JFDI Accelerate 2014A Alumni, Madhu GB (founder of Augment and GuitarStreet) blogs about his positive experience with theJFDI Accelerate Program. Here are the things we love – and can learn – from his story, writes Crystal Superal.
It was just a regular day at the smoochy office when we noticed on a conversation on Twitter. From Kush Apoorva (@kush_apoorva):
Text reads: “Wow, I am rich, I’ve got $5” my response to @madospace – when we needed to go to @jfdiasia in Singapore http://bit.ly/1ca8BdJ
Kush (founder of GuitarStreet and Quickly) was speaking to friend Madhu (founder of Augment and Guitarstreet). The tweet leads to a blog written by Madhu about the early days of Augment. At that time, the two GuitarStreet co-founders were in a cafe in India, talking like normal friends do.
“While reading Techcrunch, I came across the article which read, ‘JFDI – Asia’s #1 accelerator has now opened their application for their next batch,’” writes Madhu.
“Let’s join!”
“How much money do we have?”
“I have $5.”
“I guess, $3.”
With $8 combined in their accounts, Madhu and Kush moved to Singapore and applied to JFDI Asia’s Accelerate Program. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Smoochy Loves These Stories
We dig these stories from our founders. It lets us know that our work at JFDI – helping venture-fundable startups in Asia – has tangible impact. Whenreal people speak about how much we’ve helped them, that’s a true resource for us to keep going.
These stories tell us that founders are just regular people (worried about money too!). They just happen to be ordinary people with extraordinary zeal to pursue their ideas. In the blog, Kush and Madhu took risks to validate their idea, but not without doing a version of customer discovery first. Best of all, these stories humanize the startup cycle. It teaches us that whatever Kush and Madhu achieved, others can too.
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Speaking of the JFDI Accelerate Program, our 2015B Applications are now open. Our mentors, founders and investors form the perfect ecosystem for your startup to succeed in Asia. More than 60% of our Accelerate startups receive seed funding.
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Crystal Superal is the Social Media and Content Marketer at JFDI, the #1 business accelerator in Asia. She finished her Multimedia Communications degree while playing golf for a San Francisco-based art school. She currently lives in Cebu City, Philippines. For her thoughts about tech and lifehacks, follow her Twitter @crystalsuperal.