This will be the first of a series of articles from StartupYard about the basics of Social Media and Community Management for Startupers. We’ll focus on companies who are just getting started with social media.

While the social media landscape constantly changes, best practices, in many ways, extend to a time before Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. They are based in the age-old skills of clear, consistent and effective print marketing and customer relations. So that’s where we’ll start.

A future installment of this series will deal with the basics of building and maintaining your online communities in social networks. But first, let’s cover a few basics about Community Management:

Should My Company Be on Social Media?

This is a surprisingly important question for many startups. The answer is: not necessarily. Marketing blogs and (surprise) social media evangelists will tell you that social media is the cure-all marketing solution for any business in the 21st century. The truth is that social media is the perfect venue for marketing blogs and social media evangelists to talk about how great social media is for growing your business. For social media companies, this is true, and because they focus on social media- they’re great at getting that message out. As in the above “tips,” for startups, many of these people stand to benefit from you wasting a lot of effort on a social media presence you might not need.

Social has become an important channel in the past decade for 4 main things: inbound marketing, content, advertising, and customer care. Now, if you’re a B2B business with a small pool of potential clients, and you have to go door to door to recruit them personally, then social media is not going to represent a huge growth opportunity for you. In that case, it may even be preferable not to engage in social media, because it is a) a waste of time and effort, and b) your lack of engagement in social channels may reflect badly upon your company image. What happens when a potential client who you’ve contact by email follows you on Twitter, or looks up your Facebook page, and discovers that you have 3 likes, an outdated set of team pictures, and no new posts for 6 months? Once you start a social media presence, you have to commit to maintaining it, so the cost/benefit ratio has to be clear before you start. Until you can see a reason why having a Facebook page or active Twitter handle will have some real benefit, you should hold off.

Which Social Media Should I Use?

This is of course a question that pertains to your goals in using social media. Supposing that you are a B2C company that would like to grow word-of-mouth buzz about your products, Facebook and Twitter are the natural yin and yang of social media. Other networks, like Instagram or Pinterest, are more of interest to media and niche product companies, interested in promoting specific products or content. If, for example, your products are used to create beautiful pieces of art, or if you sell something physical and photogenic, then these platforms should be interesting from a content perspective. If not, though, you should seriously consider confining yourself to the big two.

Between the “big two,” Twitter encourages more active engagement, media sharing, and content curation than Facebook, but Facebook offers a cleaner, simpler, safer relationship with your followers. Think of Twitter like a party where you have the opportunity to hand out your business cards to 300 Million people at once. Facebook is more like a city, where you can set up your own shop. People can stop by, and they’ll see your posts as they pass by, but you can’t go out and flag them down.

These two approaches have their own intrinsic values, and you can consider them complimentary. Facebook posts made from company pages garner “impressions” (that is, they appear in front of users, whether they are clicked or noticed or not), on average about 16% of the time. This means that if your Facebook page has 1000 followers, say, and you post at regular intervals every few days, then your average post will appear for about 160 people. If the post is liked and shared, these numbers can increase dramatically. A post that is shared by a friend who also likes the same page has about a 35% chance of being seen. Facebook’s algorithm, while it remains mysterious, also appears to favor posts that have early traction, and shows these to even more of your followers.

On the contrary, tweets are much more ephemeral. Twitter Analytics, indicates, for example, that with over 2000 followers, we generate between 100 and 400 impressions for the typical Tweet. But since Twitter feeds are updated on a constant basis, “views,” probably include a larger number of users who skip past most of the posts in their feed at any given moment. Engagement rates with those tweets show that indeed, of those impressions, only a small percentage (between 1% and 4%), engage with a tweet in any way. That may seem impressive on the surface, but it comes out to between 1 and 10 people actually engaging with a particular tweet, out of 2000 followers and nearly 250 Million active users.

On the other hand, the fast pace of Twitter allows for much faster organic growth, as you can retweet, favorite, be retweeted and favorited, and other users will see and be able to follow you based on your interactions- unlike with Facebook. This makes it much easier to alter and hone your tweeting style to engage with more followers. Also, Twitter doesn’t appear to alter the ratio of views/followers based on the number of tweets you make in a day, granted the number is not excessive (less than 10 “broadcast” tweets per day). Thus, Twitter tends to yield a larger number of followers, while delivering a lower average number of impression for anything you happen to post. This encourages you to post more, and to target more specific hashtags or even specific other accounts for interaction.

