Mutual assistance in the accelerator: the collective mind of twenty-three projects

Every startup thinks at some point how to organize a workplace for yourself: go to coworking, go to accelerator or work from home? We are now going through acceleration in IIDF. We are often asked a question: what does acceleration give you? In addition to expert support of mentors and the provided infrastructure, the opportunity to receive investments, this acquaintance with other start-ups. (For information on what is taught in the resettlement program, see the article “ What should a startup do to survive? ”). We would like to tell about the special internal culture of the accelerator participants: about mutual assistance of projects.

In FRII, participants help each other constantly, it is embedded in the work process itself. Firstly, the accelerator itself holds events that help the interaction of teams. Secondly, in a multitasking environment and for a limited amount of time, the founders approach each other with questions and useful tips. We have broken all kinds of useful communication between projects into 9 categories.

1. Networking

This word defines the internal culture of the accelerator as a whole, its essence lies in building trusting relationships and mutual assistance projects. The main thing in networking is making useful contacts, expanding the network of contacts, and here we have referred to the collective search for the right people. The theory of six handshakes in the IIDF is used constantly: the search for the right contacts takes place both over a cup of coffee and in the secret group of residents on Facebook. During the first month of our acceleration, different teams were found: a friend in tax, who helped to correct the error on time, content managers, sales people, developers, contacts in the sphere of political PR, and so on. From her own experience: Anna Chashina, CMO of Witget , introduced Andrey Makeyev, the founder of the FlowWow Flower Shop Aggregator , to Dmitry Amroyan, the founder of the myWishBoard.com service, and soon flowers from Andrey's service may appear on the wishboard .
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On all stands hang project contacts with names and phone numbers. On the contrary - the competence of the guys. That allows you to find the right expert among your own in just a few minutes. Board of competences and necessities in the kitchen accelerator looks like this:



2. Traction-meetings

Every Saturday in the accelerator are held traction meetings, during which experts and mentors along with other participants of the accelerator assess how each team manages to put its business model into practice. All teams are divided into four groups, the first half of the teams “tracks” in the morning, and the second - in the afternoon. (For more information about the usefulness of these activities, see the article " How the traction meetings save a startup from failure ").
For each such meeting, all the teams prepare presentations, calculate the project's economy by metrics. At a rally meeting, the project’s bottlenecks, that is, its weaknesses, are identified and collectively think about how to solve the problem. Bottlenecks are found with the help of a sales funnel: this is the moment when a large number of potential customers “fall off”. Before joining the accelerator, many projects did not build sales funnels: they did not calculate how many customers were lost and at what stage on the way from the first contact to the transaction. At the beginning of acceleration, the GoandStudy project had only one of the ten bids before the sale of the service, and after the traction rallies the client’s entire path (request, first call, second call and so on) was disassembled, this indicator doubled.

The last slide of the presentation is the needs of the project. For example, “Servicephone” was looking for an engineer to work on the client’s territory. Witget is looking for projects that have made affiliate programs. RentMania is looking for an SEO expert. PetsFerma asks for help with puppy breeders.

The main assistants are the trackers: Dmitry Kalaev, Artem Azevich, Yevgeny Kalinin, Alexander Zhurba. Right during the traction they place on their Facebook wall a request coming from the project. Thanks to a large number of friends, the post responds in minutes.



Usually, all needs are closed immediately after a tracking rally.

A very interesting way to get feedback is using Maxim from the LetMart project. At the end of the presentation, he turns on the “red” voice recorder on the plasma panel and asks to share everything that, according to the listeners, was wrong. Then includes a "green" voice recorder to be praised.

3. Stand Up

Between the morning and afternoon traction shifts in the kitchen of the accelerator, Stand Up is held: all the teams come together, and one person from each project goes to the center of the room to talk about the needs of his team and the expertise she can give. Simplified: what team needs help, and how it can help other projects. All competencies and needs are recorded on pink stickers and placed on a large blackboard. It also happens that the problem is solved on the spot: at the last stand-up, the project founder + Voice (CRM-system for working with voters) expressed the need to get into closed groups of political technologists, and right there was a person who is in several communities and can send an invitation.



4. Expertise

Every start-up entrepreneur has a certain area of ​​competence and experience with a set of tools. For example, with Yandex.Direct, trigger mailings, e-mail marketing, Google Analytics, and so on. If one of the projects needs consultation from the competence of another, the projects find each other through Facebook or directly on the stand-up.

To make it easier to find projects in the accelerator, blue clouds with names are hung above the founders' tables.



From examples of competencies: Vyacheslav Bogdan, co-founder of FlowWow, previously worked at Yandex, where he was involved in contextual advertising. In this area, his competence came in handy to several projects of the third set, including the AppCoins project: Vyacheslav advised them to use the Direct Commander program to avoid intersecting keywords and increase the effectiveness of impressions. The founders of the Petsferma project prompted the rest of the businessmen to a free service to find YouDo employees, and the GoandStudy guys even helped to make the advertisement on the service popular: the initial display rate was extremely low - one view per half hour. By changing the category of the ad to the more popular one and specifying the cost of the service, the guys increased the number of views to 25 in a quarter of an hour, and in the end got 6 candidates for the vacancy.

