or a story about how we failed to get accepted on a start-up accelerator program in europe.
well it has been some weeks now after we have received that although our project has been selected among the top 50 teams that applied to the startup accelerator program for this summer, we did not make it into the Top 10 teams.
It happens. of course. there are so many stories and blog posts out there on this topic, so why this will be different, i don’t know. you tell it on the end. although we feel—-naturally—-disappointed, the reasons behind writing this post is completely different. namely, procrastinating from another task of mine. and that i really wanted to do it.
so where do i start. right in the middle and hopefully it’ll unfold into something readable and understandable, otherwise it’s just another waste in the air.
So suddenly the email popped into my inbox, that we’ve been selected into the top 50 teams among all the applicants so they’d like to do an interview with us, via skype. let’s choose a date for it. No worries, let’s pick a date, and let’s try to do it. but hey, coool we’ve got in! top 50 teams… but wait, how many applicants were there at the first place, my question was? don’t know why but somehow i really wanted to know how many teams were there who applied just to see, as it’s a bit different if you make it into top 50 out of 100 or 1000. or make it into the top 50 teams among the 13 that have applied ;) well anyhow, without going any further, till today (2 weeks after the announcement of the teams and soon to be starting programme) they have not released any statistics, e.g. how many teams applied at the first place.
never mind, numbers are for… so the interview day came we’ve fired up skype, and did a 3 way interview. short intro for who we are, and then let’s get down the business: what do we want to create with our product. after a short description, of course the questions after questions came, more or less related about: who’s gonna use it? who’s our main target? and how are we going to make money out it? after describing (and of course already mentioned this in 2 previous emails, i.e. who’s our target and what are the possible application of it, and how it could make money) our ideas, the question came back again in a different form, now a bit more aggressively: there are already solutions like this (no there are NO SOLUTIONS like this just similar.what do i mean about similar? well in a sense that linux and windows are similar, since they are both operating systems, no? ;) so without being more sarcastic, i just wanna say that after trying out all the competition and writing a loooooooooong email why our system is different from all of those, and why it would be better than those, the person asks again why, why a customer would choose us. Well, i had two options here: option a) ask him whether he has read at all the emails we’ve been sending to them, where we very detailedly answered all these questions option b) tell nothing about the emails, and just repeat the whole thing we’ve written in the email.
i’ve went with option a+b: told him that this has been very well answered in one of our emails—that he assured he read it—and retold the hole thing again. Well, not so surprising he did not buy our answer. Still he kept on asking the same thing (i.e. why would somebody choose our product) in different ways. we’ve tried to answer and tell him that we have proposed various applications of our product, how to make it a business, and then who our target could be, but we thought that one of the thing of an accelerator program is that people there do know their business, and help us in developing a solid business plan. as we obviously did not and do not have a business plan, just various feasible ideas about it. and then came THE question. the ultimate question that has struck my ears so deeply that for more than a minute i couldn’t even react:
“i still don’t see why my 18 years old sister would use your product?”
hell yeah! that’s it! the ultimate question for all the start-up companies out there. so why? well while i was completely mute, my partner tried to tackle this question from left and right, but obviously because of the nature of this question, he just couldn’t answer in the way that would a) make any sense b) would satisfy him
in the meanwhile i was just sitting in front of my computer and started to wonder. why his sister would use an application where she can post max 140 characters and can subscribe to other people’s 140 characters stream as well. and why his sister would ever use a software where she can add her friends in a list as friends, and upload pictures and tag her friends and message them and so on. and then i’ve realised that maybe the answer to this question is bare simple: your sister DOES use a computer. she owns one, and works with it. and for sure his sister is not a 18 years old computer geek who cannot wait till the next release of the linux kernel and enjoy setting up and compiling her custom kernel. but still, she does own a computer and she for sure uses it on a daily bases.
anyhow, that interview just went baaaaaaaaaad. which happens, we are not so experienced in situations like this, especially that we are looking on problems in a from a very different perspective than he is.
the guy on the other side realised that something really went wrong with this conversation so he said that hey, let’s have another round, as maybe he is just really tired since he was doing this for the whole day! he will email us… but in any case, if we are going to be rejected we’ll get a very detailed feedback from them!
while we were waiting for the next round of 1 hour interview, we’ve talked a bit with my partner about the previous one and had the same conclusion: WTF? :> but hey, we’ve made it into the top 50 (again, out of how many?)!
so the second round arrived, where things were much more relaxed than the previous one. moreover, people were even quite excited about our idea. of course some issues like licensing came up, and the same question that they have already asked from us in emails, and we’ve answered it…. but never mind. we’ve repeated the whole thing again. then came the question: do you maybe have a demo? mmm yes we do have a demo, but it is in a very very alpha stage. as we were hoping that we can come up with a real beta while doing a start-up accelerator program. well no worries—-they said—-just send us a video where we can see that little demo, just to see where you guys at. we’ve agreed, worked on that demo quite a lot. on the end of our interview we’ve agreed that we’ll send the demo and a very detailed answer on some of the questions that has been raised during our conversation but could not be answered right away because of it’s nature.
2 days after we’ve sent the email with our answers and video based demo where they can see the basic functionality of our software.
and we started to wait and wait. but in the meanwhile we’ve already had the feeling that this is just not it. this program is just not the program that we thought it is. we have an idea, and some proof-of-conceptish demo, and ideas how we could monetize this whole thing. but we do NOT have an already existing user base, and certainly we do not have a working application that we could hand out for trying it out. and no we do not have a solid business plan either. just options, how it could be done. but somebody with more expertise should be able to tell us, which of these options are at all really feasible, and how exactly.
one week later we’ve got THE letter: bla bla bla great, great great, but…. there were better ones. It does happen. so we did not get into the top 10 teams. well, yeah it wasn’t a surprise for us of course. taking into the consideration the whole interview, and how it happened. well, next time some other place with some other people… maybe… hopefully.
all in all just two things: a) we are still waiting for the email with the detailed feedback on our project b) we are still waiting for the email from the person from the first interview to schedule another time for a re-interview.
maybe the next time…