In our posts, we have repeatedly said that after the finals of the Digital Breakthrough contest, successful teams will be able to finalize projects within the framework of the pre-accelerator and make products for the market. The program started on September 30, and we can already sum up the first results. But first, we’ll tell you what its meaning is and why the pre-accelerator is necessary for companies, investors, and the teams themselves.
With the help of experts, projects created at the hackathon (at the regional or final stages) are pumped to the maximum and prepared for entering the market. They are introduced to company representatives, investors and future mentors who, like good fitness trainers, squeeze the maximum possible out of them. By the way, all work is carried out under the strict supervision of 20 trackers - people who have grown a single successful startup in their time and certainly know all the pitfalls in the development of future unicorns (and we're not talking about mythical horses) 🙂
The main goal of trackers is not to brag about the portfolio of projects they have grown. They become mentors and individually communicate regularly with the teams, give them a vision of the project from the outside and point out obvious "bugs" in the implementation of the idea. Representatives of companies that supply tasks at the hackathon also work with the participants. Based on the results of joint work, a crude development will turn into a real pilot. And it can really take off in the market.
We asked two trackers how preacceleration is going now.
Chizhov Nikita, tracker
“All participants approach their core mission differently. For example, the main goal of one of the teams is further employment in a large corporation and the development of their project already inside. At the same time, another wants to get a grant and get connections in government bodies, and the third wants to build a large, large-scale product for the entire market and attract investment from a business angel. Now the teams are at the stage of validating their main idea, and to help them with this, we use the customer development technique, which helps to identify the problem of potential customers and understand whether the solutions are suitable for their task.
One of the tools that allows them to think strategically and work through their ideas is the business canvas tool. It makes it possible to describe all business processes and the consumer segment, the key offer, the necessary resources, infrastructure, partners. This will help the team to think in more detail at the outset about what is needed to achieve their goals.”
Denis Poshekhontov, a member of the St. Petersburg Continuous Disintegration team (winners in the Rosatom State Corporation nomination), shared his goals with us:
“For the pre-accelerator, we chose the final prototype and slightly expanded its hypothesis. Our main mission is to attract funding to the project and bring it to the market. In addition, we are interested in what the startup kitchen looks like from the inside. Who knows, maybe in the future we will also become a full-fledged startup with a truly competitive solution.”
Marat Nabiullin from the goAI team (winners in the MTS nomination) noted the goals of his team, which turned out to be very broad:
- Develop a development strategy for 3 years
- Sign NDA and agreements of intent with a corporate client, a government customer and 2 other large corporate customers.
- Get data to analyze the labor intensity of work and create calculations of the cost of contracts.
- Prepare and agree on commercial proposals with the definition of contract forms, stages, terms, cost, testing parameters and acceptance conditions, development cost change conditions, monthly maintenance parameters, SLA and security levels, compliance with GDPR and regulatory documentation requirements, requirements for the transfer of rights and licensing, creating user manuals for the system, and training parameters for staff.
- Sign 1 contract on certain parameters.
Oksana Pogodaeva, tracker and entrepreneur, also spoke about the progress of the pre-acceleration program:
“A tracker always plays a key role in the implementation of any project. He helps projects in goal setting, in formulating hypotheses and their development. It also focuses teams on achieving their goals, for this the movement goes through weekly HADI cycles (hypothesis-action-data-acquisition-conclusion), which allows you to quickly gain useful knowledge from the market and understand what it and the end user really need.
At the start of the pre-acceleration program, projects were diagnosed, which made it possible to understand what state they are in at the moment, and also helped to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the teams.
It is also important to note that the tracker is not an expert and does not give advice on how the team should act in a given situation. With leading questions, he leads her to understand the problem and find solutions.”
60 teams were selected to participate in the pre-acceleration program, which have been working on improving their projects and skills for the second month. After the defense, which will be held from November 20 to 22 at the Senezh Management Workshop, the finalized prototypes of innovative solutions will go to the market without mentors. Some will be able to do this with the help of investors who also follow the work and communicate with the teams in the process.
Other participants who did not pursue the goal of bringing their project to the market will be able to get a job in the company and develop it already inside.
Marat Nabiullin spoke about how the preacceleration stage goes for them:
“Within the framework of the pre-accelerator, we are working on a project, a task from the final of the competition, and are developing a service for retraining ADEPT personnel based on artificial intelligence. This is a service that solves the issue of “additional training” of specialists within the company for open vacancies and promotes career growth, on the one hand, on the other hand, it allows employees to adapt to disappearing professions due to the digital transformation of the business and makes it possible to offer them new positions.” Marat also shared feedback on working with mentors: “As part of preacceleration, we receive very valuable feedback from trackers. They allow us to take a fresh look at the product and seriously improve it. In addition, they share useful contacts that will help us bring the development to the market in the future. Many thanks to our tracker, Viktor Stepanov, who keeps us in focus.”
Why do companies need a pre-accelerator at all?
At first, the pre-accelerator helps organizations hunt promising technology professionals. Such resumes are not found on Head Hunter or Super Jobs - as a rule, these specialists already work in companies or own their own business. Throughout the competition, we see a trend among companies that want to hire not individual specialists, but a whole multidisciplinary team that will be able to assess the company's activities with a fresh look and come up with new solutions for its innovative development.
Beyond IT organizations hunt for technology solutionsdesigned for the specific needs of their business. Hackathons help them with this, where they receive dozens of prototypes for subsequent integration into the company.
Investors receive separate advantages when working with projects in the pre-accelerator. We are all well aware that it is most profitable to invest in human and intellectual capital. And as a result of hackathons, we have accumulated a lot of such wealth. Therefore, investors, representatives of funds and business angels closely monitor the growth of projects, communicate with teams and decide who they will give money to.
How well-pumped projects came to the pre-accelerator after the final?
This question was answered by the trackers who have been on the battlefield for the fourth week and are monitoring the development of the teams:
Oksana Pogodaeva:
“There is a very noticeable spread in the level of projects, some have teams that have been formed for years, and some met for the first time only at a regional tour, some teams have quite good experience in creating products, and someone is doing it for the first time. In general, we can already say that we are in for a lot of pleasant surprises in the form of very interesting, unique and in some ways even elegant solutions.
Now teams are increasingly immersed in the context of the specifics of work within the framework of the pre-accelerator, they learn a lot of new things from the educational block and actively use the acquired knowledge in the implementation of their startups.”
By the way, we forgot to tell you that an educational program is provided as part of the pre-acceleration. It is divided into two stages - remote and face-to-face.
"Remote" teams under the strict guidance of trackers work to improve the product, receive expert advice and regular feedback on development. At the same time, he is taking an online course on launching IT startups and implementing solutions in business processes of companies.
At the in-person stage, master classes in public speaking, trainings on professional and personal competencies, and lectures from the partners of the competition are held.
And, of course, in the final, all the most difficult - at the end of the program, the teams will have to defend their projects in front of investors, funds and company representatives who will be able to assess the progress of the participants throughout the work (soon we will publish a post on how to make a perfect presentation without a designer ). Based on the results, the fate of each project will be decided, and later the contestants will go to celebrate or work on the mistakes - it all depends on how actively the work was going on at the pre-acceleration stage.
We hope that after that, all participants will be able to achieve their goals and show that the Digital Breakthrough is not about innovation, but about the people who create it. Therefore, we decided to create a pre-acceleration program designed to unite all the components for the successful implementation of technological progress - companies, investors and, of course, product teams.
Source: habr.com