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There is such a pre-accelerator beast, this is when you are not yet in the accelerator, they do not give you money, but there can be a lot of tasks. And the reward will be the vague prospect of getting a pass to the accelerator. We got the experience, learned it, and share it with you.

Attempt number times
It was like this, we are from Russia, but we have no traction in Russia and there was no idea from the beginning to make money from Russia. But then one big bank announced recruitment together with XXX Startups and we could not pass by. And in vain!
How the pre-accelerator went — for two weeks we were busy with daily tasks that had to be completed before the next morning. The tasks are relatively small and simple enough, many do not reveal the main point. On the definition of customer, value, and economy.

Along the way, the organizers said that they didn’t even read their homework and that all this was needed to get to the final interview. As a result, we spent about a day on all tasks (now we multiply by three people in the team, who did it — and we are sad).

We did get to the interview and … With the same success it was possible to tell about the project to a brick wall. By the way, the interview was in English, although before that everything was in Russian. But in any case, you could see how people on the other side of the screen were tired of hearing about projects and just waiting for them to end.

We heard from XXX Startups the same as before, we need more revenue. And obviously, we did not fit the bank’s ecosystem.

Attempt number two
It was especially fun here, we got into the Baltic accelerator. The program was for 8 weeks, there was a lot of information. About 10 videos for 5–8 minutes and 4 practical tasks, plus 2–3 general calls per week. And so for 8 weeks. Such a good basic course in economics.

During the program, I was in the USA, so all the calls came for me in the middle of the night, which was pretty inconvenient. We tried to share the calls in the team as best we could, but quickly realized that in general there was not much sense from them, except perhaps English training.

For example, we had a call on legal issues. I had a question about whether it is legal to cook food at home and sell it to the masses on the Estonian market. To which a response was received from a specialist that she does not know for sure and advises to take advice and a specialist in this industry. (Hmm, why is she here then?)

We realized that we were out near the end. We had a pitch run in the penultimate week and the girl from the jury did not listen to us from the word at all. That is, she asked questions about the presentation (of competitors), which were discussed a minute ago. Also, she managed to scold us for the Russian accent (although she is also Russian), which, in my opinion, was incorrect. Then her “favorites” began to perform and she was no longer so scared that their performance took not three minutes, but ten.

It all ended very enchantingly, they sent us a diploma by email and said that, unfortunately, our team did not have enough time on the demo day. Although initially it was said that all teams have the opportunity to present the project to investors. How could there not be enough space, if there are 16 teams in total — it is not clear. Or maybe we did not praise the organizers enough?

I would like to summarize that if instead of the time spent on pre-accelerators if we messaging the investors on Linkedin, it would be more sensitive. By the way, if we all stood with an outstretched hand at the station, there would catch more money.

In general, my advice is this, you can go to the pre-accelerator only if you do not understand anything at all about the basic business processes. In all other cases, get involved in the project.

Evgeny Chichvarkin has an amazing book - If out of 100 times you are sent 99 … The story is about how we were looking for investment in a project about this.

1. Make a list of accelerators and funds.
   Everything was easy here, I collected the top list through chats in the telegram, I found the profile ones myself, thank God I have not been banned in Google yet.

2. Submit applications, and were not submitted to subscribe to the newsletter. In total, I applied for 112 incubators and accelerators, the original plan was 300, but I realized that I would go crazy faster, so I settled on those in which the project had more chances.

3. Wait and suffer. About thirty sent us a rejection in the first couple of months. They referred to the fact that the company is registered in Russia, although it was written on their websites that there are no restrictions on regions. A dozen more were invited for interviews, but many lost interest when they realized that we were Russian.

Almost immediately we got a response from playfair capital and we got to their pitch session, they gave a lot of worthwhile advice, one of which sounded like that if we want to attract money, we need to become residents of England or attract someone to a co-founder with such status.

We had a great conversation with balticsandbox and we still communicate, they have great expertise in the Baltics, but this did not help us to attract money either.
We had an unforgettable call with newchip who tried to sell us a paid participation in the pre-accelerator, and then their friends tried to sell us paid mailing and linkidin, a very subtle scam of course.

