Want the Midas Touch for Your Dream Project? Here’s How an Accelerator Can Help
If you’ve ever dreamt of having your own start-up, you would have come across the term business accelerators. For the uninitiated, accelerators are programmes designed to help start-ups once they reach their ‘adolescent’ stage, that is once they are established but need guidance and peer support to strengthen their roots. As India moves towards self-empowerment, OWN explores the concept of accelerators and how they can help give that extra push to your dream project.
To help break down the concept, OWN spoke to Shrishti Sahu, a powerhouse of knowledge in the field with experience in firms such as Facebook, Lumis Partners and many others.
“Accelerators are programmes to help start-ups. They literally accelerate their growth. So typically, you are in a group of 10–15 start-ups that are part of a cohort where you go through this journey of learning and mentoring together,” says Sahu.
She adds that the two pillars of accelerators are peer support and mentorship. “The biggest one is peer support because you typically are selected with start-ups that are building in the same domain or the same area as you. So when you are in a group of similar start-ups, you are able to learn a lot from them and exchange learnings so there’s a lot of knowledge sharing.
“The second key pillar is mentorship. So typically, as part of a programme, there are various industry experts who could be investors, entrepreneurs or also people from product to engineering team, depending on how a start-up programme is built. These mentors work with you through the course of the programme, be it 3 or 6 months on a regular basis, and they are able to guide you and support you in your journey.”
So, what are the advantages for an entrepreneur if they avail the services of an accelerator? “You get discounts and credits from leading companies. Two, you meet investors early on for those initial conversations. Three, you ultimately make better decisions about how to make the company grow and also at which point you should start thinking about funding. The last biggest piece is to train and educate yourself on technical and domain-focused areas,” shares Sahu.
And when should one go in for an accelerator in their entrepreneurial journey? “The criteria differs for different programmes but I can say that typically, accelerator programme are focused on the post-product stage. So this is when you have something ready and you have started seeing early attraction on it. For an acceleration programme, you don’t need hundreds of customers or millions of downloads but what you need is a product to be ready, to get some feedback as to how people are responding to it, how customers feel about it so that you can be eligible to apply. Accelerators are also different from incubators as incubators are more focused on the idea stage. The best thing you can do for an accelerator programme is to apply to one which belongs to your industry,” says Sahu.
Sahu adds that while some programmes will give you seed funding to be an accelerator programme start-up, others might do it equity-free. “So when the programmes give out seed funding in exchange for equity, they are more interested in helping you find the right investors who will help you grow. So they help you in getting follow-up for funding because their incentives are very tight and they also track their success in terms of which start-ups have been able to raise funding after the programmes. So a lot of programmes are actually focused on finding these investor connections and that’s why investors get involved from Day 1 of the programmes.
“They also help in the course of the journey to figure out which are the start-ups that work for them or fit in their investment thesis but ultimately, the owner relies on the entrepreneurs to be able to go and invest in those relationships, build a very strong rapport with them and over a period of time, show them how you are progressing, how you’ve been able to hit the milestones that you had initially set out for yourself and that’s what attracts investors.”
Original Women Network is a platform powering women with inspiration and information to achieve their ambitions. This interview is part of the #OwnItLikeABoss series. You can watch the full interview here:
