What is wrong with the Indian accelerator ‘ecosystem’?
My startup journey through an accelerator and what I felt could have been done differently
Its been a year since I started my own company. The journey has seen many highs and lows with lots of learning.
My startup got into one of the best accelerators in India. The 3-4 months that I spent there was amazing in terms of learning about strategy, product and sales.
Indian Accelerators take note
- It is not what space I am in, Vision is what matters.
It doesn’t matter what space my startup is in. If I am successful in one ‘space’, I can always go build something else in another ‘space’.
Startups need to run fast, pitch to as many companies as possible (if B2B) and understand what customers want and add new features. This is what accelerators teach you. I did this for the first eight months of my startup life. Lots of learning, decent money — but no concrete product market fit yet.
Something was not right about how we were doing things.
I sat with my team to understand where the gap could be. One problem that came to our minds was — lack of vision. We were building what each and every customer wanted, as a result the product become complex and there were only few takers.
Defining the vision gave us focus and direction, it helps in defining boundary conditions to product/feature build and more importantly the sales pitch is more appropriate now. When we finalised on what we should be doing — bulls eye — everything was (is) falling into place. The last two months has seen super speedy growth in product development, online marketing, sales etc.
I am not saying we are ‘there’. But it took us an extra four months to find the right product market fit and now we are accelerating.
Accelerators, help us build on our vision, everything else will automatically fall into place.
2. Demo day is important but even more important is growth-hack.
We spent a month practicing for “demo day pitch”, most other accelerators in India make startups spend even more time on this. Instead of focussing on our business, we were focussing on how to convince a investor. Looking back, we lost crucial 45 days during our early days of starting up.
Accelerators — We are not in Bay area where Investors write cheques right after demo day pitch. Go slow on this, there are more important people — customers
What about growth hack? Frankly there are some awesome blogs — Andrewchen, Growhack, YC-blog and Growth hacking on quora. And we have our own Neil Patel who writes at Quicksprout. These blogs helped us come up with a strategy for online marketing, content marketing, social media activities, sales pitch etc.
Why do people share stuff? How to promote videos? How to do inbound marketing? etc. Where are the ‘mentors’ who can help us in growth hacking early on in the startup life?
Understanding and Implementing growth hack techniques is not just A/B Testing. It involves strategy, plan and execution, application of which goes beyond A/B testing. Kindly help startups with this.Help us build a plan here, demo day and investors can wait.
3. Beta customers are okay, but where are the paying customers?
Indian customers don’t pay money in time. We have customers who haven’t paid our due for three months now. This is where accelerators can help startups even more. Introductions aren’t enough. Early stage startups don’t know the exact pain point of the customer (The first 2-3months we were figuring out the exact problem). And that is the reason they end up having Beta Customers with whom we don’t sign agreements.
Elsewhere in the world (Read US), Beta Customers pay for trial. In the early days of startup life, we are in desperate need for customers and therefore do not look at signing legal contracts.(I am assuming most early stage startups don’t).Can you help us accelerators?
Getting paid customers early on into the startup life will do wonders to the morale.
Accelerators, help startups get paid customers and not investors.
With so many new accelerators coming up, there is lot more opportunities to starting up. But starting up is not just about quitting jobs and building something to sell it. Help founders build on their vision, sales strategy, growth-hack techniques and possibly some paid customers.
help startups run bolt speed!
PS : The accelerator that I was part of, is amongst the best in India. They did most things right, no complaints. These are my suggestions on how any Indian accelerator can improve. As one of my close friends (who also has a startup) puts it - ‘Many accelerators play a negative role in slowing down the acceleration and in some cases drive the founders to closing the startup’.
These are strictly my personal opinions on how Indian accelerators can improve.