Then we got to the incubators in Portugal and the program for obtaining their startup visa through the incubator. Now we have about five interests from different incubators, but this does not really bring us closer to a visa. In general, the procedure for obtaining a startup visa is interesting but very long, and it does not really smell like money.

After a couple of handshakes, we talked to a guy from TechStars who, for just a hundred dollars an hour, was ready to help us get into their accelerator. I have a double attitude towards this, I do not see anything bad that he takes money from people for consultations, but it is sad that he has it put on stream.
There were also about 10 calls, followed by nothing. At best, they sent us a letter with a refusal.

And then I talked to a beautiful Russian-speaking girl from an Italian venture capital fund, who explained to me in an accessible way that in general, they had nothing against Russian developers and technologies, just for a startup from Russia the stage at which it attracts money will be much further. Conventionally, we can forget about getting money at the idea stage or the first non-cyclical sales. In general, the guys from balticsandbox told us the same thing that now we need to develop traction and, when it is more impressive, go for money. It sounds, of course, very reasonable, but still, I wanted to believe in a miracle.
And then we got into the pre-axel of Sberbank, let's see what happens next)

I was always interested in how startups live, or rather what they live on. The classic model is when you work in a well-paid job and make your product at night, then the product starts to take off and you quit your job and go into your project in full. Someone first saves money and then starts to launch a product, sitting on a financial pillow. And someone just lives on the neck of a parent or partner, and even on the water with breadcrumbs. Our pillow was a previous project, and everything would be fine if we did not close it. So one morning we realized that we need to look for money very quickly and that’s what came of it.

This was not the first attempt to raise money in my life, but before we did it within Russia, so everything was decided by connections and the ability to scratch well with our tongue. It is generally difficult for a startup in Russia, because there is no infrastructure here, and the one that is built around the state and money can be toxic. By toxic money, I mean that you won’t be able to raise money abroad in the next round, and you may also be asked to “return the money”. It sounds funny, but we already went through this in one of our projects, so we decided to take only employees from Russia.

This does not mean that it is impossible in Russia otherwise, but by the examples of other guys — it is possible! Not as big and not as easy as the states, but real money.

What are the investments? Investments depend on the rounds, and where you are looking for them also depends on the project and stage. Let’s figure it out. In general, the search for investment in the sale of oneself and a project according to certain rules.
Idea stage — the stage of the idea, that is, you just want to be given money for an idea, just for you to do something. It seems to me almost unrealistic to attract money at this stage, if before that, for example, you did not create Apple, that is, of course, it is possible, but you have to be either the second Jeff Bezos or have an explosive idea and also find someone who will light up her like you and will give you money. By the way, in the early stages, as a rule, they invest in a person/team, and not in a company, but about that a little later.

At this stage, the check can be anything and not predictable, but I would count on $ 50,000. You can also collect several checks for $ 100,000k +, although investors do not like this.
Pre-seed is the stage when you came up with a project and tested it. That is, you have an MVP — a minimum working product or prototype, proven traction. Ideally, you have not only interested customers who signed up for a free subscription, but also paying customers. Your idea should be scalable. And also the market for your product should be interesting, that is, potentially from a billion dollars.

Where to get money at this stage? There is a beautiful and beloved rule of FFF — the rule of 3F, which states that the first money is attracted from the inner circle — friends, family, and fools. I am not a supporter of such investments, it seems to me that you can stay without family or friends.

You can go to an accelerator or an incubator, we went this way because getting into an accelerator you will either quickly develop your project or kill it just as quickly. Also, you can get connections and investments.

VC / Angel investors are private investors, ideally when you get not only investor money, but also his connections. For example, our ideal investor would be a C-level employee (CEO, CPO, CTO person of the top management of the company) who has worked for 10–15 years in the industry of advertising in social networks, conditional Facebook, because we could get from him not only money, but an understanding of internal processes, and of course communication.

The average check at this stage is about $ 100,000.
Seed stage — when your company has grown and purchases have become constant and predictable, you need more money for even more money. The story with fundraising remains about the same as in the last round. If you raised the first money in a good place or from good people, it will be easier later. Only the sites are changing.

