Founder Briefing 4/6: During JFDI; Detailed Program Schedule

(Part 4 of the Founder Briefing Series)

On Demo Day, you show a business, not just a product.

The JFDI bootcamp is 100 days of preparation for Demo Day.
The investors who come to Demo Day might nod politely when you talk about the features of your product. But they’ll sit up when you talk about the customers and revenues of the business.

You’re in dialogue with the market. Listen to what it tells you.

During the course of the bootcamp you will be expect not just to build the product, but launch it, and keep iterating it in response to market feedback, in whatever direction maximizes growth.
If you are not prepared to do this, and think that you know better than the customer, or that you just want to build it a certain way and damn the feedback, then you’re not going to have much of a business to show on Demo Day!

JFDI is a mentorship-driven accelerator.

We will open our network of successful entrepreneurs and investors to offer invaluable experiences to you. You will learn to get to know them and present your idea to them in the most efficient manner. They will give you advice, and you will learn to listen and distill the (sometimes conflicting) information to best serve your business.

Mentor whiplash happens. As a meta-lesson you will learn how to choose from multiple angles of advice.

Many of our mentors are entrepreneurs who have built, from scratch, a successful business.

“Hero mentors” have exited their businesses through a trade sale or IPO, sometimes multiple times; they offer inspiration to your team and coaching on strategy and tactics. When you least expect it, they may offer to invest.

“Role models” haven’t made it quite as far the heroes, but as practising entrepreneurs they are fully up-to-date with the on-the-ground realities of fundraising, hiring, and interfacing with government.

“Specialists” have deep experience in some area of startup practice, like law, bookkeeping, growth hacking, or platform strategy.

Prior to the bootcamp you will receive a detailed list of mentors who will be participating in your batch. The long list of mentors can be found at http://jfdi.asia/mentors/

We will teach you how to raise funds.

Fundraising isn’t easy. Building a deck, rehearsing a pitch, spreadsheeting financials – if that sounds like work to you, you might not be ready to change gears.

You will experience challenges. You will ask yourself if this is really worth it.

You have to be prepared for the grueling rigours of fundraising and repeated rejections, and difficult negotiations over valuation.

If this sounds too painful, then maybe the business that you want to build isn’t that compelling; maybe the people who will benefit from your innovation actually don’t exist; maybe the right thing to do is scale back and build your prototype on a hobby basis – but don’t quit the day job. There is no shame in this. Better to decide now that you would rather pursue a career path in engineering than in entrepreneurship. Either profession is worthy. The former pays better.

JFDI is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

In the US, seed accelerators offer more than $100,000 to startups. We don’t. Why? Because we’ve learned the hard way that $100,000, which is six months of runway in Silicon Valley, is a retirement jackpot in half of Southeast Asia. Offering that much money attracts scammers. They just want to take the money and run. We can’t deal with that.

Being accepted to JFDI is the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, not some kind of goal. Some entrepreneurs come from a history of winning business plan competitions. Sometimes they come to JFDI with a miscalibrated sense of competitiveness. You’re not competing with other teams to get in to JFDI. You’re not competing with your classmates in JFDI. You’re competing with actual businesses, other startups who you’ve probably never met, to reach millions of customers and become a billion-dollar company. That’s the true competition.

Resources

You will have access to all the perks and deals available to F6S startups in general and GAN startups in particular. In addition to that there are a few other private programs which we will discuss separately, not on this blog.

You will have hotdesking access to our campus at Block 71. You are welcome to find a desk and make it your own – in particular, if an external monitor makes you more productive, get one. You will have unlimited access to our coffee bar. Please contribute to help cover costs. On days with mentor sessions, it will be convenient to camp out there all day.

Serendipitous interactions are a big part of what JFDI is about. Even on days without mentors you will get more out of the program if you’re around, because when investors and mentors wander in unannounced, we will be able to introduce them to you.

Bootcamp Practicalities

Housing

It’s up to you to find housing in Singapore. Some founders stay at hostels. Some rent rooms through Airbnb. 100 days is an awkward period of time to be in Singapore. We suggest you take a 6 month lease if you can find one.

We’ll send you specific recommendations when we’re farther along the process. In the short term, consider The Enclave.

Visas

Locals don’t need a visa and can skip this section.

Foreigners will probably be here on a tourist visa. It doesn’t make sense to get an employment pass at this stage: you should expect to get funded after JFDI. It’ll be easier to get an employment pass then.

We’ll work with you on this. We have a special relationship with certain government agencies which helps to get your tourist visas renewed with fewer trips to the government office.

