WHU Accelerator hat dies direkt geteilt
MD @ WHU Entrepreneurship Center - Germany's #1 community of business startup founders
How do you convince an experienced entrepreneur to join your accelerator? What many startup support programs get wrong.🦉💭🚀 The application phase for the next installment of our WHU Accelerator has just started. 💣 For any startup support format, the application phase is one of the most important times in a program. The quality of the final selection of teams decides the success of your activities: You bring together great individuals and help them exchange and bond, and you’ve created something valuable. 🙌 But why should these great individuals - busy founders no less - decide to join your program? How do you avoid adverse selection? 🤔 I have two fundamental assumptions: (1) Focus on what others can't offer. (2) Optimize the founders’ value for time investment. What does that mean? ☝️ For once, there are lots of support programs out there: #Accelerators & boot camps - but also slack channels, YouTube videos, and #MOOCs. 📺 As founders have opportunity costs, if there is a Y Combinator video on a subject and you don't add a localized twist or high level of interactiveness, don't force participants to attend a workshop. 🔗 So, what do you have to offer? It often comes down to your location, your specialized industry access, or unique resources. 🖥️🔬💰 Be 100% clear and transparent on both your unique offerings and their corresponding target audience. ✌️ Second, don't try to do everything! If I join your program because of your unique selling propositions, that's what I want to spend my time on. ⏱️ In too many programs, founders tell me that they put up with unnecessary workshops or meet-ups, because they wanted to get to the actual benefits. Kind of as a “price to pay.” 🫠 If your USP is strong enough, founders might accept this. But you risk being affected by adverse selection right from the application phase. 👉 So, how do we approach these challenges at the WHU Accelerator? Our target audience is clearly defined: early stage startups with at least one WHU co-founder. What is WHU famous for? Our crazy community of high profile founders, investors, and operators.🦸 Ergo, our core value proposition is that all 8 teams get 20 minute mentoring calls with 80 mentors from our network. Founders only have to answer one question: Could I get these 80 calls with high profile experts and network multipliers in a more efficient way than investing two weeks for these pre-scheduled sessions? ☎️ Why is that the only question? Because we keep the rest of the program to a minimum: only 4 individualized workshops/office hours, one bonding day in Vallendar, and the Demo Day in Berlin. That's why we also attract founders who have worked in VCs or built VC-backed startups in the past. Clear value proposition for a specific target group and little distraction. 🎯 If you attended a program or are surveying your participants, ask: “Was it worth your time?” If the answer is “yes,” your program has a good foundation. 💪