How is the Founder Stack Program designed for Consumer Tech startups to become growth ready?

With an idea to support founders in their early stages of building businesses, we at Accel introduced our Founder Stack program earlier in February.

The first cohort focused on helping early-stage SaaS startup founders gain necessary knowledge, insight and clarity on their budding startup journey. 

Software-as-a-service is a global opportunity worth $400 billion, which is up for grabs around the world. Entrepreneurs in India have a great potential to tap into this opportunity and build large SaaS startups. Though there is access to capital for good ideas, so is a knowledge and exposure gap on how to build large-scale venture-backable SaaS companies.

Founder Stack - SaaS comprised 32 SaaS founders from 15 early-stage companies. A holistic understanding of their business, product and the corresponding market potential, are differentiated into actionable insights for the participants. 
For the second cohort of Founder Stack, we are calling applications across from founders that are in their early stages of building their Consumer-tech companies. 

For the second cohort of Founder Stack, we are calling applications across from founders that are in their early stages of building their Consumer-tech companies. 

The last date before the applications close is 20th October, 2020. Apply here.

What happens in Founder Stack - Consumer Tech?

The Founder Stack programme for Consumer tech startups will have over 30 coaches from across the industry who are proven entrepreneurs and subject matter experts, that have seen tens of thousands of consumers using their products. The duration of the program is 12 weeks, and we intend to facilitate a maximum of 10 founding teams in this cohort. 

The goal is to help these teams in their pre product-market fit stage, with everything they would need to go to the market.

• The Market Research layer comes with a specific outcome, to help the founders pick the right market opportunity. The first three weeks of the programme goes into this layer, touching upon subjects like market sizing, competitive benchmarking, building a necessary GTM strategy, and conducting effective market research. The final stages of this layer ends with a Private Roundtable that helps the founding teams review their market sizing.
  

• The Product layer starts off with walking the founders through understanding of PMF scores for the first 100, 500 and 1000 users. The subjects that follow are formulating the right PMF strategy, working with the core customer segments and exercises on augmenting the stickiness and retention of users with the product.
  

• Use Growth layer has sessions on growth metrics and their tracking, the numerous growth strategies, organic and paid marketing channels, SEO, landing page, content design and brand positioning. It involves a deep-dive into pricing models, up-sell/x-sell, Network effects, growth and social loops. The Sounding board includes a finer look at the startup’s onboarding process, engagement metrics, churned user data and first use, and the relevant advice on amplifying these aspects.
  

• The Presentation layer in the FS - Consumer Tech programme is all things fundraising in the category of consumer tech companies. The experts help the teams build the key building blocks, pitch tuning, peer and sponsor feedback.
  

The teams will have access to four types of sessions - Sounding boards, Private roundtables on the Tuesdays of every week, Masterclasses and Founder sessions on the Thursdays of every week. On the other days, the founding teams get to interact with the coaches on seperate AMA blocks, community nights and dinners, and category-specific discussions. 

Download the detailed programme details here.

Sounding Boards

For example, Niraj Singh, founder of Spinny , an expert in User Growth & Fundraising will take the teams through his personal learnings on the subject. He would spend time with the startup and offer specific feedback on what the business is doing, and how it can get better. Similarly for other subject matters like Market Research, Product and Presentation, respective coaches will spend some time in brainstorming on the various aspects of the business.

Sounding board consists of founders, operators & an accel team member.

Private Roundtables

These micro-level board meetings give the cohort startups exclusive access to other coaches, founders, Accel partners and operators. These experts help the founders get actionable insight and clarity on specific topics and the necessary demos to help crack their bottlenecks.

Founder Sessions

Each layer in the program has sessions by founders who did most of the heavy lifting in the early days of the company.  The founder sessions are curated to provide a perspective, actionable insights and a chance to have deeper conversations with them during the breakout sessions. These are sessions with no more than 10 people. 

Masterclasses

As the name naturally suggests, this is pure expert talk from the coaches to be provided with specific actionable and contextual insights. Masterclasses mostly contain frameworks that have worked and can be applied in Indian context. This content is generally not available on the internet. 

For more information on who the coaches are, visit here.

How can you join ? 

Applications are currently open for founders to be part of the life long community. Deadline for the applications is October 20th, 2020

Please check www.seedtoscale.com/courses/sts-consumer to get more details.

Related Articles:

1. What can you expect from 10 Weeks of Founder Stack for SaaS Startups?
2. How Founder Stack can help early-stage Fintech startups surpass their challenges and go to the market‍