🧭Accelerator Tier List (Founder's Compass)
Hello there and welcome to Founder's Compass, a good way to get oriented around the labyrinthian world of startups.
Tool of the week: Co-founder Matchmaking (YC)
Yeah, I know. You’ve probably heard about it. But do you really know how to use it?
First of all, it’s super easy to get listed here. Just fill in your profile (most accounts are accepted in 1-2 days). Second of all, after going through all the Indian profiles, make sure you match with the people that are looking for your profile: If you’re a tech person, match with the people that are looking for tech founders.
Also, make your profile stand-out. Not as a tech capable-person, but as a personality: list your hobbies, show your passion. People will meet with you if you have things in common.
The second secret? Offer to try working together for free for a week. If you’re the tech, try to build a super bare-bones thing in a week to show your skill. If not, show you can land a meeting/a client, something. Show you can deliver. Even if there will be no co-founder relationship to build, people remember other performers.
The most important part? Add a calendly/zcal link so people can book a call directly.
Video of the week: Accelerator Tier list
Want to survive the accelerator experience and actually get smth out of it?
Here’s what Caya from Slidbean has been through and his advice. Make sure you apply to the right accelerator. (wink, wink, ReaktorX):
Top 5 stories of the week
“The innovative material is composed of tiny, hollow spheres known as hydrogel microspheres (HMS), which are commonly used to repair damaged tissues.
The microspheres are comprised of a unique combination of gelatin methacrylate, a biomaterial derived from natural protein, and poly(sulfobetaine methacrylate), a synthetic polymer.
The combination of these two creates a favorable environment for cell growth and hydration.”
“Understanding both the allure of endless projects and the cost of never finishing is crucial. It’s not about dismissing the excitement of new beginnings, but rather about finding a balance — learning to channel that initial enthusiasm into the equally important (if sometimes less glamorous) work of seeing things through to completion.”
“Most steel is more than 98 percent iron. It is the other couple of percent — sometimes only hundredths of a single percent, in the case of metals added to confer desired properties — that make the difference. Just as important are treatment methods: the heating, cooling and processing, such as rolling the sheets prior to forming parts. Modifying each, sometimes by only seconds, changes the metal’s structure to yield different properties.”
“This is one of the easiest wins you can get in typography. Setting the proper line height might have a tremendous impact on the overall look. If text is packed too tightly, it's harder to follow the line, which reduces readability. And if the line height is too big, it makes it harder to go from the current line to the next one and breaks the visual rhythm.”
“Fundamentally, the startup era of the last couple of decades has been about betting that the virtual entirety of consumer spending would move from the physical to the digital world, a bet on the speed of change of consumer behavior. As such, and despite being labeled as “tech companies”, the last generation of startups faced a growth challenge more than an engineering one: the largest alpha was in solving distribution and monetization more than raw technology. Although Facebook (the true precursor of this generation), Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash, Ramp, Rippling, Stripe, Flexport, and Slack have all overcome gigantic engineering challenges while scaling their products, none of them have been primarily about technical invention. Fundamentally they’ve all been about betting on the depth of market penetration of an existing (albeit new) technology.”
Funding & programs for startups
Two awesome programs to sign-up for this week:
$100K Investment
Fractional Co-founder: Your dedicated Managing Director will become an extension of your team
Customer Introductions: Meet key customers from our network of 300+ F500 and F1000 companies to get early product feedback.
“Forum Ventures’ accelerator is different. We become your fractional co-founder and work together to get you to meaningful traction and fundraise ready, providing unwavering support every step of the way. Very few VCs go the extra mile like we do.”
Entrepreneurs Round Table: NYC's leading tech accelerator
ERA invests $150,000 on a post-money SAFE in return for 6% of each company.
CTO Roundtable–Problem solve with your cohort and other CTOs in the trenches.
We formally pair you with alumni mentors; our 330+ alumni companies have created an active and engaged community, including the thousands of employees at companies in the ERA family.
“We are New York City’s largest accelerator program. ERA has NYC’s deepest and strongest mentor network with 500+ expert investors, technologists, product specialists, marketers, customer acquisition strategists, sales execs, and more, across all major industries represented in NYC.”
Some updates
Let’s update you regarding what’s going on at Creative Motion & ReaktorX:
Try our Startup Roasting bot. He’s going to die soon ;) Try it out here.
We organized an awesome event yesterday alongside SMOK Ventures, some of you might have seen the invite :) Stay tuned for more like these.
You’re hearing it first here: Roast My Startup is back! We’re organizing the next edition as an official side-event of How To Web conference.
Startup idea of the week:
Problem: Sometimes big businesses create incredible internal products to help them function better. Like Google building their own internal prediction market to improve business decisions or Microsoft’s famous Windows 8 repair tool (if you know you know).
And recently I came across a video of Shopify explaining their internal “flex comp” tool and thought that could be a great idea for a software business. So let’s build exactly that.
Target: The global HR payroll software market was valued at $27bn in the year 2022.
Solution: A platform which allows employees to customise their pay packages between cash, equity and bonuses.
When employees are being onboarded they decide on their compensation split between salary and equity, since different employees will have different needs and risk profiles
At every pay review employees can alter their comp structure if they wish to
Employees can also choose between different additional benefits they want as well, such as health and wellness benefits
The platform handles the tax and legal implications of the employees decisions making it a seamless process
Larger tech companies, likely post Series B, will be your early adopters here. You could also sell into HR software platforms directly so they can offer this feature.
Benefits:
Easy SaaS to build (can be done in a no-code really).
Obvious use-case, especially for startups who are cash-poor and look for ways to reward their employees.
For employees, it’s an obvious win: they might want more cash and not care about the equity or vice-versa.
Challenges:
UX here is critical! Make sure you’ve got a good designer onboard.
Good luck selling this without a network… You need some strong relationships already in place to get into these B-series startups.
Longer-term bet: this isn’t something you can build and sell in 2 years: most of your clients will need extensive support.
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