My 100 Days at APX Accelerator — Part 1
First, let me give you a backstory to prepare you for my 100 days learnings at APX. It all started 10 years ago when I was 19, I decided to take my first step towards becoming an entrepreneur by registering a company in London. I had an invalidated idea, no team, no experience and little idea about how things worked. So the naive me thought a company registration can put me on the map. This sense of naivety made me try many things, break most of them and experience failure; but most importantly learn a lot by doing things.
I decided to study MSc Entrepreneurship at Royal Holloway University of London to up my game. During the year I developed the Royal Notes venture and won the Arora Awards for Enterprise at RHUL for 2012. Here’s a Facebook page and a Youtube video that still survives from those days. That was a sign of upward trajectory for me, a validation of how I was developing on a personal level. A couple of ventures later and my co-founder and I launched a social crowdfunding platform for expats, raising $500k in the space of 2 years for 47 micro projects across 17 countries in 4 continents, improving the lives of 5000 people globally with their health and education.
Coming from marketing and crowdsourcing backgrounds, we set our sight on crowdsourcing authentic word-of-mouth at scale with the aim of disrupting the digital economy. We had put a strong team in place to achieve this and we started building fast. I had no doubt we were into something, at the end of the day this was our bread and butter from the crowdfunding days.
We joined Launch22 incubator in London to validate our idea and to build our MVP systematically. 3 months later and we had a private-beta version ready for testing. We then further tested our value proposition and the public version was out in September 2018. We experiences 30% WoW growth for 10 weeks during YC Startup School Program where we were mentored by the brilliant Teespring founder Walker Williams. His ideas and encouragements gave us further proof of being into something big.
We now had a good product and the early stage traction. But raising the pre-seed money wasn’t easy at all. For us getting into an accelerator was a must. I knew how important the value of a network was from my PhD studies in disruptive startups at Royal Holloway. Accelerators bring that to the table and are supposed to invest in early stage startups. We would only apply to those that were in our space, but we quickly realised most of them are not really early stage risk-takers. Most would say we were too early for them! What? Seriously? We had a team, a product and traction. It was disheartening to hear that as the only feedback as we knew that wasn’t true, and the worst thing was that we didn’t know whether that was our ethnic backgrounds, brexit or how competitive the UK market was. The most frustrating part was that people would hear your idea, say no and then give you no useful feedback in return.
I had seen startups raising millions based on an idea written on a napkin. We were turned down about 70 times by Accelerators, Angels and other so-called early stage investors. We decided we needed to look outside the country for funding as we were just 2 months away from being cashburnt. We simply couldn’t give up. So desiced to look across the pond in Europe.
I’m not going to lie, I was very close to losing hope towards the end, but I had good people around me in my family and on my team, all giving me energy, praying for me and encouraging me to continue as long as I could. In December 2018 I started looking at accelerators and early stage investors across Europe and soon came across this quote: “ Europe’s most ambitious early-stage VC”. Had I heard similar things before? Maybe, but the opportunity to receive investment from the largest digital publishing house in Europe, Axel Springer, was a no-brainer for us. So we applied for the program, suprisingly enough we got great feedback and things moved forward really fast. We received our offer of 50k EUR investment from APX and we were just over the moon. That was 5 weeks before being cashburnt.
We moved to Berlin and everything else is history. I have seen, talked and engaged with many accelerators during my time researching and fundraising across Europe, the US and Asia, and I can honestly say that APX are the ones staying true to their promise of being the most ambitious early stage investors in Europe. I see teams joining the program every months from an idea stage to the later stages. The emphasis is truely on the founders and the space is so diverse and inclusive which was helpful for us as a team at Pukket as well.
The Learnings From The First 50 Days
Coming from an under-represented community I decided to record my learnings in the tech space for the future youth aspiring to have start a career in this space. I’ve been recording them on my twitter page www.twitter.com/fahim_pour
Day 1: The welcome day and the lifestyle
Day 2: Pitching
Day 3: Leadership
Day 4: The Problem
Day 5: Open up and Network
Day 6: The Culture
Day 7: Find Allies
Day 8: Scaling Organically
Day 9: Ratings, Users & Listings
Day 10: Track PPP
Day 11: Upselling
Day 12: Follow the Money
Day 13: Tools
Day 14: Combine Mentors’ Advice with Your Guts
Day 15: A/B Test Everything
Day 16: Usability Test
Day 17: Customer Journey
Day 18: CAC
Day 19: Stay Focused
Day 20: Be Yourself
Day 21: Net Negative Churn
Day 22: Advice and Investment
Day 23: B2B Sales
Day 24: One Liner
Day 25: Terms Sheet
Day 26: Sales Deck
Day 27: Pricing
Day 28: Speed of Growth
Day 29: Company Values
Day 30: Keep the Doors Open
Day 31: PR
Day 32: Revenue
Over here we ran a panel with top speakers in our space to put ourselves on the map:
Day 33: Sales Channels
Day 34: Sprints
Day 35: Runway
Day 36: Feature Development
Won a prize with the pitch getting polished:
Day 37: Story telling and pitching
Day 38: Client Demands in Marketing
Day 39: Negotiation
Day 40: Pitching to Clients
Day 41: Communication
Day 42: Learning vs. Outsourcing
Day 43: UX
Day 44: Fundraising
Day 45: Be Around the Best
Finally invited to a panel to represent my community, it was an honour:
Day 46: Legal
Day 47: Performance and Diversity
Day 48: Days Off and Off Days
Day 49: Family
Attracted attention from France and invited by TF1 for their marketing challenge:
Day 50: The Power of Positive Reviews
That’s it for the first 50 days of learnings.
To be continued…
