TechStars Atlanta: What I Wish I Had Known

#GiveFirst #GoodLuck #Godspeed #GetSh*tDone

Dear Founder,

Congratulations on getting accepted into TechStars.

I know you’ll receive plenty of informative emails from your program manager (if you haven’t already). So I apologize if some of the information I’m about to share with you is redundant. Nevertheless, in no particular order, here are some of the things I wish I would have known prior to entering the program.

The Focus of Each Month in Program

The 13-week program more or less breaks down into thirds. The first third involves establishing a cadence, and includes a two-week period called “Mentor Madness” (10 twenty-minute meetings every day for 10 days = 100 meetings). The middle third is intended to be the time to hit the throttle and grow. The final third is dominated by preparation for Demo Day. As a founder, your time will be completely sucked up by all of these activities, and you’ll find it very difficult to work on TechStars activities as well as grow your business. While it is difficult, it can be done and the key is to enroll others in helping you.

1. This starts with anyone currently on your team. Delegate, but only the things your team members will do well.
2. Secondly, lean on the TechStars Associates. The makeup of associates varies from cohort to cohort. In 2017, the TechStars associates consisted of a business analyst (great for making financial models, business plans, etc.) three graphic designers and a data scientist. In subsequent years, there have been experts in operations, market research, and fundraising. Regardless of their skillsets, ask them to help with anything you can think of. Put them to work.
3. Third, pull in the Managing Director and Program Manager where you can. I remember that one team was hiring a Head of Marketing and asked the Managing Director to review resumes and interview the final two candidates. As a long time marketing exec, he was happy to help them out.
4. Fourth, put your mentors to work. You’ll be asked to request your top-rated mentors following mentor madness. Try to pick some who will carve out time to work on your startup. During your 20-minute meetings, ask them what they see themselves doing to help your company. Get an idea of how much time they plan to devote to you.

Order Some Good T-shirts

In his 12 Rules for Startups, Mark Cuban famously says “Rule #10: Never buy swag,” but many people, myself included, think he’s wrong about that. Regardless, at TechStars, you’ll need some t-shirts with your company’s name and logo. At a minimum, I would order two per current team member. Get more if you plan to add team members or really want to push the brand. The majority of folks in the program will not do this, but you’ll find a couple of people who rep their company t-shirt Every. Single. Day.

A classy gesture, but a considerably more hefty investment, would be to give your 5 or 6 mentors, the TechStars Directors and Business Associates a t-shirt with your company name/logo. If the shirt is high-quality and a good fit (ladies cut for females, for example) then odds are these folks will be willing to wear your shirt and help rep your brand. In time, they’ll even be able to give a version of your elevator pitch when asked, “What’s that logo on your t-shirt?”

Another option is to print up some stickers to hand out. 2U Laundry and Monetizer did that and those stickers ended up on a lot of laptops, coffee tumblers, etc.

We’ve never used them, but Swag.com is a TechStars company. You may want to give them a look.

Speaking of swag, each person on your team may get a box of TechStars goodies upon arrival. Our box contained a green TechStars t-shirt, a black TechStars hoodie, stickers and a couple of books. Of course, all of this is subject to change from year to year, as TechStars grows and the brand evolves.

Make a Public Relations Plan

As soon as you get the green light from TechStars, I encourage you to promote the hound out of the fact that your company was accepted into the accelerator. Reach out to the folks at local news outlets, including any TV/radio stations. If you’re a Tennessee-based startup, shoot an email to Tom Ballard of Teknovation.biz. Crow loudly on your social media channels. You’ll be asked to put the TechStars logo at the bottom of your website and LinkedIn pages, so be ready to do that ahead of time. You may also want to reach out to anyone in your industry with a podcast or influence amongst your customers.

In addition to that, TechStars Atlanta will assist with PR of their own via Hypepotamus.com. It seemed that there was a PR push at the beginning of the program and once again nearer to the time of Demo Day, but not much at all during the middle of the program. Talk with your team and think of ways that you could do something PR-worthy on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

Finally, there are plenty of good articles online on how to get press for your startup.

KPI Presentations

On Wednesdays, each of the ten companies in your cohort will be asked to come up before everyone and deliver an update on their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Each presentation should take no more than 5 to 10 minutes. For us, the format always went like this:

1. Give a 30-second elevator pitch (some companies continue to refine their pitch over the 3-month period, but by the end, you’ve heard them all so many times that you’ll feel like you could give all ten just as well as the other founders).

2. Happy, Crappy, Thankful
Describe something that happened that week that made you happy (e.g., We added customers. We hired someone awesome. We grew our revenues. We closed an investment, etc.)
Describe something that was crappy (e.g., “Y’all may have noticed that Brenda and Daryl are not here tonight. Well, I regret to say that they are no longer on the team. It was crappy to let them go, but I’m confident that we’ll all be better for it…”).
Describe something for which you are thankful. Hint: it always helps to show gratitude for the efforts of someone in the room (e.g., “I just want to say how thankful I am to the TechStars Associates. Roberta, in particular, did an outstanding job on that [graphic design project] she did for us.”).

3. Give an update on your company’s progress and go over your KPI slides. KPI slides will be displayed behind you for the group to see.

Incidentally, every Wednesday, teams are in Google Slides updating their KPIs. You’ll find that Wednesdays come around very quickly. You may want to have a standing meeting with your team on Sunday evenings to make sure some progress is being made so that there’s less pressure to make something happen at the last minute on Wednesday morning.

The KPIs for your startup should be whatever metrics you need to use to measure whether your business is on track and progressing. For that reason, KPIs are bound to vary for each team. For a social media video clip company, it was weekly average impressions. For a crowdfunding platform, it was the number of sponsors added. We reported closed sales and installations pending. But I can tell you that we did very poorly because we have sales cycles that are quite long. For that reason, it was harder to show the velocity of growth that some of the other companies enjoyed. If your company has a longer sales cycle, you’re simply not going to show much progress in three short months — best to choose KPIs that correspond to your company’s lifecycle. Early on, you may want to focus on customer discovery more than selling (as is clearly described in Sell More Faster by Amos Schwartzfarb). Your Managing Director can help tremendously in establishing appropriate KPIs for your startup. He or she should be able to share some screenshots of KPI slides from previous cohorts. If that is the case, ask if you can see slides from early in the program juxtaposed with some from the end of the program so that you can see each team’s progression.

In our cohort, every KPI slide contained something called “Big Rocks.” These are the highest-priority weekly goals set by each team. The TechStars Directors care less about the actual weekly goals you set. They mainly want to see that you are reaching them. Likewise, once a good KPI is identified for your business, they want to see progress on that metric as well.

While everyone is supportive, you’ll find that watching the other companies go through their KPI slide can be quite boring. It’s rare that a founder will get questions about his/her team’s KPIs from any of the other teams in the cohort. The questions almost always come from the TechStars Directors and Associates.

The KPI Template

KPI Slides from week 1 (left) compared to the final week (right)

Ultimately, the purpose of the weekly KPI meetings is just to hold teams accountable and push them ever so slightly. While they should be taken seriously, I would not stress about them.

An article to read prior to establishing your KPIs:
https://saasholic.com/the-right-saas-metrics-for-each-stage-of-your-company-1c0c769104cb

Gusto catering

Family Dinners

Following the KPI presentations, there will be a “family dinner” on Wednesday evening while the entire cohort is together. You and your team will be expected to attend every one of these dinners.

At some point during the 3 months, your company will be asked to provide one of the dinners. Depending on the total number of folks in the program, you will be asked to provide food for around 40 to 50 people. (One startup in our cohort, for example, was an outlier as they came into the program with 12 people, all of whom had equity in that business). I always thought it was a bit inequitable that teams of 2 or 3 people had to spend the same amount to feed the teams of 12, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

I do have a suggestion on how to do handle the meal. Rather than stress about it, or waste any precious time, I would simply order a catered meal from Gusto, the protein/veggies/grains bowl place up the street from PCM (Incidentally, I have absolutely no affiliation or business arrangement with this restaurant). Their food is delicious and it went over extremely well with everyone, despite all of the extremely diverse diets, food allergies, and preferences that people have. Gusto delivers everything including burners, plates, flatware, serving utensils, etc., and their delivery person will set everything up for you (another enormous time saver). At roughly $700, it wasn’t inexpensive, but I’m glad we didn’t waste two full days running around town picking up food, food warmers, etc. My co-founder has friends and relatives in the Atlanta area who own a restaurant. Initially, he wanted to go that route, but the restaurant he had in mind was completely vegetarian and didn’t deliver. I’m so relieved that we didn’t attempt to tackle that. Gusto was a much easier option.

Your Program Manager will assign the week that your company is responsible for the dinner. Hopefully, you’ll get to provide the meal earlier in the program so that you can get it over with and never have to worry about it again.

Founder’s Stories

At the conclusion of the family dinner, a seasoned founder will give a brutally honest talk about his or her entrepreneurial journey. Some of these Founder’s Stories are better than others, but all were valuable. The majority of these founders have done extremely well and would be considered successful in the world of startups. A couple of them have also experienced massive failures. It’s beneficial to hear the narratives from each scenario. I encourage you not to miss these talks. Moreover, sit up front, ask questions and at the end of the talk, consider asking the speaker if you could meet with him or her sometime in the future. Rarely will they say no as all of them remember what it was like when they were in your shoes. If you do get a meeting, I would encourage you to focus more on building a long professional relationship instead of trying to get anything in return (#GiveFirst).

Everything on Wednesday evening should conclude by 8:30 pm.

Final Thoughts

Take care of yourself. Sleep well, eat well and exercise — even if it is just going for a walk on the beltline each day. I would encourage members of your team to do likewise. Avoid burnout at all costs. If things get really bad, tell someone sooner rather than later.

The three months will whiz by so quickly. Congratulations and enjoy the journey!