Help! I made an amateur mistake: Forgot asking e-mail in the submission form
Hey everyone!
When I introduced incubatorlist.com here, many people wanted to add new programs to the list. Because of this ultra-simple feature that didn't exist, they kindly shared these programs with me by e-mail. That's why I am grateful to them.
Then I made a simple submit form and it worked like magic: More than 25 submissions in a few days! But I realized that I made a stupid mistake: I forgot to ask their e-mails!
I am pretty sure most -maybe all- of them came from the programs themselves, because the ones contacted me by e-mail or the submissions after I fixed the e-mail issue, are all from people working in those accelerators & incubators.
So, I want to contact these people for several reasons: either to let them know I added their program to the list, or to announce new features in IncubatorList.
The only solution in my mind is:
- sending e-mails to program contact e-mail addresses, asking whether they submitted or not, and being honest with them:)
What should I do? Do you have any other idea? Or should I ignore the submissions without e-mail because of my carelessness?
I did one better, I managed to build a sign-up form that asks for the email address but does not actually send the email address one.
Thankfully their email was coded into the "Reply-to" for the system but nearly lost out on sign-ups for that.
Oh, when I launched my landing page at first, I f*cked up the API connection to Mailchimp and lost the first few days of submissions.
That's a nightmare. But I see your business is going well, which means that kind of problems is not the end of the world.
I didn't even create a signup form when I introduced the website here. I received nearly 1K traffic on that day but no sign-up:) I think I should be more careful.
How did you get that much traffic on the first day? What did you do? Ads?
Hey! I just shared it here with a title of "A curated list of 250+ startup accelerators & incubators" and attracted people much more than I expected. I haven't used any ads so far, all the traffic came from here and HackerNews.
Wow impressive!
Omg:) But at least you solved it, hope I will solve it too.
Off topic
Interesting idea and I’m curious what’s the value proposition of your search engine?
P.S. I’m working for Techstars :)
Hi Felix! Sorry for the late reply as I am now recovering from the worst flu I've ever had:)
Easy access to updated information about top startup programs is not available right now. F6S, one of the biggest resources, is full of outdated information, for example. I've also realized that most of the new programs want to announce themselves, which is not easy for them, as the number of startup programs is increasing rapidly.
I've been making interviews with people who attended those programs on my list. I want to transform Incubatorlist into Glassdoor of startup programs, showing reviews of previous cohorts etc. Applying to multiple programs at once will be another important feature as well, which I am planning to contact startup programs and ask their opinions, beforehand.
That's why it would be great to have feedback from you, an insider from Techstars:)
Sure. Please find my quick feedback below:
what makes your platform better than F6s, at least for now?
how would you ensure the quality of application when you allow startups to apply to multiple programs at once?
a validation question for you -> do you know the percentage (%) of startups applying to an accelerator program organically, such as found an accelerator program on Google search?
one more thing... there's a huge difference between incubator versus accelerator. Hence I think your domain either required update or you distinguish clearly in your website
Would be great to hear from you :) @bozkan
This is great feedback Felix, really appreciate it! Tried to give short answers, but now it seems a bit long:)
There are hundreds of programs in F6S, either shut down or out of date, but their applications are still open. Besides, if you don’t use F6S for your application form, then your program will not be available in F6S. But Incubatorlist is a hand-picked, curated list, with all up-to-date information.
My fault, I forgot to say: I was actually considering it as a pre-application for all or preselection form rather than one application for all, because every program would naturally want to ask their own questions. It is not possible to create one, unique form for all. But such a common form could work really well for preselection. Otherwise, quality assurance is not so possible.
Tbh, I don’t know the percentage, but those sort of data may be valuable to validate, thanks for sharing your insight. For now, I can say that I just validated by myself:) When I moved to Sweden, I was looking for a co-founder but knew no one. I just googled a few words like “how to find a co-founder in Sweden” and found Antler, then applied, got accepted in a week (true story) But at the end, still couldn’t find a perfect partner for me there :(
I agree. I just didn’t want to miss incubatorlist domain name when I saw it was available, although I planned it both for incubators and accelerators. I tried to emphasize my website’s purpose in the motto, by saying “A curated list of 250+ startup incubators and accelerators” at the top of the page, but yeah, it may not be enough. I don’t want to lose the current traffic, that’s why second option is more suitable for me. How can I distinguish it in the website? I will add a filter in a few days, based on location, investment, type of program (incubator/accelerator/VC) etc. Would such a filter work for it?
You're welcome. Hopefully I'm helpful :)
Re:
How would you ensure updated info based on a handpick approach?
Sure - then I think you need a deeper analysis to see how's the pre-application process looks like
Gotcha. I'm not in a good position to speak on behalf of other accelerators. But in general, most startup applications aren't from the organic sign up. Antler is definitely a great program, I like the team and the program a lot. For that reason, you might need to narrow down and understand the behavior of an equity-based accelerator. Try to do segmentation.
It's nice to get clicks, but it might not be the right metrics you should celebrate. The chance is you'll get clicks but no engagement if your information are not matching what a new visitor expected.
When you mention filtering such as days, based on location, investment, type of program. How would you compete with aggregator like Crunchbase? @bozkan
Ofc you're helpful!
Yes, these sort of data are dynamic, but they are not very dynamic: You don't need to update it every day. I am a software engineer and I love to automate every task of mine, but for this one, manual approach is better. 1. Data is not huge 2. This is not a search engine, where you can get every possible program in the world, indeed it is a curated list
2 & 3 I definitely agree.
In the long term, I would compete with focusing on niche and providing participant-based data as well such as user feedbacks and community support. I can give NomadList as an example. You could already use Google to get every piece of information about Taipei as a nomad, but you need 1. some nomad specific info about there 2. other nomad's reviews. Crunchbase is like Google in this case, or you may consider it as the Bible of numeric data, but people are looking for more than Google or numeric data to get insights.
By the way, if I would say, I am going to be the search engine of startup programs, then it would be a failure. Because it is not required. But this is a curated list, aiming to provide target information about them. So far, people here on IndieHackers and HN asked me whether I can provide some other additional data, 12 different data points in total. They are available on some API or you can extract them. But they are not available to users, which I am planning to show on my website.
How many are they?
26 submissions without an e-mail:)
Ok, not so much. I think you also need those e-mail addresses to send notifications to the incubators when a discus comment has been made. Maybe contacting them with a message, 'Thank you for adding your record to our website, for further contact requests, inquiries and news from incubatorlist.com, please click here and enter your contact e-mail address. If it's not you, then just ignore this e-mail." Show it like a delayed automated e-mail from the system, and let the users without e-mail decide what to do. This way you can send this e-mail to more people in the incubator, and find out which one has added the record.
Hmm, that's genius, thanks for the recommendation!
Though I wouldn't love to send this e-mail to other people in the same incubator, as it may be recognized as a phishing e-mail, but maybe I can try a few other people.