What are the features of business management?

What would be your advice for the mission, promise, proposition value, and business strategy of a technology accelerator aiming at early-stage startups?

• After a difficult first year, our company is already in position to start developing our challenge of becoming a full-stack technology accelerator, bringing a new concept to startups and entrepreneurship. I am sharing with you a resume of the main concepts I would like our potential partners to read. So please, if you have any insight of entrepreneurship, drop your comments, suggestions, questions, any of them will be highly appreciated and will help us refine our message. Thanks! Mission, promise, proposition value Our mission is to boost startups reach launching their ideas faster and better, taking control of the IT decisions and execution, and so helping them avoid failure because of bad management in the development of their products and services. We summarise it all in our company slogan "your CTO on-demand", in which we state that we are much more than just a traditional development company. We are a technology accelerator that incorporate the founders on a complete immersion in the methodologies (e.g. lean startup or agile development) and technologies used in our development processes. We become the CTO for them. When partnering with us, founders free themselves of everything related to software development and, at the same time, secure the proper execution of the startup ideas and projects from a technical point of view. They can instead focus on things like customer development, marketing, fundraising or sales. Our promise is defined through continuous delivery: day by day we deliver our work so that every other important aspect for a startup (e.g. pivoting business models, reaching key providers or working on new funding rounds) receives all the dedication needed and integrates with the product development seamlessly. In order to stick to our value proposition, it is crucial for our startups to understand that the level of commitment and participation we demand is very high. We must work together, not isolated. We do not understand the relationship as a customer-provider, but rather a full-round partnership. How we do it Our company works for a monthly fee; we don't believe in fixed estimates and requirements, because they are like handcuffs to the ideas of our entrepreneurs. Only in special cases we consider closed budgets under pre-approved fixed list of tasks. There are two main stages a project may be, in terms of amount of development needed. The first requires workforce and full-time dedication from part of our team, and is usually happening while we are developing MVPs or major next releases; we call it "development stage". The other one slows down the pace of product evolution and software delivery, focusing us more on things like resolving bugs, improvement of existing features or test coverage; we call it "maintenance stage". We organize our team in a "bootstraped" way, supported by talent rather than number of people working. We also praise the philosophy of "total football", on which every member must be versatile enough to exchange roles and be ready for problem solving at all time. What makes us unique We create robust developments with best practices implemented from the beginning. As experts in Python and Javascript, we have created, through years of experience, a solid codebase that we use as a launch platform to implement common features and patterns found in most frontend and backend applications. Startups follow and monitor the progress of their projects through different online collaboration tools (tickets, issues, code repositories, task management) and also participate and help develop them (improving documentation, maintaining quality assurance tests). We are a design-led company, because believe in the union between design and technology. Thus, our workflow is guided by the user interface (UI), seeking the constant improvement of the user experience (UX). Our goal is build  digital products with the optimal practical use (interaction design). Business strategy Our target partners are entrepreneurs and startups, incorporated or not, with seed capital or a first angel or venture capital. These startups can be based anywhere in the world. However, knowing that startups tend to concentrate in certain areas or cities, we pay special attention to those hubs. We walk with entrepreneurs on their early steps and stages, as technology mentors or advisors, until they become funded and deposit their trust on us in developing their projects; through this process, we get the chance to know better the needs and understand the whole thing even before we put ourselves "hands on". We seek other fellow entrepreneurs, mentors, advisors, investors and people involved at any level in the entrepreneurship business, to become ambassadors and spread the message and value proposition from our company. They, as a result, may benefit from this relationship, depending on each case and agreement reached with them. In order to extend our area of business activities, we want to create partnerships and collaborate with capital firms, organizations and public/private institutions fostering entrepreneurship. We also aim to participate in demo days, hackatons, contests and programs where there can be any chance of meeting and contacting startups, so that we can do a follow up of their evolution and status. From meetups or talks, as active members of the local community of developers, until we host bigger things (e.g. Latinamerica's first DjangoCon), we want to perform activities that build ourselves a company reputation to captivate the interest of talented employees.

• Answer:

  Ok, so I think you've outlined two essential parts of the business plan but not the essential third. You're really clear about the problem you perceive in your target market: that handling IT is boring and painful and unpredictable and can be the live-or-die reality of an entrepreneurial business, particularly one that needs to quickly get customer-facing technology or backoffice functions to work smoothly. You're also clear about the deal. What a client of yours needs to do, and pay, to get your services. Monthly fees, no fixed costs, no upfront start up costs, it's a business model that fits a client who doesn't know the future pattern of their growth. All good. What is entirely missing is what you bring to the table. You talk about "walking with" and "getting to know", "committed" "participation", but it doesn't sound like something unique. Now, maybe it is. Maybe it's something that no IT provider on this planet could provide (my neighbour is one so I could ask him - but I'm pretty sure this level of support is called consultancy and so to me it doesn't feel distinct and unique - so to your target market it probably doesn't either). What do you bring that's really special? Why are you the only people able to provide it? What have you seen in the market that you're willing to invest in? What's in it for you to grow that type of market, in that way? What's your style of collaborative working? Who wants that? Why? What I'm really looking for is, if I was a potential competitor of yours, why would I worry that you have arrived on the market? Tell me that, and you have your mission.