For example, within the framework of the accelerator, one of the most famous YCombinator, to get into it, you need not only an excellent product and a team, but also traction from $ 10,000 per month, but this is so rumors from FB, it happens in different ways.

I would describe the Seed round as when you already have a system and it works, you come to the investor and say — “Let’s get rich together.” And of course, at this stage you are still looking for smart money — that is, not only money but also connections.
The average check at this stage is $ 2 million.
Series A / B / C

If your company has reached these stages, you are already great. Here we are talking about big money and big projects. Investments are attracted from such giants as New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Greycroft Partners, GGV Capital, Da Vinci Capital, and others.
And yet I have nothing to tell you about them, because we are to them, as to the moon on foot.

I approached this process as a sales funnel, now there are 110 contacts/accelerators/incubators on my list with whom we sent information on our project. We talked to about thirty of them, I mean we got feedback, about 20 rejections, and another ten got a dialogue. I’ll write about why we got rejections and what interesting funds and accelerators told us next year. Happy New Year and I hope Santa Claus will bring us a cool investor in the bag.

How to calculate the development if you are not a technical specialist at all.

Hi, my name is Polina, and here I am talking about our startup in the field of marketing automation. How we subscribed to all this can be read in the first post.

Today I will tell you how we wanted to find developers and why in the end we decided to make a product without code.
Background, I don’t understand anything about development at all. From the word completely, that is, of course, I can distinguish the code from the open Exel plate — but that’s all.

Search

To be honest, we didn’t look very much, but there were a couple of attempts. Because nobody wants to work for free for dubious prospects — and this is generally understandable. I scattered a couple of ads across hackathon groups and on my social networks.

A couple of people responded and then the most interesting thing began because it was necessary to explain what we actually want.

Many questions immediately arose, for example, do we want the user to be able to change the ad settings himself, or do we make a closed service. Will the user be able to change any particular criteria: age, gender, geo. What the subscription will give and how it will work. How will the integrations go, etc.

At this stage, we each went to think to their side, the developers in the direction of paid work, and we in the direction of how much money we generally need for this, because of course, no one wanted to fit into it for free :)

How we calculated development costs

In fact, we just asked about 10 people from the industry how long it would take and how long it would take. The average index was 6 months with two full-time developers. We saw that, on average, on job sites, we can count on $2000 per month for each. That is, for half a year it will cost us about $24000 Given the fact that social networks are constantly changing something, this will not be like the application that you made and it works. Something we went far, how are things with free options.

Is it free?
And we returned to the site construction again, and you will not believe, we have collected a personal account on it.
In fact, we used to do everything hand and our communication with the client by mail served as a personal account. It now looks more streamlined, at least from the client-side.

At first, we started thinking about how it should look in general, we took Tik-tok for the first integration. It turned out not everything is so transparent, but sometimes just take and start drawing is the best option. We used Miro, in the end, we got a way of how it looks to the client and how it actually looks to us.

The final mechanics turned out like this

1. The person completes the test
2. Receives an answer in which channel it is better for him to set up ads
3. Clicks on the try button and goes to the registration in the personal account
4. Registers or logs in to your personal account
5. Selects from 4 pages available for him: uploading photos/videos to creatives, viewing analytics, paying for a subscription, paying for an advertising budget.

And then the adventures began, the main problem was that the website builder does not always change the language of the page, and as a result, in some places, it turned out crooked. And the payment was in rubles, it turned out that 200 rubles fell into the account instead of $ 200.

Instead of a conclusion: it is good enough as a prototype, now photos and videos are uploaded to us automatically and payment goes through almost always. Much better than waiting half a year and hoping that the product will work correctly. It took three days to create a prototype and to understand that we need three months. And we did all this to try our luck in venture capital investments, but I will tell you about this next time. Until then, do not forget to subscribe and add me to the FB.

Today I will talk about CustDev and how we screwed up while testing the target audience. But first things first.

CustDev

CustDev is testing an idea or prototype of a future product on potential consumers.

