Entrepreneur stories: Participating in an accelerator program (Part 1)

You are fresh in startup world? So was I a year ago. But every time you make a step, there’s an adventure waiting for you — this thing about startups I like the most! Most of the adventures/challenges require quite a lot energy from you — but I guess you are already comfortable with that, even if you’re completely new to startup world. But even I, once I entered Rockstart startup accelerator experienced a new level of challenges. So, here’s my impressions on the first month at Rockstart startup accelerator.

Intro

Whatagraph was accepted by the Rockstart accelerator to participate in the program out of 300+ startups around the world, and form a batch of 10 startups in total, who came here for working, living and accelerating their businesses in Amsterdam. Program lasts 150 days, in which we will be fine-tuning our business model, product and preparing for scaling!

Main resources

Program itself has around 100 mentors’ network + 200 investors’ network, so being here means being a part of the community, where you can get not only the feedback about your product, but also (the most valuable part) — network of people who can (and does) help you first by finding the right problems and when you identify them — help you to find the right answers/solutions.

Notice: You need to learn to ask the right questions as soon as possible, because questions like: What do you think about my product? — DON’T WORK AT ALL. View the video bellow and follow — Rob Fitzpatrick.

What you get?

As I mentioned before you get a huge network of mentors (and if you are lucky to meet right ones), you get their network too, which means in total you get huge amount of contacts, meetings and discussions which you need to use as best as you can, because in most cases you have one chance to show that you and your product is really attractive. If you do so — great feedback is granted!

Of course you get great office space in the heart of Amsterdam, huge office building on the street between canals. In the office you can use everything starting from high-speed internet till free coffee, events printers and etc.

Also you get some cash for compensating the living here, but if you decide to bring all your team here (as we did) it won’t cover everything, but still it is an advantage.

Workshops — also one of the great things here, which helps you to identify and fill the gaps on the processes inside your company or building Pirate metrics for your product. We also had a very interesting and helpful workshop about Team Canvas, it helped us to know more about the people inside the company.

The story continues..

There are more series coming up about the time spent in Amsterdam.