Navigate Accelerator 2020 - Year 1 Recap

The term early-stage is complicated in the startup world.

It seems like everyone you speak to has a different definition. Some people use it to refer to the idea and pre launch phase, others use it to refer to the post launch and product market fit phase, still others use it to refer to the post seed, pre-Series A phase.

Very early-stage startup founders (pre-product, pre-launch, pre-capital) are the second-class citizens of the startup ecosystem. What's perhaps worse is the lip service they receive.

Everyone says they want to support at the earliest stages, but those same founders then get rejected from angel funding, accelerators, and the like because they don't have enough traction.

Navigate is a new kind of startup accelerator that works with very early stage founders around the world.

We're located at the LAB Miami and we launched in mid 2020 and from July-December we worked with 28 companies. Far from our vision of helping 250 startups (#2021goals), but it's been a great few months filled with learnings on 1) What early-stage startups need, and 2) Which founders find this type of program beneficial.

As we reflect on what 2020 has taught us, we thought we'd share what we're seeing in the hopes that it might be useful for other ecosystem builders and, of course, early-stage founders that find themselves unsure of what to do next.

1) What early stage startups need

We started Navigate because we saw that early stage founders needed more support.

In our first months, we've had a few taglines to describe what we do. First is was, "Helping founders Navigate the startup world", then it was, "The personal trainer for your startup" , and most recently, "Startup Confidently".

Too often, at the time they need it most (before TechStars, before their Seed round, etc.), founders are left to fend for themselves. They're stuck looking to books, articles, and webinars for advice on what to do next on their path to success.

So we created a new kind of accelerator

• No limited-time cohorts
• No one-size-fits-all programming
• No revolving door of volunteer advisors and mentors

Don't get me wrong, there is a place for all those things and we encourage our founders to apply for traditional accelerators. But some founders just needed something different. In particular:

Ongoing community

Once a cohort-based accelerator program ends, founders often lose the network and community that was really valuable during their time in the program. Building a startup is a difficult and lonely business and it can feel impossible when you have to do it alone.

By creating a program where founders can stay as long at they want, they don't have to lose the community and support that is there to help them make the right decisions as their startup grows.

Customized Education and Growth Planning

Programs that teach based on a specific track (product market fit, fundraising, team building) can be extremely useful -- but if those tracks don't align with where your business is at this moment in time, the value you get from it can be limited.

Our program includes a customized Growth Action Plan that is designed based on startup stage and desired milestones. We make sure the the learning and action items each week are specific to each individual startup so there's no wasted time on topics that are not relevant to their needs.

Dedicated Support & Advisory

There's something to be said for getting exposure to lots of mentors and advisors. Most programs facilitate this quite well. They have mentors days where you can sit with 8 or 10 amazing minds for 30-60 minutes each and get some solid feedback. The issue is that you spend half the meeting explaining what you do and then the advisor only has ~20 minutes to give you their feedback.

Additionally, because deep relationships are not possible in this quick interactions, there is no followup, accountability, or assistance when the feedback and suggestions are too difficult for the founders to take care of on their own.

We changed that by giving each startup one advisor that they work with on a weekly basis. In our opinion, when you work with the same person each week, it enables the feedback, accountability, and assistance to be deeper and significantly more effective.

2) Which Founders are Finding this Program Beneficial

Because we're building something a little different, it was important to identify which founders would find this valuable. There were some interesting insights as we analyzed the startups we've helped so far.

Female Founders

Women are notoriously under-supported in the startup world. While they own 36% of businesses, they receive less than 9% of the funding. We were pleased to find that just over half of our companies had a female founder.

Founders of Color

The disparity in startup support for founders of color is also well documented. A recent study which examined publicly available VC-backed deals over the last five years and polled over 10,000 founders found the following:

• 77.1 percent of founders were white—regardless of gender and education.
• Just one percent of venture-backed founders were black.
• Latino founders made up 1.8 percent of those receiving funding, while Middle Easterners totaled 2.8 percent.

With that said, 56% of the founders that chose to work with us in 2020 were non-white. While part of this is a result of our location (~50% of our startups are in Miami, FL), we'd like to think that another part is due to our program being accessible and filling a need that under represented founders have and aren't able to fill with existing programs.

Laterpreneurs

Founders over 35 are statistically more successful, but it's not always possible for older founders to drop everything and spend 3 months at a traditional accelerator. Additionally, they have the life experience to understand the value of an advisory based program. This makes our program especially appealing to this group of founders, as evidenced by the fact that 64% of our founders are over 35 and the average age is mid-40's.

Very Early Stage Founders

Once you raise a Seed and your approaching scale, everyone wants to help you. At that stage you have VC's and accelerators competing to get you in their portfolios. Our initial vision was to provide help for founders at those earliest stages: Idea, Pre-Launch, Team Building, MVP, etc.

This segment represents the largest group of startups and also has the smallest number of programs and resources available. We designed our program to help these stages in particular so it came as no surprise that only 12% of our startups were in the Funding stage. We expect that as we help companies move through the stages the numbers will increase, but we hope that our commitment to support the earliest stages will keep the percentages similar.

Founders with No Fundraising Experience

Once you've raised capital once, it becomes easier to raise capital in the future -- but if you've never had to navigate the VC world, it can be very complicated. The dedicated education and assistance our program provides is especially effective for this audience.

Conclusion

While it's only been a few months, we're excited about the founders we've been able to connect with and the support we've been able to provide.

We'll continue to focus on building a startup community that helps founders launch and grow their companies and get them ready for funding. Our primary vehicle for this is dedicated advisory, marketing support, and a week-by-week growth action plan that details what tasks they should be working on, how much they should be spending on marketing, and aggressive KPI tracking.

Our goal for 2021 is to scale our own program to have a 10X reach in 2021.

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Want to join us? You can learn more at https://www.navigate.capital/

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Sources and additional reading:

• https://startupsusa.org/women-founded-venture-backed-startups/
• https://womenwhotech.com/startupinfographic
• https://news.crunchbase.com/news/untapped-opportunity-minority-founders-still-being-overlooked/
• https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45
• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-05/diverse-startups-raise-more-cash-and-return-more-to-investors