Do startup teams need accelerators?

Conclusion: not necessarily!

Well, this is really a very unhelpful conclusion. People often ask me if I want to participate in the accelerator. If I don't know the status of your team first, I really can't judge. But I would first suggest clarifying two things, the first is what the team needs at the moment, and the second is what the accelerator wants to participate in.

If you find it difficult to answer the first question, it means that you may need the help of an accelerator. An appropriate accelerator should be able to comprehensively inspect the resources or things that the team needs to improve, and give relevant resources to help or suggest ways to improve. . The cultivation time of accelerators mostly falls within 3 to 6 months. It is actually not easy for a team to fully mature within such a period of time. So don't think that the entire team will be reborn after participating in the accelerator, but there should be a clear short-term goal to adjust the team's future pace.

Knowing exactly what the team needs, it's time to pick and choose which accelerators to enter. It may be your own industry. For example, we belong to the financial innovation team. At that time, the first choice was to join the financial innovation base FintechBase. At the beginning, because of joining the base first, we were able to know the dynamics of domestic financial development in advance, and then we successfully entered the financial innovation. Park FintechSpace. It is also possible that there are related personal connections or the connection of the industrial chain, etc. These all need to be carefully considered.

If you know what you are lacking, you can also find resources or people to help you. In fact, it doesn’t matter if you speed up or not.

Accelerators are of course not charitable organizations, and there is usually a purpose behind actively recruiting teams. Some use government money to help nurture new teams, but there are usually problems such as running out of money for projects or changing hosts, and the team is a KPI for them, so there are often strange things There are regulations or some superficial matters that need to be dealt with (helping to attend, filling in strange information, etc.), but relatively speaking, there will be quite a lot of resources to dig for treasures, and you can take the initiative to ask for some things, which will be more helpful. The other is accelerators established by private companies, usually looking for investment targets, and the selection of teams will be more stringent. If you want to participate in this kind of accelerator, it is recommended that the team has a certain maturity to participate.

Accelerators are still mainly short-term, clarify what you want, whether this accelerator can help you, you can also ask the opinions of those who have participated, many things are two sides, just look at how each entrepreneur thinks about it weight.