Focus: Creating an essential curriculum that can be licenced out to other accelerators.
Uncharted sees entrepreneurs as having two basic needs when entering an accelerator program:
1. A viable business
2. An investable business
Uncharted’s approach to building the curriculum is therefore focused on validating the entrepreneur’s business model, and preparing them for investment.
Business Model Validation
What problem are they solving?
Push the entrepreneurs to a process of customer discovery, prototyping, and making sales. Hold them accountable for growing revenue numbers and sales figures.
– Identify the foundational assumptions that underpin their venture
– Learn a repeatable methodology for how to do customer discovery
– Design and run experiments to validation/invalidation for the entrepreneur’s foundational assumptions by interacting with customers
– Build 2-3 prototypes of a key element of their venture and test with customers
– Conduct a break-even analysis of their business and identified the key cost and financial assumptions of their business
– Evaluate product-market fit by completing an audit of sales efforts to identify what’s working and what’s not.
Investment Preparedness
Is this enterprise and team ready for the type of investment and terms of investment that the investor is offering?
Can they produce the results they are promising?
– Understand the steps of the investment process and what is needed
– Diagnose where a venture is in preparedness for those steps, build a full plan for how to get ready, and actively work to get more prepared
– Work on various elements to become more prepared to raise funding (e.g.: develop their financials, write a strategic plan, clarify their funding ask, develop their pitch materials)
– Identify funder profiles
– Pitch and meet with actual funders
– Build out a strategic plan
Source: Uncharted