Week 2 at the Techstars Accelerator Program

We’re quickly diving in and getting the hang of things, spending a considerable amount of time last Sunday getting ourselves prepared for the Mentor Madness. It was definitely worth the hassle — the first results are already in! Mentors are interested in working with us and we’re getting a bunch of very, very interesting business leads from them.

In this second week, we’ve met over 30 strangers with a very particular set of skills, various backgrounds and connections in search for the right match. This is called Mentor Madness. When we find someone who we think is the perfect fit for our project, we can choose to hire them (a total of three) as our Lead Mentors for the rest of the program and even after it ends. You can think of this program like a speed-dating experience, and here we are thoroughly testing our pitch, demo presentation, communication skills, team collaboration and trying to prepare as much as we can for this incoming and great rollercoaster ride.

As fun as it sounds, it’s not only about meeting these people. We also had to look them up, prepare the right questions for them, put an emphasis on the right things in the pitch and also take care of the newly established relationship itself — writing follow-ups and thank-you notes within the next 24 hours to all of them. It felt like a rat race for the whole team as the last emails were usually sent around midnight.

And then we started from scratch the next day once again.

Obviously, all of this did not go as smoothly as it sounds from the very beginning. We’re here to learn (the hard way) and evolve. Luckily enough, that happened, so now you can check out our progress:

Monday

Wasn’t a bad start at all but we had 20 minutes with each mentor (spent 10 minutes talking about our product and 5 minutes showing the prototype). That left us with just 5 minutes for the questions. The pitch wasn’t very effective. We used a lot of flowery language and people got lost in it.

On the other hand, when asked about how we think our meetings went, Roman responds with 10 of 10 without much thought but his confidence is backed by the mentors — who named us as the best-prepared team while four of them are interested in leading us. But of course there’s always room for improvement.

Tuesday

Going to bed really late forces us to rethink the way we approach this whole thing and we start to divide our tasks more carefully. Not everyone needs to be everywhere.

Roman is in charge of communicating with our team in Czechia when it comes to investment strategies and the legal area. Jakub talks to the business partners and sells it. Matus takes notes during the meetings and extracts the juice directly to our CRM on steroids which we keep in Notion. Kamil focuses on programming our beast and I, Albert, support the team by preparing sales materials and investor decks.

Even more mentors are interested in working with us after today’s round of the Madness. Wow.

Wednesday

We’ve met with Charles, our new Lead Advisor (yes, that’s a slightly different role than Lead Mentor, more on that later) in his office for the first time to give him a demo of our product and discuss our future plans. We left the meeting energized with our heads full of new ideas and leads to potential partners. The routine here in the states is amazing. Everything feels quick and to the point, professional in every way. Yep, we like.

A few moments after that, when we were back at our HQ in Rise NY where we presented ourselves to David Brown, the co-founder of the Techstars accelerator. He likes what he sees and also provided us with useful tips on how to play the game. “Just say ‘we digitally fingerprint anything’ and show the demo immediately”, he advises. We employed this straight away and it works miracles. Thank you, David.

Even though we divided up and organized the work, we’re still behind schedule with writing to all the people we meet.

Thursday & Friday

These two days somehow blended together as the schedule was pretty similar. We’ve met many new faces and began feeling even better about our pitch. It takes about a minute right now and Kamil has perfected his demo as well (and that’s not even its final form yet). Then we bombard mentors with questions.

These questions come with a clear goal — to get us involved in a project tomorrow. We begin to realize how important it is to ask the right questions rather than to just talk about ourselves.

The Weekend

We used Saturday to decompress from all the work-related things. We enjoyed some “us time”, eating out and a very rough massage session in China Town. Sunday — funday, despite the work we needed to do. Oh yeah, we had a proper fight over the kind of procedures for choosing the Lead Mentors, not even actually choosing them.

Looking back at the past two weeks, it feels unbelievable how much has happened. We got myriads of high-level contacts — it’s going to be hundreds by the end of our stay here and we’re discussing just how we’re going to manage that. Only now we understand the word “accelerator.” And how much money will be needed to make that acceleration happen.

Next week, I’m thinking about writing about all of the mistakes we are going to make and taking it to a much more personal level. Just how you like it.