Lessons Learned from running Three Cohorts of our Costarter Accelerator
We recently launched our 4th Costarter Accelerator cohort. This program offers an initial investment of $15,000 and 3 months of support, space and connections to five early stage companies. The launch of the 2019 cohort caused me to pause and reflect on some lessons learned from previous years.
1. Successful businesses are created by great entrepreneurs. So our first challenge is to recruit solid teams and individuals behind the businesses.
What makes a great entrepreneur? It isn’t the smartest or the most talented or even the one with the most money that makes a great entrepreneur. The qualities that drive success for entrepreneurs are: the willingness to listen (to customers, to mentors/advisors, to people in the industry and to other entrepreneurs), the ability to absorb this information and the ability to leverage different kinds of resources. Determining how to react and pivot as needed requires perseverance, passion and hard work - in fact, a lot of hard work.
Throughout the program we provide access to mentors, advisors and subject matter experts that can develop skills, knowledge and expertise but having a committed entrepreneur with the right mindset is critical.
2. It is hard to predict the best business idea.
At the outset it seems easy to determine which business ideas have the most potential. We can ask and explore some basic questions. What is the problem they are trying to solve? What size is the target market? Does the business model have the potential to scale? What are the costs and strategy to acquire customers? What is the value proposition? Does this business have a unique competitive advantage? However, in the early stage of a start-up many of the answers are only hypotheses and the next step is to validate that we actually know the answers. This validation can often only be done by getting out and talking, starting and adjusting, learning and fine-tuning. During this start-up phase we then truly come to understand whether we have a good business idea.
3. In the end being a successful start-up depends on execution.
This goes back to the first point. An entrepreneur’s ability to actually get the job done, stay focused, be organized and persevere leads to success. Many business concepts are not driven to success by the best value proposition, but by a team that was able to execute the plan (e.g. pet rocks). It is very difficult to execute successfully as a single individual; involving others and taking advantage of programs and services for support (like Costarter) can enhance execution and increase the chances of success.