Why should startups join an accelerator programme?
Once you have a good idea you should just run with it, right?
Jeff Mann, Programme Director of the Centrality Accelerator powered by Lightning Lab shares insights from his wealth of experience running startups. To stay up-to-date on the progress of Centrality’s ecosystem, follow us on Twitter and our Telegram Announcements channel, plus join our community on Centrality’s Official Telegram, Instagram, Reddit and Facebook.
Your project might have it all — a great idea, the right people and willing investors, but more startups fail than succeed due to their being no market need to purchase that product or service at the time.
To increase your chance of success, you need to develop a deep understanding of the problem you’re aiming to solve for a specific audience group. This means bringing a certain level of rigor to your project and accessing disciplines, connections and knowledge that you may not have. An accelerator programme can help provide these disciplines and present the opportunity to:
Connect with relevant and highly experienced mentors and investors
A good accelerator programme acts somewhat like a broker, matching up startups with mentors and investors that are looking to support a team with an idea that resonates with them. These individuals bring expertise and connections that can assist startup teams and their projects in getting traction in several ways. When it comes to quality investors, often they will bring more than finance to the table. It’s their experience and connections that can often than not bring about partnerships and growth for the business, that assist the startup team to success and ultimately lead to a return on their investment.
Undergo personal transformation with long-term applicability
Simply put, participants often develop better business building skills through the experience of the accelerator. An individual will come into an accelerator with a business idea and a specific skillset, and later graduate from the programme to someone with a broad skillset who knows how to manage and execute change. They say there’s no school for entrepreneurship — but an accelerator programme is as close as it gets to being exactly that.
Gain technical and commercial expertise
An accelerator programme provides teams with hands-on support from market validation to product roadmap, customer and partner engagement. And the Centrality accelerator programme powered by Lightning Lab enables startups to tap into an ecosystem of core technical services they may need to progress their dApp business. Centrality’s core services include messaging, digital ID, padded gateways, exchange tools. This community of core services provides a leg-up to startup teams entering the accelerator who seek to build their tech on top of that existing technology. Together those group of companies can go to market with a much more powerful base at less cost to the individual startup teams. Participating teams also receive technical and commercial training to develop a decentralised business model to build their business use-case for blockchain.
Unable to join an accelerator programme? Read this guide on How to Growth Hack your dApp.
To stay up-to-date on the progress of Centrality’s ecosystem, follow us on Twitter and our Telegram Announcements channel, plus join our community on Centrality’s Official Telegram, Instagram, Reddit and Facebook.