Twitter is also a much more efficient channel for communicating multi-laterally with your existing users, as Facebook pages don’t allow for public one-to-one interactions as Twitter does. This makes Twitter a much more commonly employed platform for Social CRM or “Customer Relationship Management,” which I’ll talk more about later.

In sum, most B2C web companies should probably be on Facebook, and should at least have a Twitter handle reserved for themselves, even if they’re not necessarily ready to use it. But don’t open 5 social media accounts all at once. Focus on the ones that serve your immediate interests: Facebook for building buzz, and perhaps for some advertising; Twitter for talking with your community.

What is Community Management?

Community management in its many current forms, is a relatively new development in web business, and it means different things to different companies and industries. But at its base, it is a mix of marketing, branding, and customer service. As web businesses have built themselves around communities of users, leveraging their existing customer base to promote and sell their latest products, community management has emerged as a way of handling the concurrent interests of a company’s marketing, branding, and customer relationships in a more fluid way.

Whereas a tech company might in the past have needed dedicated sales, marketing, customer service, and Q/A departments all dealing with their separate domains, today many of these activities all occur in the same places online. If you are using Facebook and Twitter, along with email to announce a new product, the success of that announcement depends upon you having a strong following on those platforms- a base of users who are paying attention to what you say in all of those channels. That strong following depends on your community manager’s using that platform to provide value to your followers and users.

Below is a sampling of a Community Manager’s possible roles. Depending on the size of a company, the community manager may be the same person running sales and marketing for the whole company. If your company has a biz dev specialist, a marketer, and a sales specialist, then often the marketer will be responsible for community management as well, in collaboration with the other two. For larger teams that have customer service, Q/A, marketing, and sales teams, a community manager can be brought in as a role that bridges many of their individual responsibilities.

A Community Manager’s Roles

1. Maintaining an Internal Community

The “Community Manager” role grew early on through message board admin roles. Today, a similar role is still played in online communities based around gaming, content sharing, and discussion. If your product has an internal community feature, it’s likely that a community management role will have to evolve relatively early on to manage the safety and stability of your internal community. Common jobs include maintaining an FAQ, being able to escalate and resolve user complaints, and enforcing the platform’s terms of use. The role may be filled by someone with a focus on customer service, rather than marketing.

2. Social Media Outreach

For companies with a respectable base of engaged users, a community manager can encourage cohesiveness of its communities on social media, outside the company’s own platform. This role sits between customer service and marketing, with a good community manager also being familiar with the company’s Q/A processes, and being able to pass along valuable user-generated information on bugs and missing features in the company’s products.

The community manager in this role must be able to handle customer inquiries about sales, as well as handle simple customer issues, with the ability to escalate customer complaints to the appropriate colleagues efficiently, following up on the results to ensure satisfaction. In addition, the community manager has to use positive interactions to make impressions on the community, by, for example, sharing successful customer service interactions and positive reviews for the company and products with the community on social media, or by email. He or she may also currate and share chatter about company products from around the web on the company’s social media accounts.

The community manager controls the conversation: making sure that misapprehensions and rumors about your company and products are sorted out quickly, and don’t spread. Are people sharing a blog post bashing your company, full of false statements and innuendo? Your community manager should spot this, and provide the official line- taking steps to make sure that rumors and negative buzz don’t have any room to grow. At the same time, the community manager spots and promotes positive reviews and mentions of the product, so that they are seen by even more people. If you aren’t in the conversation, you can’t influence it.

Depending on the size of a company, this role may be shared with PR, and marketing, and the community manager may also be the company’s general head of communication, blogger, and marketer (such as in the case with Startupyard itself- I currently fill all of those roles at once). In other cases, this role may evolve from customer service, or from an internal community management role.

3. Customer Advocate

One of a community manager’s most important roles is observation and intelligence gathering. As the person with their finger on the pulse of the company’s customers, the community manager should be able to deliver key insights into customer sentiment and behavior. They should be able to identify common problems and common positive feelings about a company’s products, and the company itself. They should also have some insight into the makeup of the company’s active community demographics: who are the users? What defines them as a group?

