs tend to have a cycle (3–4 months/ twice a year) and they start opening up the application 2–3 months prior to the start of each cycle (So there is almost always an application open ). It is always good to have your application send in early so that we can ensure that they’ll read it and have more time to understand your product/ startup.
Things to remember while applying to a program?
- Be very clear and specific about your answers.
- Try not to sound like a sales pitch. Provide answers to the point! People reading your answers will be going through 100s of other applications and writing long story answers might get them bored!
- Review your answers more than once to ensure there are no typos and other mistakes
- Try to research the organization/ program and see what are they looking for — this will help you tweak the answers and increase the chance of getting selected.
Recommendation?
Almost all the programs like to see one or two solid recommendations in the profile. Whether it comes from a fellow entrepreneur or friend, or even better one of your previous investor or a mentor.
It is super easy to set up this is f6s. Provide the email of the person you’d like to get the recommendation from and f6s will send a link to the email for the same (Make sure you already have intimated the person regarding the same!).
Go explore the platform!
