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What I learned in my first month of running a startup accelerator

One of the things I focused on is trying to make the program a lot more structured than YCombinator and modeled it around a finishing school that I always wanted.

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Microsoft Accelerator
Photo: dr-hempel-network.com

I have been the CEO of the Microsoft Accelerator for the past month. There are 11 companies as part of the batch and it has been an exciting ride. One of the things I focused on is trying to make the program a lot more structured than YCombinator and modeled it around a finishing school that I always wanted. Here are the top things I learned.

1. Dont try to change an entrepreneur’s idea. They have to come up with something they like themselves. This seems fairly trivial. There are many incubators and seed funds that believe if you dont have an idea, but are great entrepreneur material, they will “give you ideas”. That rarely works. Entrepreneurs have ownership and pride only for things they believe “they came up with on their own”. Anything borrowed (even if its a clone or knock-off idea from a US startup) is theirs. They will put more wood behind their idea than anything you ever propose.

2. Indian entrepreneurs have varied expectations from accelerators. One entrepreneur wanted “execution” help in actually doing the design (preferably a full time designer and user experience person for a few weeks to do it) and another wanted better quality food at the cafeteria. Some think the biggest value proposition of an accelerator is the “quality of the space” (i.e the physical location), while another thought the value was the other startups who would egg them to get better.

3. Regardless of what you offer, there’s always someone offering more or better, which I think is the “grass is greener on the other side syndrome”. If I had a penny for every time someone said “I have heard YCombinator founders get XYZ” or “500 startups gives more ABC”, I’d have enough money to fund all the startups for a year.

4. Indian companies need a lot more user experience and design help than any US company. I have invested in over 20+ companies in the US and about 11 here in India. Its extremely hard to find good user experience talent in India. This is a different person from someone that just does Photoshop and illustration. We interviewed 23 “highly recommended” designers and user experience professionals in India. Most were average and were still charging rates from $20 / hour to $100 / hour. No negotiation.

5. The Go-to-market challenge is largely under-appreciated in India among founders. Many need more help here than any other area, but tend to relegate the problem to “lets hire someone to do that”. Unless one founder is deeply involved in the customer development process, we largely build technology for the sake of it.

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Business

40 Good Brand Name Ideas for Great Business

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Good Brand Name Ideas

Choosing the good brand name ideas can be a complicated thing. Because names are prayers. So, you should choose a nice and beautiful name to be easy to remember by customers. Besides to take any name you should not originate, you must match it with what goods or services you sell.

For those of you who are still confused about choosing your store name and looking for a suitable name. Here’s a list of store name ideas that could be your reference in naming your new store!

List of Good Brand Name Ideas for Clothing, Accessories, and Food

For those of you who have a food, beverage and other stores and so on, here are some unique and beautiful names that can be your reference in choosing a name for your store, among them the following:

  1. Glamorous Styles
  2. Fashionistars
  3. Healthy Buns
  4. Dazzling Store
  5. Green Groceries
  6. Fresh Finds
  7. Stylish Nails
  8. Finest Craft
  9. Food Frenzy
  10. Fun Pantry
  11. We Eat
  12. Food Fair
  13. Food Hut
  14. Foodie Club
  15. Buddy Beverages
  16. Funky Mart
  17. Beast Feast
  18. Crash Cuisine
  19. Choco Blast
  20. Dine Court

List of Ideas Name Shop Cake and Flowers Aesthetic

If you have a flower store or a cake store, there’s no need to worry here’s a list of ideas for the name of the cake and flower shop that could be your reference when you’re looking for a beautiful special name for your store:

  1. (Your name) Florist
  2. Sweety Bakery
  3. Bread Stations
  4. Happy Bakery
  5. Flower Aura
  6. Velvet Boutique
  7. Queens’ Cake
  8. Blissful Clothes
  9. Fresh D’Fleur
  10. Sassy Queen
  11. Batter Up
  12. Delight Doughnut
  13. Heaven Boost
  14. Top Dessert
  15. Petal The Flows
  16. Flora Essence
  17. Bless Florist
  18. Lilly Silly
  19. Violet Luv
  20. Azalea dew Florist

Why Does Our Shop Need a Good Name?

In the business world, choosing good brand name ideas is very important, because the name will reflect the survival of the store. So, choose a nice and beautiful name. But, did you know there are some underlying reasons why you should choose a shop name with a nice and aesthetic name? Here are some important reasons, namely:

As a differentiator between your owner and the other store

Choosing good brand name ideas is also a differentiator where this will distinguish your store from the other. But, make sure you’ve chosen the store name for what you’re selling.

Forms of Professionalism and Special Features

The choice of good brand name ideas is also one of the hopes to make the front shop become a lot of customers. The unique store name is also one of the characteristics and forms of professionalism.

Besides, you should also choose a suitable and bright color. We sure the store name you’re going to make not only reflects the bad business value but is also free of negative connotations so that later will give a positive effect to the coming buyers.

Build a Good Branding

Aside from selecting an excellent shop label, you must also establish a solid brand, such as acquiring customer trust, because it will allow you to connect with a larger marketing audience.