A good community manager should be able to tell a head of marketing what customers are most interested in hearing about, and what bothers them most about the company’s products. They should also be able to identify Q/A and UX failures, and to provide some insight into user preferences in these areas. They should be able to identify which competitors customers are most interested in.

Do We Need A Community Manager?

A friend of mine who is a producer for a very popular gaming company told me this recently: “Nobody needs a community manager, until they really need a community manager.” This is to say, if your intention is to grow a base of users quickly, and to leverage them to grow your community and public awareness of your products, you’ll need a community manager eventually. And that need will arise suddenly, and possibly unpleasantly, when you realize that a lot of people are discussing your products, and that you are not in control of the conversation.

Yours would not be the first company, for example, to receive a great deal of negative press over a particular failure (a bug, a privacy lapse, platform instability, or other issue), that could have been mitigated by the presence of a community manager. Suppose a journalist or blogger wants to write about your company, but the contact email you’ve provided isn’t read by anyone, and no one answers direct messages via social media? An article or blog post can go out without you having an opportunity to engage with it, and give your side of the story. Worse, an article can float around for days and weeks without you even noticing it’s there. When people are googling you, or checking Twitter, they’ll be getting information you don’t even know about.

Social CRM

Social CRM, or “Customer Relationship Management,” is a relatively new but rapidly growing industry. These are primarily tools for customer service and community management, increasingly focused on social media channels, but including sms, telephony, email, and community message boards as well. Today, a small to medium sized company can access off-the-shelf web based products for monitoring and engaging with their online communities, whether their primary focus is in sales, marketing, or customer care. In fact, StartupYard accelerated a Social CRM company called Brand Embassy, which is doing increasingly well in the customer care segment of Social CRM.

These products allow a single person or a team to monitor conversation across multiple social media channels and internal communication platforms (like email), and get a snapshot of all the conversations going on in a company’s community at any given time. They will let you know when your products or company are being mentioned, and where, and allow you to respond on multiple channels from the same place, allowing you to efficiently manage your community as a whole.

Quality of Life Metrics: Prague leads Central Europe

Last year we posted a somewhat controversial piece about why we thought Prague was the darling of Europe, and the best place, for our money, to live the Startup Life. And honestly, our assessment has nothing to do with hookers, despite some reactions. Today, we’re going to revisit that opinion (about Prague, not hookers), and expand upon it with some more detail.

Prague is only the 14th largest city in the European Union by population, just behind Milan and Munich. Though it’s much smaller than places like London, Paris, and Berlin, with just over 1 million in population, several quality of life metrics rate it as one of the best cities, in the world, to live in, and it is routinely ranked the best in all of Central and Eastern Europe.

Transport

According to the European Commission report on perceived quality of life, Prague rates alongside London and Paris for its transportation system. The modern, 3 line Prague Metro is the most widely used, per capita, in the world, and its tram network is also the most heavily used in Europe, second only to Zurich, with total patronage numbers rivaling the larger systems of St. Petersburg and Budapest. Prague transport is also a trend-setter in technology, first with the world-renowned classic Tatra T3 trams that have been copied and exported around the world, and lately with the Porsche-designed Skoda 15T, which is being exported to China, and is already also in use in Riga. With over 800 active rolling stock, it is one of the densest, and most accessible tram networks in the world. And operating 24 hours a day, it can get you anywhere in the city that you need to be, and is usually as fast as taking a cab.

Add to that the cost of transportation to the consumer. Prague transport operates on a unified, open ticketing system, with tickets available by sms, or through machines. A single trip costs about one Euro, 30% less than average for systems in Germany or France, with over half the total real cost covered by the city. Monthly all access passes are priced at just 20 Euros, making transport a fraction of the expense it is in other capitals like Berlin, Paris, and London.

Employment and Entrepreneurism

The above study also showed that employee confidence is the 3rd highest in Europe, with 56% of those surveyed saying that finding a job in Prague is easy. The city employs a stunning 150,000 foreign workers, nearly a quarter of the worker total, and over 80% of total jobs are in services. Eurostat research also shows that Prague ranks 5th in Europe for GDP per capita, at 172% of the EU average.

The low cost of living and high quality infrastructure has translated to a haven for entrepreneurs from across Europe, who come for the snappy local economy, and stay for the low cost of good living that is hard to give up.