The last time I did it two years ago in one of the projects, and to put it mildly, I have dubious memories. I remember to find a potential target client and ask him questions. It turned out that this is not entirely true)

How did you look for people on CustDev?
It was the easiest. I wrote on FB that I am looking for people with relevant experience in creating and promoting my business/project. 7 people responded I asked each of them to suggest someone else with the same problem. So I got about 5 correct and 5 incorrect interviews.

In my first interviews, I had the following list of questions:

1. What business are you in? Do you do it online?
2. Do you have marketing experience? If so, which one?
3. Have you ever set up an ad yourself?
4. Have you ever worked with an agency or freelancer to attract clients?
5. “If setup was easier, would you customize it yourself?”
6. Are there any games, quizzes that catch you?
7. Are there any games/applications that you use to kill time, for example on a plane or in a taxi?

Surprisingly, even on these strange questions, I received feedback. True, in the second interview I had a doubt that I needed to update my knowledge.

And so in order, first the conclusions from the answers.
Whom did I interview: fitness trainer, coworking space owner, natural cosmetics store owner, tattoo artist, online furniture store owner.

Key ideas: 3/5 hired a freelancer. The results of their own and others’ work are evaluated on an emotional level, and only one considers the economy.

Pain: it isn’t clear how to work with this, there is not enough time to figure it out, there is not enough time for analytics.

Thank all the gods, at this moment I slowed down and went to remember how to do a normal in-depth interview. The second batch of questions looked like this:

1. What service/product are you selling? What is the most difficult part of selling your product/service on the Internet?
2. When was the last time you encountered this problem?
3. Why was it hard?
4. What did you do to solve this problem?
5. What did you dislike about the solutions you used?

The result has improved dramatically.

Interviewed: the owner of a startup similar to Uber, a product specialist from a bank (this was a pass, but interesting), a product specialist trying to launch a startup in the field of blogging, a dance shoe seller, a pastry chef.

Key ideas: all the respondents have problems with setting up ads, moreover, regardless of whether they set up ads with their own hands or delegate.

Pain: it is not clear what message to broadcast to the audience, in some sites a/b tests and payment for installation are not implemented (relevant for applications), there is no clear analytics.

So we decided to focus on solving three main problems: determining which sales channel to go to the client, hiding the internal advertising settings (to give the client only the result), and understandable analytics.

Coming to life
First, we made up the landing page on a Tilda. I would like to say, “Oh, it was simple.” But we needed to insert a test there. We did not find anything better than the onlinetestpad platform (it feels like a site from the early 2000s), but we managed to use it.
What was the point?

The client (artisan, small business owner) answers our questions and at the end receives a marketing strategy, in total we had about 36 different answers. For example, if you say that you are selling a product and you have a website, but you cannot buy on it, then first of all we advise you to go to marketplaces, and secondly, add the function of selling goods to the site.

We decided that the landing page as a whole was ready and launched the target. (Not so easy)

Test № 1
Platform: FB, Insta
Region: Estonia, England
Target audience: freelancers, m / f, 18–54

In both cases, men responded to our ads better than women. In Estonia, the cost per click was cheaper. We collected a database of 50 freelancers, talked to them, and found out that they are ready to work with us if we have an automated part (like on prototypes).
Of course, part of it twisted at the temple and did not understand why we were doing advertising at all, but in general, we received feedback from the market. They did not take pens to do it. Each freelancer has an average of 5–6 clients and we physically and financially cannot meet such a volume of work.

Test № 2
Platform: FB, Insta
Region: Estonia, England
CA: small business, m / f, 18–54

And here we were disappointed. We did not change the site and launched advertising directly to it for small business owners. Of course, small businesses did not understand at all what we want to offer and why they need it, we just drained the advertising budget.
At this stage, we realized that we had made a mistake with positioning and we needed to change something. We wrote the text and inserted what we thought were “understandable prototypes”, but we completely forgot that not all representatives of our target audience understand what we mean. And we need to explain the product more clearly. And what we came up with I will tell you next time. This is how our startup is doing.