5. Hypothesis Testing

In these two words, the whole essence of a startup is concentrated, while it has not yet become a business. Each project in the accelerator makes assumptions and tests them on its clients, and often on other projects. For example, the guys collect the opinions of colleagues regarding their landing page, the implemented function, the payment page. So Dmitry Sokolov, the founder of the Pocket.DJ project , collected feedback on the new landing page:



Other projects conduct corridor testing, for example, the Youmely project selected a heading for the landing page using such a survey. They approached 10 projects and showed the screen of the mobile application with a request to say where you want to click and what is understandable. It turned out that no one understood almost anything, so they had to redo both the headline, the image, and the call to action.

Our project with the help of such a survey tested the service payment page: we called the guys to the computer, and they looked for flaws. The Witget project has a B2B model, it is designed for small and medium businesses, which means that we are surrounded by a target audience, from which we can constantly request feedback or assistance.

Thanks to the guys, the checkboxes became green and a footnote “Soon” appeared for the expected functionality.



6. Partnership

Of course, all projects are actively interested in each other’s activities. Several projects have installed and tried our Witget service to increase site conversion, and half of our team are hooked on PocketDJ (playlist generator). We are writing to our blog about other accelerator projects, for example, we have already published an interview with the founders of the SHOPPILOT feedback platform . The founders of the Petsferma project use Servicephone - with its help, you can configure IP telephony “for yourself”. Usually partnerships are negotiated by companies with a similar audience / product. For example, plans for FlowWow (a flower shops aggregator) to collaborate with Funfromme (creating videos from customer photos as a gift).

7. Lynch Landings

The IT accelerator program includes hours when projects stock up on coffee and cookies, gather in one of the audiences and “lynch” the landing pages of each other’s websites — they simply criticize them, reveal weaknesses, advise each other what can be improved and how. “In a casual way, the guys discuss the design and quality of the landing pages, laugh at each other,” said Andrey Makeev, founder of the FlowWow project. Lynches are continuing in the workplace: it does not take a day for a project not to ask Facebook to evaluate its new landing page and give feedback about it. If urgent feedback is needed, the projects ask the colleagues sitting next to them to evaluate the new development. In general, the same thing happens with the main page of the site, and with its interface as a whole.



8. Life hacking

Perhaps one of the most important advantages of working in the accelerator. Each project knows some workarounds for the obstacles in its sphere. In FRII, all projects are in one way or another related to IT, so life hacks of one entrepreneur are almost always useful to another. Sergei Kuldin, the founder of the Youmely project, had a problem: how to get an application for an application as soon as possible in the AppStore? He was helped by a colleague from the project Dr. Tariff . “Life hacking is that they don’t pay much attention to the author of a single application, and those who downloaded a dozen are answered fairly quickly. As a result, you simply remove nine out of ten, and most importantly, you advance further, ”Sergey shares his experience.

The founder of Letmart, Maxim Perevezentsev, gave useful advice to Unim Histology founder Alexey Remez, how to attract relevant traffic from the Yandex news feed: link a news feed to it on the Unim Histology website.

Stanislav Bai, co-founder of SHOPPILOT, helped the RentMania project with advice: for rental projects, an excellent KPI is not at all the number of orders, but the number of ads in contextual advertising. The wider the coverage of ads, the higher the efficiency of the company.

9. Training

The benefit of the accelerator is that each member of the team is an expert in some field. If you want to recruit a lot on some topic, the administrators announce a master class.

Evgeny Bezymyannikov from Witget told projects about the American system. According to this methodology, knowing the exact time that an employee spends on one operation, you can plan to hire new employees and scale up the business.

Daniil Khanin, co-founder of Crossss and mentor of the startup RentMania, shared with all projects his best practices: how to test the hypothesis and demand for the product in 5 minutes without wasting time and effort on creating landing pages and programming order forms.

Colleagues can also be used to lobby for the idea of ​​a master class from a famous speaker. If there are enough people willing, the accelerator finds an expert and puts his lecture into the program. This happened with the speech of Alexander Egorov from Alytics on contextual advertising, and this is how we ask for a lecture on SMM:



The resources of the accelerator itself are only half of the push that it gives to a startup. One head is good, two are better, but fifty, and even entrepreneurial, accelerate the development of the project at times. It seems to us that such an internal culture can be built in the usual co-working and in the classic office, the main thing is the right motivation. Of course, a similar culture already exists in many offices, coworkings and business incubators, but if not, then you can try to develop it. On the other hand, perhaps it is necessary to help and listen to the advice, too, so that constant communication does not interfere with the work.



Working in a startup is not only learning and networking, but also a lot of mistakes that each of the projects makes at the beginning of the journey. Read more about this in the material " Startups and Facs ." In the following publications, we will talk about several more accelerator projects, for example, about how the MoneyHero project increased conversion by changing the Landing texts. Follow our blog posts!