Self-employment in the Czech Republic is also straightforward, and taxes and regulation on independent contractors are light, and lightly enforced. While the biggest obstacle to gaining employment here is the language, international workers, particularly in tech, find that to be a minor issue, as English is the official language, or a lingua franca, for virtually all international firms, and an employment requirement in most tech jobs.

This makes hiring local workers, such as marketers, software engineers, and IT workers exceedingly easy and painless for small companies, giving employers a great amount of flexibility in finding great local talent.

Crime

According to statistics compiled by Numbeo, which tracks visitor perception, Prague has one of the lowest crime indexes in Europe, on par with Helsinki, a full 10 points below London, and 20 points below Paris. Users rate Prague as safe or very safe for walking alone in at night, and the biggest perceived criminal problem in the city is corruption- an issue that extends more into politics than it does local business or the tourist trade. The Czech Republic boasts a murder rate of just 1 per 100,000, which is the same as the UK, less than 1/4th that of the United States, and 1/10th that of Russia.

Culture and Food

Prague is well known and appreciated for its amazing variety of good eats, good beer, and a wide selection of places to go for just about anything. The cottage industry of local food blogs is testament to the vibrant gustatory scene, and a highly decent lunch can be had for as little as €5, with a world class half-liter of beer coming in at around €1.

Housing In Prague

 I won’t attempt a definitive neighborhood guide to Prague. But I’ll give you an idea of what some of the living options are. For those who will be attending our program in 2015, I will mark locations convenient to our offices (either by transport or nearby), with an asterisk (*).

Old Town: Prague 1

The old town comprises several neighborhoods, on either side of the river, close to the central, historical part of the city. Here you will find most of the high-end restaurants, theaters, bar/clubs and hotels in the city. The sections of Old Town that surround Old Town Square, at the heart of the city, are usually swarming with tourists, and are, at least in my opinion, unattractive for day-to-day living. They are also expensive, and transport is crowded and difficult.

The neighborhoods of Mala Strana* (the “small side”), are those across the river from the old town. This is traditionally the haunt of the city’s best known writers and artists of ages past, and today it hosts a number of the best cafes, wine bars, and theaters in the city. The area is also host to a number of foreign Embassies, and has a high concentration of art galleries and museums, including the Museum Kampa, the modern Art Museum in Kamp Park, along the river. Here can also be found the city’s only funicular railway, at Petrin hill, which offers beautiful views of the castle and the city. Many parts of this neighborhood are very attractive for living, including those blocks which connect Mala Strana with Smichov, between the Ujezd and Svandovo Divadlo tram stops. Mala Strana is connected to the old town via Charles Bridge.

New Town: Prague 2*

New Town, or “Nove Mesto,” is an area that includes a series of neighborhoods from the lower edge of Old town, down the right bank of the Vltava river. Some important areas here are Na Plavka, the riverside embarcadero that hosts a thriving farmer’s market in warm months, and Karlovo Namesti, one of the largest open public squares in Europe. This area also contains Prague’s second largest Castle, Vysehrad, which is ideal for walking and relaxing, with idyllic beer gardens and paths. The area also has one of Prague’s best swimming facilities, Podoli, where the Czech national swim team trains, and which is open to the public. Areas such as Palackeho Namesti, Vysehrad, and Vyton are very attractive for living, with easy transport to the center, and plenty of good dining opportunities.

When looking for housing, you’ll find more attractive rents and larger flats in these neighborhoods. I lived in this area for 5 years myself, and fell in love with it.

Vinohrady and Zizkov: Prague 2 and 3

Up the hill to the east of New Town are the neighborhoods of Vinohrady and Zizkov. Historically cheaper areas, these neighborhoods have been consistently popular with foreigners, and have a wonderful home-grown feeling cafe culture. Vinohrady between Italska street and Riegrovy Sady (a park with an unparalleled set of beer gardens), is traditionally the gay quarter of Prague, although clubs and bars catering to LGBT customers have also migrated more and more towards the city center in recent years. Further up the hill, Jiriho Z Podebrad is an area that has much improved in recent years, and is known for a lively alternative club scene. Lower Zizkov, the area that reaches up the hill from the central train station, Hlavni Nadrazi, is a traditionally seedier and cheaper part of town, where low rents mix with bars open until very early in the morning.

