How can early-stage founders in India build their consumer startup with the help of Accel?

Applications now open for Founder Stack - Consumer Tech cohort to support early-stage founders in user growth and product-market fit

Apply now on www.seedtoscale.com/courses/sts-consumer

Launched in February 2020, Founder Stack is a curated community of experts from the consumer tech ecosystem to help early-stage founders scale faster towards PM fit.

• A community initiative designed to guide early-stage founders, Founder Stack helps founders identify a good market opportunity and supports them on their journey through the product-market fit.

• Over the years, we have partnered with some of the best consumer tech companies in India - Flipkart, Swiggy, Urban Company, Vedantu, Cure Fit, Bounce, and others. At the time of investment, these companies were small, just the founders in their first 500 days of their journey.

• Through the initiative, we would share our learnings from partnering with these companies from seed to scale stages. The cohort will have about 8-10 ambitious founding teams that are trying to solve the pain-points of millions of Indian households, to build startups around them.

• We started Founder Stack with an intent to be business model specific so that founders get high returns for their time spent with Accel.

For SaaS businesses in India, there are a plethora of community groups for support. When it came to consumer tech, however, we could not find a community that

• Acts as a knowledge bridge for founders. 
• Gives founders access to actionable insights 
• Access to operators and founders in their market category to have quick chats and get feedback loops. 
• A community of members with a similar objective to build high growth consumer-led businesses.

Hence, we decided to build a closely-knit, high-signal consumer tech founder community.

This will have - startup founders, operators, experts, consultants, and other support group members to help you.

What if founders could spend 10 weeks with consumer tech experts, VCs, and experienced founders before spending the next 100 weeks of an uphill battle. Can we build a community to make this possible for them?

What do members of the Founder Stack - Consumer Tech community get access to?

We have two broad outcomes for founders during this program. The first one is to help you to grow your users and the second is to solidify your product-market fit score.
We do this with help of:

1. Dedicated sounding board of consumer tech experts throughout the program.
   
   
2. Masterclasses and founder talks to help you with the market, product, user growth.
   
   
3. Private roundtables with people who can add value to your business
   
   
4. Comprehensive board-like meetings to structure your growth strategies
   
   
5. High-quality peer group to build a strong community for your future journey.
   
   
6. A curated pool of high-quality agencies, consultants, experts available on-demand.
   
   
7. 3-month active engagement with the community, to gain clarity and access a high-quality network.

We spoke to 25+ founders in the consumer tech space and designed a program that helps early-stage founders clear specific questions like

‍

By the end of the program, we would expect you to have answers for questions like: 

a) What is a large market opportunity in your space?

b) How do you carry out effective customer research?

c) How do you think about user growth and what channels work best for your business category?

d) How to ace organic and paid marketing and design network effects to reach 100K users?

e) How to double down on a GTM strategy? 

f) How to work with current users and improve my Product Market Fit Score?

g) How to value a consumer tech startup & how to raise investments?

These are just a few of the many questions that we will answer during the program, which is curated in a way that helps you gain clarity, skills and network to blitzscale towards PM fit.‍

Get access to the highly curated experts of consumer tech startups in India.‍

Coaches are not just speakers at events, they are part of the community and root for each other’s success. During Founder Stack SaaS, many coaches became early customers and continued to coach them beyond the program.‍

As part of this program, you get access to

Founders:

We have one of the best founders form the consumer tech landscape to help you on your journey. You will get to spend time with them and unlock the learnings about markets, landscape and their growth journey

Experts:

L-1's, operators and senior leadership who helped scale companies on the ground will share contextual learnings with you through Masterclasses, Roundtables, and One-on-One's.

Agencies, Freelancers, Consultants:

We would also like to connect you with partner agencies, freelancers who can help the early-stage founders to grow faster.

We shall provide a grant of Rs 2 Lakhs per team to avail these services and fast track your growth. 
Lastly, 

If you are a consumer tech startup:

1. In the Pre- product market fit phase

2. Looking for a strong sounding board

3. Seeking actionable and contextual insights for your market

‍

Apply now on www.seedtoscale.com/consumer

‍

Related Articles:

1. Scaling your Startup
2. Problems while Scaling a Startup
3. Why the founder-startup fit is vital‍