Three months of boot camp and active exchange in the community, founders should have better chances of belonging to 10% of successful startups. A new initiative from Vienna came with the claim: “the founders in Europe” see themselves as a “society of acceleration”. Standing behind this initiative are two well-known entrepreneurs from Vienna. Benjamin Roshin Founding partner WeAreDevelopers community of developers. Michael Ionita was among other things the chief technology officer of Walls.io, a startup firm in Vienna, and a pioneer of NoCode in Austria.
Mutual learning from one another is the focus of the European Founders’ accelerated society. As a model for this, the initiators take the famous United Statesaccelerator YCombinator and above all a strong alumni community known to support each other beyond the actual program. The target group are founders before or shortly after incorporation, who still lack the skills and knowledge to “lead their startup to the first million in sales.”
“Founders’ education”: a school for institutional women
“We no longer want to see European startups appear in the background in the international startup scene. We want to help lead European startups to success faster.” In the three-month Founders Education program, skills will be transferred. Via a dedicated e-learning platform as of August 2021 – videos in particular play a major role in this. This portion of the training will be uploaded and priced in the four-digit euro range, as Ruschin emphasized in a conversation with brutkasten. The initiators are based on five domains. Core they identified as being of particular interest in interviews with 200 founders and investors:
- People and Leadership: How do I build teams and lead them to success? How do I create a positive, performance-oriented culture in my startup?
- GO to the market: How do I create a business plan? How can I validate my assumptions, especially regarding my product, business model, and pricing?
- sales: How can I increase my sales? Where can I find the right sales representatives and how can I quickly expand my sales? This is the specialty of co-founder Benjamin Roschen.
- Producer: How can I develop a product that meets the target group’s requirements and metrics right from the start? What techniques do I use and how do I lead my product team to success? How can I use No-Code for my use case thus saving a lot of time and money? On the other hand, no icon is the subject of Michael Ionetta and aims to help very small startups overcome an obstacle that is often difficult for developers to find and also difficult to fund at an early stage.
- marketing: How can I develop and implement an effective content marketing strategy to achieve my KPIs?
Weekly reactions in real time
“We complete the transfer of knowledge with specially developed systems, templates and business models that help founders of startups make qualified decisions quickly and thus put their company on a path to growth. Thanks to real-time feedback and constant dialogue with the founders, we address their current challenges every week in the context of our learning sessions, ”says Ionetta.
The metronome is also an investment opportunity
However, the program does not only function as a boot camp but also to some extent as a selection process for a potential investment. “Over the course of 12 weeks, we got to know the co-founders. We can objectively determine who has the personality, motivation and bite it takes to lead a startup to success,” says Roschen. At the end of the boot camp it is possible to make an initial six-digit investment – in this case, the money comes directly from the founders and the investor network. “Monitoring and working with pre-selected founders over a period of three months is the best way to screen startups as objectively as possible and to maximize the success rate,” says Roshin.
Benjamin Ruschin and Michael Ionita tested with all the details on “Founders in Europe” on April 13, 2021 at Brutkasten talk On Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, derbrutkasten.com/tv
Even founders who (cannot) participate directly in the program should benefit from the “founders in Europe”. Before the program begins in August, weekly video conferences are planned with interested founders, where practical knowledge and questions are imparted to the experienced founders as well.
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