Demo Day

Demo Day is an invitation-only event. Unfortunately, space is limited, and even the air conditioners tend to get overloaded, so we can’t open our doors to everyone. We spend tremendous energy recruiting between 100 and 200 angels and seed-stage investors who may invest in your business. They have first priority.

Each founder who owns shares in the startup and has attended JFDI will be invited.

Each startup in which JFDI has invested, and which makes it through the program, will be invited to pitch at Demo Day. Each founder who is part of the team and has attended JFDI will be expected to be there to man your startup’s booth. If your startup is struggling to show traction we may ask you to defer your Demo Day pitch to the following batch 3 months later.
If your startup quits the program, then it will not be invited to attend Demo Day.

Exit

After Demo Day, we will help you find co-working space that’s right for you. JFDI offers co-working too so if you want to stay on campus, you can. It’s a good place to hold investor meetings.

Your job during the Bootcamp.

We use a red/green chart to measure startup readiness for Demo Day. Steve Blank would call this an IRL chart: Investment Readiness Level. Each column represents a startup. Each row represents a test. If you’re familiar with Test Driven Development, you know this chart.

Your job is to turn your column as green as possible before Demo Day – and beyond. We share it with mentors. We don’t share it with investors.

You may already be well on your way down the path. Wherever you’re stuck is where JFDI will focus its attention. We’ll help you with the next hurdle, and the next, and the next.

These are the questions we use to test the business:

1. Do we UNDERSTAND the problem domain as well as most experts?
2. Have we identified a specific first CUSTOMER?
3. Do we bring new INSIGHT or DESIGN to the field?
4. Have we confirmed a SPECIFIC user problem or opportunity through interviews?
5. Have we built a SOLUTION that matches that problem? (MVP)
6. Does the solution DIFFERENTIATE from current competitors through a UVP?
7. Have we confirmed a CHANNEL to reach our market?
8. Do we understand the conversion mechanics of our sales FUNNEL?
9. Can we confirm PRODUCT / MARKET FIT in the form of
   1. TRACTION and GROWTH?
   2. actual REVENUE?
10. Do we have a REPEATABLE SALES process whose LTV > CAC?
11. (B2B) Is that sales process implemented in a SALES ORGANIZATION which does not require much founder time?
12. (B2C) Is there a PRE-SALES promotion activity driving the top of the funnel?
13. Do we have an action plan to SELL TO EVERYONE in our target market?
14. Can we articulate the Big Vision?

The greener your column, the higher the chances you’ll raise funds.

Program Schedule

This detailed breakdown of what happens, day by day and week by week, should help you visualize what startups get out of JFDI. In addition to this formal curriculum there is also the peer-to-peer learning that happens amongst the founders directly – everything from tech dev assistance to gossiping about investors.

Day 1: Thursday: Meet and Greet

Some founders arrive with luggage bags, having just gotten off the plane. Others have lived in Singapore all their lives. Most have arrived a few days or weeks before, and found long-term housing already.

You pitch yourself to the other founders. You pitch your startup to the other startups.

Day 2: Friday: Demo Day One

You pitch your startup to a dozen or more mentors and investors. Many in the audience have worked with JFDI for years. Ideally, you should approach, or be approached by, a mentor who says they want to keep an eye on you, and work with you, throughout the course of the program. It’s important for each startup to find a lead mentor.

Day 3: Saturday: Orientation and Welcome to Singapore

Meng leads the batch on a walking tour of Singapore’s most interesting neighbourhoods – Bugis and Kampong Glam.

Day 4: Sunday: Off

Get your housing situation sorted out, get your SIM cards, set up your redmart.com account so you can get groceries delivered.

Day 5: Week 1 Begins.

Generally, we try to follow a format of one week on, one week off. We alternate intense mentoring with time for you to put advice into practice. Except the first two weeks are both on, because there is a lot to cover.

Week 1: Monday

Prior to the bootcamp, we sent you many documents to review and execute. These documents establish your startup as a corporation. This session explains what you signed, discusses corporate governance, and explains your responsibilities as a director of a company. This is all part of building a business, just like brushing your teeth and tying your shoelaces: nobody enjoys it, but it must be done. With your new understanding, if you want to make any changes to your constitutional agreements, now’s the time.

Week 1: Tuesday

We talk about term sheets and the mechanics of early-stage investment. We look at case studies of past JFDI startups who have raised millions of dollars. How did they raise money? How much of the company do the founders own? Do the founders still control the company? What mistakes have startups made before?

By the end of this session, you should have a general idea of what milestones you need to qualify for Series A funding. Each business is different, but there are general patterns that investors will look for.

Week 1: Wednesday

To achieve those milestones, how much money will you need to spend? How many servers will you need to host? What is your budget for advertising and promotion? How many sales staff will you need to hire? How many engineers? In-house or outsourced? Freelancers or dev shops? What will legal and accounting cost? Do you plan to file a patent? How much do you plan to pay yourself?

Tally up the skills and expertise on your team, and you’ll have a wishlist of the early employees or late founders you’ll need to add to your team. Which key people do you want to hire? What will they cost? How will you convince them?

At a given point in time, at a given level of expenditure, you should be expecting to make a certain amount of money. How much time do you need before you start making $100,000 a month? What will that cost?

What is the largest possible vision of your business? We try to avoid the country trap: we don’t want to be like Valley startups who only plan to serve San Francisco or the United States. We want to build regionally and globally dominant companies. In this session, we imagine the grown-up business that your startup will become.

By the end of this session you should have a cash flow forecast for the next 24 months, leading to Series A. You should be able to inspire a Series A investor with the scale of your vision, and give them confidence in your ability to execute. We’ll talk about the questions Series A investors ask, and how you plan to answer them.

Week 1: Thursday

Add up the total cash shortfall, and that’s how much you need to raise for your seed round.

What do seed investors look for? What questions do they ask, and how will you answer them? Who are the seed investors in JFDI’s network? How do angels operate differently from seed funds?

What government money is available? How do you qualify for it, and what are the strings attached?

By the end of this session, you will have role-played a conversation with a seed investor, and you should know the strong and weak points of your pitch.

Week 1: Friday

Every Friday, teams share their critical incidents during group reflection. Then they pitch to one another and to mentors who join us for the session. Then we end with Open House.

Week 2: Mentors Share Startup Theory

We introduce theories of innovation, entrepreneurship, and disruption. We contrast innovation in Silicon Valley with innovation in the development markets. When do clones work and when do they fail? What happened with TaskRabbit? How do Rocket Internet work?

When is a startup a clone, a lifestyle business, a big company’s outsourced R&D project? When is it a unicorn? What does it take to build a billion-dollar business? Are you building a catch-up or leapfrog business for emerging economies? Or a new-to-the-world innovation?

We explore platform theory. What are the differences between service, product, platform, and media businesses? How do particular platforms work? We analyze YouTube, Airbnb, Uber, and Taskrabbit. What are the necessary elements of a platform, and how do you launch a platform so it achieves escape velocity? (reading: https://www.techinasia.com/vietnams-pinterest-clones-suck/)

We run a refresher on Lean Startup methodology. Minimal Viable Product. Concierge MVP. The build/measure/learn loop. Quantitative, evidence-based decisionmaking. Running small, fast experiments. Agile development and quick iterations. This is how we expect you to operate.

By the end of this week you should have mapped out your startup using a number of tools, including the Lean Canvas, the Platform Canvas, and the Value Proposition Canvas.

Week 3: off

Now that you have a common vocabulary, reach out to your favourite mentors and connect one-on-one.

Week 4: Make Something People Want

Most of the teams in Accelerate have passed through our pre-accelerator programs, Discover and Validate. They have pivoted, experimented, and learned from the market. They have become domain experts, if they weren’t already. If you haven’t done these programs, you may need to catch up.

Now we take a deep dive into the design-innovation element of your product. What makes it great? What makes it different? How does it express your innovation? Is there a better way of doing it? We look at your service from the perspective of the http://jobstobedone.org/ framework to really nail product/market fit.

We talk about competitive positioning: how are you different from what’s out there today? How will you maintain your advantage relative to new entrants? Somewhere around the world, a new accelerator is starting its bootcamp, and one of those teams is doing exactly what you’re doing.

We take feedback in the round from your peers and your mentors. Can you tweak and relaunch the product in a week or two?

We talk about branding: naming the thing, designing the logo and visual identity, the challenges of content marketing with a unified voice. We storyboard the key interactions between users and your brand. We explore the concept of pop-up test-branding: bringing up the service under a different name and style.

How will you know that you’ve made something people want? We explore the AIDA funnel and Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics.

We introduce usability testing with Rocket Surgery Made Easy. We bring actual users into the room and show you how to get the most out of a usabiilty session.

We talk about viral growth and building viral loops into your product. We look at case studies of how previous startups have launched invite strategies.

Week 5: off

At this point, some teams are charging ahead and some teams are pivoting. You have one week to build and launch the next version of your product, incorporating everything you’ve learned.

Week 6: Sales

B2B sales is different to B2C sales.

How do you sell to businesses? How do you master the complex sale?

How do you sell to individuals? How do you get in front of their eyeballs?

We talk about Google AdWords and other forms of online advertising. We cover SEO and SEM.

How does content marketing contribute to presales? Track web and mobile visitors using marketing automation and analytics.

The valuation of your company depends on the sales it makes. But every sale that a founder had to be directy involved in, gets discounted by 90%. How will the company sell without you? How can you use channels to scale sales? How do you partner with resellers and big companies?

Week 7: Off

Go sell.

Week 8: Understanding Investors

Some investors are clueless: they’re just starting out as an angel, and they think that 30 years of corporate ladder-climbing means they somehow know something about startup life.

Other investors have been VCs for 20 years and know more about your industry than you do. (Why? Because all of your competitors just pitched them last week.)

Where deals are concerned, how do investors view the world? What investment opportunities interest them? What landscape of opportunities do they face?

What are their financial incentives? How is a venture fund structured? To whom are they accountable? What are their constraints? We turn to writings by VCs like A16Z to understand their side of the table.

What is the etiquette of doing a venture deal? How do you get a warm introduction? Who follows? Who leads?

How many meetings will it take to get to a term sheet. How many more weeks does it take before the money is in the bank?

By the end of this week, you should be able to have an intelligent conversation with an investor whout too much frustration or disappointment on either side.

Week 9: off

Keep working on your traction! Most teams should have launched by now. If you haven’t, you should. Remember what Reid Hoffman said: If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

Week 10: Pitch Prep

You have six minutes onstage to tell your story to an audience of over 100 investors.

In followup meetings, you will have 15 to 60 minutes offstage, one-on-one.

How do you make the most of that time?

Which investors are coming to Demo Day? What are they interested in? Which investors can help your startup in wihch ways? Is there portfolio synergy? Can they help you with the next round and the round after? Which investors do you want and which don’t you want?

We bring in pitch consultants to suggest improvements to your slides. The designer on your team will get a chance to shine as they tweak your Powerpoint.

Usually, around this time, we organize DD2 – a presentation to the venture investment arm of a large corporation, together with a few selected investors and angels. This is a full dress rehearsal for the final Demo Day.

We also talk about Media and PR – how do you maximize, or minimize, media coverage? If you want to be in Techcrunch, you can, but there are certain things you have to do. We go over a practice press release and explain the essentials of your media kit.

Week 11: Off

Some teams will already be talking to some investors. We usually advise startups to wait until after the final Demo Day to take term sheets or money, because at that point investors have to compete. But if you want to take money early, that’s your choice.

Week 12: Investor Due Diligence

When you go into post-Demo Day investor conversations, what questions will they ask? How well have you prepared, over the course of the past ten weeks, to answer those questions?

We bring in mentors to help role-play those conversations. This is easy for them: they are full-time professional investors.

Investors will want to see your due-diligence pack. We help you assemble it.

We help you write your executive summary, the lasting two-page snapshot of your company.

We run a workshop to get you listed on on platforms like Crunchbase and Angelist, and on captable.io, reportally.com, and legalese.io. By the end of this workshop you will be ready to issue term sheets and other fundraising paperwork to prospective investors.

Week 13: Off

JFDI startups usually rehearse their pitch 50 to 100 times. Work on your slides.

Week 14: Demo Day

Traction, testimonials, executive summaries, your pitch deck and your investor deck – it all comes together for the week of Demo Day.

We ask you to prepare your cap table and model a couple of fundraising scenarios so you can understand the mechanics and financial implications of your seed and Series A rounds.

Week 15: Follow-up meetings

Investors will ask to meet you after Demo Day, to learn more. This “roadshow” piece can be tiring, but you’ll be as prepared as any startup can be.

We will work with you to produce term sheets so you can lead your own round in a high-resolution fundraising.

We debrief you after each set of meetings to help interpret investor questions and feedback.

By the end of thise week you should have a firm idea what work needs to be done for you to qualify for the fundraise; you should have a good idea which investor will be most likely.

Week 16: Fundraising Mechanics

We revisit the theory and practice of term sheets. Series A, Convertible Debt, Common Stock. Different instruments are available: YC SAFE, 500 KISS, ordinary equity. We help you produce the paperwork to effect the round: everything from directors’ resolutions to shareholder agreements, DORAs, and subscription agreeements.

Next Article: The Journey After JFDI