The Vinohrady and Zizkov will offer attractive rents in comparison with more central areas, and have a great variety of things to do. Transport connections there are generally pretty good as well.

Letna and Dejvice Prague 6 and 7

On the other side of the river, and to the north of Mala Strana, are the areas of Letna and Dejvice, which are generally seen as quieter, more established, and family oriented districts. When my wife and I started a family, for example, these are the areas in which we looked for a place to raise children. The Dejvice area is also thick with foreign Embassies and diplomats, including the enormous Russian embassy, and the US Ambassador’s residence, which would probably embarrass most heads of state for its size and luxury.  Still, if you like parks, quieter restaurants, high end shopping (gourmet foods, wines and foreign shops) and a more local atmosphere, these areas can be ideal.

Smichov: Prague 5*

A traditionally industrial area to the south of Mala Strana, Smichov has developed into a vibrant business center in recent years. Still the home of several of The Czech Republic’s largest breweries, it is built up around a large train interchange. Seznam, Google, ING, and other international firms have their homes in Smichov, and the area offers corporate apartment living on a monthly basis, and has a high concentration of business-travel hotels. It is not, strictly speaking, the most attractive area in the city, but it has convenient shopping, and a number of very good restaurants around the Andel area, where Node5 and StartupYard are located.

Housing here is generally cheaper than in the center, with some higher priced offerings closer to Mala Strana. Transport to the city center via metro is not terribly inconvenient from this area, although night transport can be difficult, as night trams (after midnight) are less accessible than in other areas.

Housing Via Social Media:

Several busy Facebook groups serve the Flat-Sharing and rental market in Prague, and these may offer the most convenient short term options for housing.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/bydlenipraha/

• a Czech language flatsharing group

Flatshare in Prague

• an international flatsharing group

You can also find answers to simple and complex questions from groups like:

Expats in Prague

• an expat focused community board for Prague

CrowdSauce

• A question and answer group for anyone in the city

Photo Credits Via Flickr: Jan Fidler, Roman Boed, Thomas Depenbusch, Brad Hammonds, and Ian Zakharov

StartupYard closed applications for our 2015 accelerator round on Dec. 15. Now we’ve cracked open those applications, and we’ve started making our preliminary selections. The teams that pass this round will be invited to interview with us via skype, and some of those companies will be invited to meet with us here, in person, at Node5 in Prague.

Though I’ve been with the accelerator team since late 2013, this is my first time as a participant in the early selection process. So I’ve seen teams during their skype interviews, but I haven’t seen all of our applicants from previous rounds. The experience has been… revealing. In a few points, here’s why:

1. Keep It Simple, Stupid

At the end of the day, we take a close look at over 100 applications. To get through the very first round, it’s basically important that an applicant prove that they can operate a keyboard, and are familiar with the English language. a solid chunk of applications don’t pass that level of muster, but that’s to be expected in any open call. We got one application from a hair salon in Latvia… which was interesting, but a little beyond our current scope.

No, the incomplete applications are a nuisance, but not a major hastle. The really vexing part of the application process is encountering walls of text that read something like this:

We are developing a B2C SaaS for monitoring optimum system throughput in a CYS2 standard 3rd generation YTS transistor for use on an inline, 3-tiered, dual-gauge system management terminal via fully integrated latest generation user feedback monitors.

The feeling you’re experiencing is similar to my own, when reading a few of our applications to myself. We don’t expect applicants to write as if they’re talking to their own grandmothers, but we do expect that they can explain their products to reasonably educated, reasonably techy people like me. And yet quite a few of the messages back and forth amongst the team in the past few weeks have been of the “what does X company do?” variety. Some we were never able to figure out.

2. We Can Tell If You Care

We know you’re not a publicist or a copywriter. We don’t want publicists and copywriters (except as mentors of course). But what we do want is people who care desperately about their products, and are enthusiastic about moving them forward. On the whole, our applications aren’t all that hard. And if it’s obvious you don’t care, don’t bother to answer every question fully and accurately, include a video when asked, and spellcheck your application, then that’s a fairly good sign that we don’t want to work with you. Who would?

