3
1 Comment

Newchip Accelerator / your thoughts

Hi,

We have been accepted to the Newchip Accelerator. They operate under a slightly different model than other accelerators. Is there anyone here who has work with them? What are your thoughts? Thanks!

https://launch.newchip.com/

  1. 1

    I had high hopes for the New Chip accelerator program. During the “sales” process, I spent a great deal of time addressing my concerns about being fundable even though we were a pre-revenue company at that time. As an older, experienced female executive, it was critical to our firm to find someone who would know more than I did and find people who truly “got healthcare" and more importantly, "got mental health” concerns. These were clearly referenced throughout the sales process. New Chip has not delivered on its sales promises. Worse yet, my first meeting with a Program Advisor resulted in me being told that without MRR/ARR, my company would not get funded and that I had to find my own investors by mining my LinkedIn account. This amounts to a “bait and switch” approach which is totally unacceptable in any business.

    I understand that New Chip defines its business as an educational company. Frankly, the curriculum has been an insult to my intelligence and the comments shared during my mastermind sessions confirmed I am not the only one feeling that way. The redundancy, poor organization, and incoherent webinars made completing the curriculum wasteful at best and beyond annoying at worst. Please remember that, regardless of how you define the company, the New Chip sales pitch focuses heavily on a 70% success rate of getting startups funded.

    The limited mentorship also has not lived up to the sales hype. In our case, it took three attempts to get matched with a mentor in the behavioral health space. Unfortunately, that mentor has no experience raising investor funding which resulted in no help at all. Frankly, conducting 20 min sessions to perfect a pitch deck is totally insufficient and inconsistent with the sales pitch which convinced us to engage New Chip. Further, I was then told that New Chip investors will not fund companies that have an app because they’ve been burned in the past. The result of this was being told I should only describe our company as a SaaS based solution because that’s what your investors will fund. This causes me to question whether there are serious investors or whether those investors have any understanding or knowledge in healthcare or specifically mental health apps. When I would share the advice I was getting from New Chip resources with trusted colleagues they would just shake their heads and wonder why I was paying for this. At long last, I finally had two resources affiliated with New Chip (but not employees) review my deck and I received only minor suggestions for upgrades basically saying they loved the deck. Following this, I was told by my Program Advisor that I still needed more feedback before our deck could be submitted to the IR department. This only reinforced either a gating mechanism punishing me for being outspoken about how disappointed I was in the program or incompetence on New Chip’s part.

    Quite frankly this has been a complete failure on New Chip's part and a complete waste of our limited funds. Add to the fact that the earliest I could hope to engage with New Chip investors is in the last month of the program the likelihood we could raise funds through New Chip despite your claimed 70% success rate is nil. I still wonder how many people get funded because they did have in their LinkedIn network investors who funded them. (I had already ruled out my LinkedIn network because none of my investor contacts had healthcare experience.)

    I also wish to highlight that there were constant changes in the program while all of this was going on. The constant program changes, which typically meant taking stuff away, suggests they understand the program has challenges and issues. We respect those challenges, however they are not our responsibility. All I can indicate is that New Chip has a lot of work to do to deliver on its value proposition. I might go so far as to suggest that your one size fits all model has reached the breaking point.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 16 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments