Our experiment in experiments is growing

3 months in, and we’re more curious than ever

When we launched Nextt publicly 3 months ago, we made a promise to work tirelessly for your ideas. It’s been a delightful whirlwind of late nights, rapid learning, close calls, and hard fought victories.

In sum: we’re more curious than ever. Which is why on the 3 month anniversary of Nextt, I’m thrilled not only about coming on full time to work with Ajay and our amazing network of makers and advisors, but to share some of the key milestones we’ve reached, including:

• Graduating our first cohort of projects, who have gone on to raise money, recruit co-founders, and land customers.
• Getting 100 applications for our next cohort, vetting them, and delivering a thoughtful feedback package to each applicant.
• Accepting an exciting new cohort of projects.

As we take stock of what’s working, what’s not, and what we learned in the first 3 months, we’re more curious than ever to see how far we can go by empowering passionate people who have big ideas to run lean experiments and rapidly learn, together.

Our first cohort’s continued success

Our first cohort was a pleasure to work with. And we say that not only because they’ve continued to be successful after the program (full disclosure: we’re continuing to work with them even after “graduation”), but because of how hard they worked for their ideas and much fun they are to be with.

• Case in point: Matt Harris’s project Bloom Credit getting some exciting momentum post-graduation. Matt started Bloom in order to rehab consumer credit in a way that helps financial institutions retain and monitor customers they’ve worked hard to acquire but can’t currently service, while helping those consumers gain access to the financial products they need. Matt now has 3 client institutions working with him, several committed investors, a development agency working on-spec to build out a full product, and 2 phenomenal engineers ready to go full-time once he closes his seed round.
• Similarly, Nina Sodhi, founder of Red Antler Books, is on a roll. Her company helps children grow with the books they love. Not only was Nina’s project voted the winner of our first Decision Day, but she’s since earned over a dozen customers and gotten interest from upstream accelerators who write $170k+ checks. What’s more, Nina is continuing to work with Nextt to develop the next iteration of her MVP (minimum viable product), which will allow parents to create an account, indicate their child’s interests, and get personalized book recommendations.
• And last but certainly not least, Adam Michalski’s Bleuberry, a directory of on-demand services, got 250+ upvotes on ProductHunt when launched after Decision Day. Since then, Adam has received partnership interest from several large players in the on-demand space & was able to recruit a designer he’s had his eye on for years.

100 applications from 5 continents

In July of 2016 we opened our doors to applicants from around the world. And we were immediately surprised by the diversity of submissions, especially since we spent essentially $0 in marketing (more on this below):

• From industrial IoT to augmented reality to social enterprises and consumer mobile apps
• From five continents, including Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe and North America
• From college students to tech company employees to award-winning break dancers and retired professors
• From already-funded companies to individual people with back of the napkin ideas

What’s more: along the way, we had interest from a number of different parties we didn’t expect, like schools and universities looking to sponsor applications, film studios/production companies looking to test script ideas, and even large enterprises interested in accelerating in-house ideas through experimentation.

And now, cohort 2…

With that all said, we’re thrilled to introduce the new projects that we’ll be working with in our latest cohort:

• Neel Pahlajani wants to make it easier for physicians to connect with non-patient income opportunities like consulting and speaking gigs with his project called the Modern Doctor Group. Neel started the Modern Doctor Group for a simple reason: he wants to see doctors be celebrated beyond clinical settings.
• Matt Moisan is looking to solve an acute problem that he feels every day as an attorney for many early stage companies with his project, Nikud. Most companies come to him with the same set of 10 or so questions about early stage equity. He thinks there’s a better way to disseminate that knowledge (e.g. short videos), especially for underserved stakeholders like employees with equity options.
• oKazi comes to us from partner incubator, R Labs, in Capetown, South Africa. Their team is looking to help increase labor mobility and small business capacity in emerging markets. Their marketplace will make it easy for businesses to find and hire staff on demand from other businesses with excess capacity.
• Learning from their own personal experiences, Zach & Ankit are looking to foster community and connection among young and aspiring artists using on and offline media/channels. They call their project, Hi.

We’re thrilled that we get to work with these fantastic projects, and we can’t wait to bring you more after Decision Day.

Meeting demand for Nextt

Some of you may notice that there are fewer projects in this cohort than we expected. While we anticipated having 7 new projects in this cohort, we only ended up with 4. The decision to take fewer projects was tough and deliberate for reasons having to do with applicants’ timelines as well as our own.

• Out of the 100 applications, we actually sent acceptances to 10 projects (more than planned) but a few ended up concluding that they weren’t currently in a position to commit the time necessary to participate in Nextt, and another few suggested that they do some work on their end to ready their project for formal participation in Nextt. We’re acting as more conventional/informal advisors to those projects in the meantime.
• Beyond the applications we accepted, we also learned a ton from those we did not, and we’re testing new ways we can help a broader set of people than the select few we’re able to accept and accelerate directly. Currently in development is a new, more productized version of Nextt that we’re excited to be testing with a select group applicants (10 in total) we weren’t able to accept. We expect to start rolling them out late next month and will be sharing more very soon. Stay tuned :)

Evaluating Nextt as an experiment

We often refer to Nextt as an experiment in experiments. So, how are we doing with our own experiment? And what have we learned from it?

1. Thoughtful, personalized feedback is time consuming but valuable. Ajay and I personally vetted each and every application, deliberated using our scoring rubric, and spent hours building feedback packages for each applicant. In the end, we found that whatever time we expected to spend on marketing was spent on application review and feedback instead. But it was worth it: fairly early on we identified that even people we did not accept greatly valued thorough and thoughtful feedback on their ideas and how to get started. Many explicitly reached out to say thanks.
2. Most people are willing and excited to share their ideas publicly. As part of our feedback package to applicants, we asked if they’d be willing to share their idea more publicly in order to get feedback, recruit collaborators, and start building a community. We offered to host these ideas for free on our site. We were surprised and encouraged that many people (~75% of applicants we asked) were willing and excited to do just that. #buildinpublic is catching on — just see our directory of Nextt idea submissions as evidence.
3. Experiments are more intuitive than we expected. Of the 100 applications we received, ~50% proposed experiments we assessed as reasonable and clever, which is a considerably higher percentage than we prepared ourselves for. Going further, there are at least 30 we are personally interested in and excited to see come to life (more to come soon). As such, we’re excited to prove the oft-quoted Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures right: “We are living in a time of great experiments. They are not happening in the lab. They are happening in the real world. We are returning to a time when anyone can be an inventor and innovator.” — Fred Wilson
4. 8 weeks isn’t long enough. On the less positive side of things, we’ve found that especially for early stage ideas, timing can be tricky. In some cases, 8 weeks is plenty of time to get a thoughtful experiment off the ground, learn from it, and get clarity on what’s next. For others, it simply takes more time. And, with almost all experiments that go well, we find ourselves wanting to take part in what’s next — like we are with Matt and Nina in their transitions from idea -> experiment -> business.

A sneak peek at what’s next…

We’ve learned a ton in our first few months of running the accelerator. Our model needs to adapt to a wide range of needs given that early stage projects are so diverse. We found that projects benefit from an initial filter, constraints can drive people to think experimentally, people need feedback to learn, and arguably the most important of all is to be able to hustle and make sh*t happen.

Now, we’re looking to take those learnings and iterate our model into a more scalable way to meet the demand for Nextt & experimentation more generally.

More to come very soon.