3. We Can Tell Who is Keen

On the other hand, in a sea of applications, a little effort goes a long way. There were teams who produced cool introductory videos, and worked hard to look good, but the applications we ended up liking the most were the ones where the founders seemed enthusiastic. That’s it. Really simply stuff: they smiled in their videos, they showed that they were thinking about the questions, and they took the time to answer carefully and honestly.

Personally, I respond well to an applicant who writes as if he or she is laying the groundwork for meeting me. The person who is trying actively to convince me to take the next step and invite them for an interview, is the person who gets invited. We even felt that way about several of the teams whose applications were frankly weaker than the others: they seemed to care, and so we care about them- at least enough to look at them during the next round.

4. If You’re A Me-Too Product, Be Honest About Yourself

“Me-too,” products are not absolute kryptonite to us. On one hand, me-too companies tend to be overconfident about just how much they can differentiate themselves against strong competition. But on the other hand,  if you’re a startup that thinks it has no competition, you’re almost certainly wrong, and you’re definitely lazy. Which is why we ask companies who they see as their competition. That helps us to understand how the companies see themselves. Your product is a delivery service. Is it competition for Uber, or Taskrabbit? If not, why not? And there is nothing wrong with being competition for big companies. Sometimes small-scale solutions really are better, and sometimes there’s a corner of your market that the big companies ignore.

But “me-too” products tend to talk about the size of the market they’re in, as if that justifies their business model being essentially the same as a dominant competitor. But the competitor they’re facing had to fight for the market they control, and if your weapons for that fight are the same as theirs, then they’ll win. Usually, they’ll win without even noticing you were there. Often, there’s a grain of a good business in the ideas that try to differentiate a me-too product from the competition. What a lot of founders have a hard time dealing with, is that these small differentiating factors have to become the basis for their business. And they really, really have to work. You can be “twitter for X” or “Uber for X,” but that X has to be something that you can do really well, and that the competition, by dint of its size or its lack of focus, can’t do for some reason. That’s where me-too products really get bogged down, and it’s why we’re wary of talking with them. 

5. Small Products Think They Have to Be Big

As a corollary to the “me-too” issue, a few applicants obviously thought that they would impress us with big ideas. We like big ideas, don’t get me wrong, but big ideas are dangerous. Big ideas, for a seed-stage startup, are dependent on a million little details. If you’re thinking about being the world leader by next year, you aren’t necessarily thinking about making the best decisions for your business this week.

And most great big ideas start as small ideas that the person cultivates from personal, in-depth experience. The examples of this are endless, and counterexamples are nearly impossible to find. So a focus and clarity of vision on the details and the small-scale aspects of a startup are important signs to me that it has a chance at bigger successes later.

6. Getting a P.H.D. In Nameology

A good recent episode of the startup podcast Startup, from Gimlet Media goes deeply into the vagaries and fears and  recriminations that go into a choosing a name. I can’t pretend to be an expert in this department. Several of the companies we accelerated last year had long struggles in choosing a name, and there were disagreements up to the moment that the final decisions needed to be made. I didn’t always win. Others came with a name, and it stuck. Something about it just worked.

I can only say this: it’s harder than you think, and your first instinct is probably wrong. If my experience is any indication, you need to go through a few names before you settle on the one that’s really going to work. And as you start to build up your brand identity and your company culture around the name, you’ll see how important a name can be. So choosing the right one shouldn’t be a 5 minute discussion. Take some time with it.

StartupYard closed its applications on Monday for the March 2015 accelerator round. As you probably know, 10 teams will now be selected by a careful selection process, and these teams will receive €30,000 and spend 3 months in our mentor-driven accelerator at Node5. In addition, €250,000 will be available for follow-on seed financing for the teams that show the most promise through the course of our program.

We’re excited to get started, and we hope you are as well. We can tell you that we received over 200 applications in total, which is 4 times the number we received for the last round. and that most countries in Central Europe were represented.

Here is a map of applicants:

Where did Applicants Come From?

We were certainly not surprised that, combined, over half of our applicants come from the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Interestingly, Slovakia in total provided the most applicants of any country, with the capital, Bratislava, submitting 30 applications on its own. We had expected this position to be occupied by The Czech Republic, with the largest number of applicants coming from Prague, our home base. Nevertheless, just these two countries combined submitted more applications than our total for last year, and each far exceeded their application numbers over the previous round.