Easy to Remember

Through giving unique and memorable good brand name ideas, customers will be able to remember the business present in the middle of society. Businesses both offline and online, business names are like magical powers to strengthen brands in the middle of society. This will give a special benefit to the development of your business as more and more people will know and know your business. So this will make marketing easier later.

Final Words

In conclusion, considering the good brand name ideas also need to be careful in choosing it, not until you choose a sentence or word that has a negative meaning and it will have a negative impact on your product. 

That’s the importance of choosing a store name to look professional and memorable for customers to remember with your product. Besides, keep the confidence, quality and quantity of goods to keep customers using your products and stores.

Read Also: 10 Important Things to Have in Life for Financial Success

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Are Accelerators Failing Startups or the Curious Case of “Zombie Startups” Jumping from One Accelerator to Another

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Zombie Startups

On Wednesday I had a chance to interact with 31 entrepreneurs in the IoT space at Plug and play technology coworking space in Sunnyvale. There were 10 companies in the Healthcare IoT area, 11 in the connected car and 10 in the home automation (IoT) space.

Plug and play has 3 sponsors for their programs including Bosch, Johnson and Johnson and StateFarm, so the companies chosen were deemed a good fit for those sponsors to help them with innovation and startup scouting.

The interesting part that was very obvious to me when I looked at the list and later spoke with many entrepreneurs was that 19 of the 31 had gone to another accelerator program before this one. Of the 10 companies in the connected home space, 3 were from the Microsoft Accelerator itself.

Of the 31 companies, 28 were outside the Silicon Valley, which makes sense (that they would want to move to the valley). Two that applied were from YCombinator as well, so, there were not just companies from tier 2 accelerators.

I asked the entrepreneurs why they felt the need to go through another 3-4 month program after they had been to one before.

The not so surprising conclusion is that for many (not all) companies, the 4 month accelerator model is largely insufficient. I did learn that most entrepreneurs did value the support, mentorship and advice provided by the accelerator program they were with before, but many had insufficient “traction” to justify a series A after their “acceleration”.

Of the over 3500 companies funded by venture capitalists in technology last year, less than 150 went through accelerator programs. Of them, nearly 50% were from YCombinator.

At the same time, over 1200 companies went through accelerator programs in the US alone last year. Of the over 1200 companies, 68% have gotten some form of funding (or about 800 companies) is the claim from the accelerators.

Which means about 650 (800 minus the 150 who secured VC funding) companies that “got funded” after an accelerator program, have not secured Institutional funding from a VC, but either from angels or from other accelerators.

If you look at the angel data from the US, of the over 4000 deals funded by angel investors in technology, < 5% or about 200 companies have been through accelerators before.

The result is that 450 companies that were claimed as “funded” after an accelerator program actually went to another accelerator.

Going back to the numbers above, if out of the 1200 companies funded by accelerators, about 450 (or 30%) went to another accelerator and 20% of them (on average) shut down, fail or close, then really about 50% of the startups from the accelerator programs or about 600 companies should be technically “funded” institutionally, but that number is 150. So, there are 450 “zombie” companies.

So the question is – what has happened to the “zombie” companies?

There are only 3 possible answers:

1. More companies have shut down that the numbers reported by accelerators.

2. Many companies end up becoming “cash flow positive” or “break even”, so they chose to not raise funding, but instead grow with “customer financing”.

3. More companies are “zombies” or walking dead – trying to raise funding, not succeeding, but not growing fast enough to justify institutional Venture funding.

I have my hypothesis, that it is #3 that makes up most of the “zombie” companies, but I’d love your thoughts.

If the measure of value that an accelerator provides (as measured by entrepreneurs) is funding, alone we are failing big time.

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Startup Idea: Shopify for SaaS Companies

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Shopify for SaaS Companies

There are over 20,000 SaaS companies in the world and growing. They are the new “software ISV” of the 1990’s. Growing like weeds. Getting users, building niche applications and growing revenue.

Every SaaS company builds a “specific application” for a “specific user”. They are the domain experts on that application.

Every SaaS company development team though, needs to pay a 15-25% tax upfront. Sometimes more.

Every one of them has to develop a sign up process, a user cancellation process, a payment process, a refund process, a login process, a password retrieval process, etc.

Trust me, we are going through this and its an absolute PAIN. It gets in the way of building useful benefits and capabilities for the user.

Its plumbing and it should be standard and out of the box for 90% of startups.

What if you provided a “Shopify” like sandbox for SaaS companies? Provide all these capabilities out of the box. Let SaaS developers focus on building their app. Not do plumbing.

Please dont tell me AWS is one, they are an infrastructure provider. You will still have to code a bunch of processes on top of AWS.

Requirements:

1. This platform has to be “developer friendly” – but not like Magento. That’s too steep a learning curve. Think like Mixpanel or Stripe “developer friendly”.

2. It has to provide simple API (hooks) to the developer’s own application.

3. It has to (obviously) be hosted.

Is it a billion dollar opportunity?

I dont know.But I will put my money where my mouth is. Show me a good team, and show me how you will do this and I will put angel money into this.

This is Heroku 2.0 (they got bought for $212 million). Go beyond platform and infrastructure and actually build application plumbing.

No one is doing it.

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