Kiuas Accelerator | Part 2/2 — Demo Day & Wrap-Up
Kiuas Accelerator is a 10-week intensive program designed to take early-stage startups to the next level.
In 2018, Kiuas Accelerator (prev. Summer of Startups) is organized for the 9th year in a row, supporting teams in various areas of their businesses. Read more about the program here.
The 10-week Kiuas Accelerator is now finished and it’s time to reflect on some of the highlights from the second half of the program as well as the feedback we received from this year’s participants. Read the first part of the series here.
After facilitating various hands-on workshops on e.g. validation, product development, customers and sales during the first weeks of the program to get the basics covered, we started to implement more team-specific coaching for increasingly customized support. This slight shift in the approach resulted in progress at an even faster pace than before.
Demo Day
A traditional final event at Startup Sauna wasn’t the case this year, as we decided to take Demo Day to Helsinki and the biggest movie theatre in Finland, Scape at Tennispalatsi.
600+ people including entrepreneurs, investors, media and other professionals were gathered to witness the results of the program on August 31st.
Summary
During the past week, we’ve been collecting a bunch of feedback and data from the participants to help future organizers build better programs in the upcoming years.
What our startups especially liked about Kiuas Accelerator this year:
Founders Talks
For each Monday morning, we invited seasoned entrepreneurs to share their uncensored stories and learnings with the startups. Speakers included for example Kristo Ovaska, Maija Itkonen and Ilkka Paananen.
“Excellent speakers. I think these were the most valuable part of the program”
Weeklies
Getting all the teams under one roof at the start of each week to present the learnings from the previous week, as well as announce goals for the next one.
1-on-1s
Mentoring sessions on various topics with entrepreneurs, investors and industry professionals. We ended up facilitating over 7000 minutes of these throughout the program.
“Definitely the best bang for buck in terms for time invested and things learned”
Some of the highlights from the feedback:
“I’ve gone through three accelerator programs, and Kiuas was by far the best organized, toughest and most rewarding”
“Expectations were met and over-exceeded”
“The best ever community a founder can have”
“I’m absolutely astonished that you were able to deliver all of this during the summer”
“When they say “From idea to first revenue”, it is not just a marketing slogan. They really mean it”
“We really felt that you guys were backing us every step on the way”
“Wish there were more accelerators like this”
Seems like something was done right, as our participants also gave the program an average rating of 9,73 on a scale of 1 to 10. Of course, constructive feedback was received as well, and that will be used to make Kiuas Accelerator 2019 even better - the best one yet.
Last of all, we would like to give a huge thank you to all of our partners, coaches and everyone who has been supporting us and the startups during the summer.
A special mention belongs to Espoo Innovation Garden, without whom the program wouldn’t have reached the level it did this year.
