Firstborn MEGA Accelerator: the year of free flight

Meet SensArt and Texel - our two graduates who successfully completed the first MEGA Accelerator. A year ago, we were looking for and striving to implement innovative ideas for improving the consumer experience of MEGA guests in the shopping center and beyond. These projects turned out to be interesting and promising, and one of them even took the main prize. Now we want to talk about how their business has changed and with what they are preparing to storm the domestic and even Western markets. And a little bit about what new players need to do to be more likely to get on Accelerator 2.

A few words about the project itself. The first accelerator started in December 2015. About 200 startups took part in the qualifying round, and 10 of them entered the internal stage. The finalists received grants and expert assistance in finalizing their ideas. The winner was the SensArt team with the technology of turning any surface into a touch screen - Surfancy. Let's start with it.

Surfancy

At first MEGA Accelerator SensArt came with a product Surfancy, with which you can make a touch from any surface. A detailed description of the technology can be found, for example, here . The size of the possible “touchscreen” for the year increased to 50 m2 (5x10 meters), the team continues to work to improve the speed and accuracy of the system.


The team deals not only with the technical side of the product. Now a startup offers corporate clients services. The first gives brands the opportunity to create interactive content themselves based on existing marketing materials and launch it on the Surfancy infrastructure. For example, an interactive showcase of QuikSilver was implemented as part of a pilot project supported by MEGA.
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The second service gives companies access to a library of applications, among which there is both simple software that adds interactive visual effects on various surfaces, as well as powerful applications developed by the brands themselves. As a rule, these are electronic product catalogs with the possibility of ordering and customizing goods and applications aimed at attracting buyers with an opportunity to win a discount, etc.


Participation in MEGA Accelerator helped the “pass the Rubicon” team in the development of any startup - to understand which final product based on the technology they are developing will be in demand in the market.

“We understand that the main gain is exactly the hit in the top ten teams - participants of the internal accelerator. The experience that can be obtained there is invaluable for B2B startups. We managed to rethink what we are doing, to make the transition from technology to product. In the process of participation in MEGA Accelerator, we almost completely changed our approach to the client, moving from the sale of devices to the sale of services in which sensors became a necessary, but still a secondary element.

Startups that will be invited to the new accelerator, I want to give advice. You will not just have to solve some kind of business problem or customers of a shopping center, but at the same time find a problem and its solution. It is necessary to pay more attention to the needs analysis and to spend as much time as possible “on the ground” of the shopping center. Well and the main thing: to absorb all the information that you will be given in the classes in the accelerator itself. Believe me, participation in the program is the best thing that can happen to your business, ”Andrei Litmanovich, co-founder of Surfancy, shares his experience.


Now developers are preparing a number of projects for large companies in Russia and abroad. What exactly will appear and where, do not say, but promise that it will be interesting.

Texel

Another finalist last year is the Texel team. They came to the accelerator with a virtual fitting room, relying on a visual demonstration of clothes on a 3D-model of a person.


Over the year, the concept has changed: the guys studied the market and chose a more promising, in their opinion, direction - providing quality advice on clothes: both in size and in style. The main product was the decision Dress Code.

“The concept is pretty simple. We install digital fitting rooms in the shopping center, the visitor is scanned - it takes no more than 30 seconds. Then he downloads the Dress Code AI application and sees on the smartphone screen a filtered catalog of clothes offered in the shopping center - only what suits him in size and style, depending on the type of figure (pear, hourglass, etc.). Also, the application can show the path to the store, which sells the user selected item. Our technology significantly reduces the time from shopping, ”says Mikhail Dorokhov, founder of Dress Code AI

The startup chose the United States as its target market, the main office is in New York, and the development center is in Moscow. The team created a working prototype, negotiated with a sufficient number of brands and partners with a network of 500 3D scanners throughout North America.

Given the high popularity of online shopping in the US, the E-commerce model is also used. The user can either scan in the 3D-scanner (for this purpose just need a network of 500 installations), or enter your data through the application. Then he sees all the clothes available in the database, which suits him in size and style, selects his favorite and presses the "Buy" button. The company plans to attract at least 10,000 paying users to the platform.


“When we found a working model, we immediately felt positive feedback from the market. Now we have a lot of requests from Russian, European and Asian shopping centers that want to use our technology. We want to work with the largest network of scanners in the world. We very quickly closed the last investment round, and we already have far more applications for investment for the next round than we plan to use, ”said Mikhail Dorokhov.

Participation in MEGA Accelerator team remembers with pleasure.

“The most useful was communication and interaction with real players in the retail clothing market. This experience helped us translate the idea into real life, to understand the client, his expectations and behavior.

Separately, I would like to note the communication with the team of IKEA Centers Russia, for example, with the manager MEGA Belaya Dacha, who helped us a lot with his experience and vision of the market. He said that it is better to have a raw and imperfect product that will work than a perfect, but non-working.

And so it turned out: the more real benefit we brought to visitors and shops, focusing on their immediate needs, the more people got in our queue for scanning, and the more successful our pilot project became.

The most important lesson that we have learned for ourselves: we must listen to other people and trust their experience, not be afraid to take on something that someone else could not cope with. We are very grateful to the organizers of MEGA Accelerator, this was a turning point for the Dress Code, ”shared the memories of Mikhail Dorokhov.

MEGA Accelerator 2

This year we are launching the second accelerator , under whose auspices we collect ideas and startups from all over Russia. Details about it can be found on the website of the project itself or in this our note. And now we will give some useful tips that will help increase the chances of success.

Four tips for candidates:

1. Choose a track with the theme that best suits your idea. There are only three of them: meeting space, interaction with visitors and an automated back office.
   
2. Prepare a clear and colorful presentation in PDF or PPTX format.
   
3. Fill out the form in detail. Pay attention to questions about sales, experience with large companies and the size of attracted investments.
   
4. Do not pull the application, the reception ends already July 27, 2017!
   

What's next?

1. Your application will pass the expert selection. If she enters the top 50 projects - congratulations, you become a member of the pre-acceleration program.
   
2. From August 2 to 27, upgrade your project in the pre-accelerator, get feedback from leading experts in the field of retail and end up in the top 15 projects.
   
3. From September 18 to December 8, work actively on the project on the creative coworking platform PO2RT, launch the pilot on the sites of MEGA shopping centers and prove that your project is the best.