We also saw applicants in significant numbers for the first time from The UK, Germany, and Italy, 3 countries in which we did not focus promotion for StartupYard.

What Surprised Us?

With an increased interest in all things Startupland, as demonstrated by Startup Lithuania’s impressive presentation at Slush this year, Lithuania was the surprise dark-horse winner for 3rd most applicants. With all of them coming from Vilnius, that city out-applied Brno, and Kolosice, the two second largest cities in The Czech Republic and Slovakia, respectively. Lithuania’s applicants approached 10% of our total, thanks in part to their promotion of StartupYard to their early stage startups. If these teams are anything like what we saw in Helsinki, we’ll be happy to have them at StartupYard.

It was also a slight surprise that we received no finished applications from Poland at all. But on the other hand, Poland is forging an important and powerful argument for its own accelerators, many of which do work very similar to our own. We had hoped for a few applicants from Poland, but we did not focus our energy on recruiting there.

A breakdown of the applicant totals per country.

What Have We Learned?

Tripling our seed funding this year doubtless increased interest in StartupYard as an option for early stage startups.  So just as the total number of applicants increased, so did the volume of communication we received. Both via email and in person at conferences and events across Europe, we encountered some new questions. I plan to write about these more in an upcoming post, but I’ll briefly mention them here.

What is an Accelerator to You?

As tech accelerators are becoming more common in Europe, and in Central Europe, shared concepts and methodologies are still being hashed out. At the Numa Accelerator Summit last week, for example, it became clear that European accelerators do not often even agree on what the mission of an accelerator is, or on what metrics we should measure our success.

In France, for example, startups seem to view accelerators more as incubators, with dashes of seed funding and a bit of guidance. This is reinforced by the growth of “corporate accelerators” in the region, which draw their talent from the corporate workforce, and not necessarily from self-starting entrepreneurs. These “accelerators,” function more as in-sourced R&D teams that are segmented away from their typical corporate structures, to give them a measure of freedom- but not too much. Few others at the summit took entrepreneurs as young as StartupYard’s, and I did not talk to any others who ran as intensive a program as we do.

Differing Expectations

A common reaction to StartupYard’s investment terms in Finland and France, where I have spoken personally to dozens of startup founders was shock: “10% equity?” I had this reaction from startups who compared our equity terms to those of TechStars, which is not a constructive comparison to begin with. A few of the same teams who reacted with shock to our terms also revealed that they had not been accepted to TechStars, which is much larger than StartupYard, and also requires that a project be much further along. Others were still bootstrapping their products, and had no investors- yet they worried over an equity stake, as if there was a great deal of money already in play.

We’re serious when we say that for us, the team is the most important thing. We have seen projects change drastically in our program, and that is often because teams join us at a time where our mentors have the greatest chance of a positive influence on their direction. So comparing us with an organization that gives twice the money we do, and takes half the equity, is not really appropriate- especially when that program only takes teams that have very evolved proofs of concept. At StartupYard, we invest money in your team so that you can make it through 3 months with us, and have a chance to build some runway, and get more investors. Our investment of greatest value is our mentorship, and our time- not the funds or perks that we provide.

Don’t get us wrong here: there is enormous value in what larger accelerators do, and the startup ecosystem needs them. But it needs us too. And for a generation of people who are now being taught that entrepreneurship is how they will craft the future and build their careers, outreach to younger startupers is needed now more than ever.

In Bucharest, in Vilnius, in Bratislava and in Prague, this is a message that is reaching the right ears. Entrepreneurs in these regions are hungry for opportunities like the ones we offer, and investors are keen to connect with those types of people. In western Europe, the situations is more complex. There are probably thousands of young entrepreneurs in France, the UK, Germany, and Poland who need and want exactly what we provide, but in these larger markets, the message of what an accelerator does seems to be dominated by the money, and by the few accelerators who give the most. It’s not surprising, but it’s definitely a new and interesting challenge for us, as we are arguing our case, more and more, in a broader conversation about what our mission should be.

As we grow as an accelerator, we too will have access to more investors. We too will become more selective. That is how we will best be able to serve our local ecosystem, and our own investors. We have to grow as our region grows. But we need to make a strong case now for the accelerators and incubators who will follow us down this path- that the kind of work we do is still vital, and will be vital in the future, even if we ourselves move on and grow past it.