Tuesday, November 20th was an eventful day for GrowLab as we introduced the Winter 2012 cohort companies to GrowLab alumni.
Food.ee, Learndot, Skyscraper, SunnyTrail and Placeling were in attendance to pass on their words of wisdom to ePACT, KarmaHire, Procurify, and Spacelist over breakfast. Unfortunately, Good Momming could not make it to this little gathering. But here’s a recap of what were exchanged over coffee and eggs:
[M]y advice to each company was to pick your biggest problem and then figure out which GrowLab partner can best help you solve it… Is it developing the perfect product? Cutting a distribution partnership? Entering a new geography? There’s a partner who’s an expert in that and you need to leverage all that they know. - Lindsay Watt, Placeling (Fall 2011 cohort)
ID mentors and advisors early who are interested in what you’re doing, can help you, and keep them up to date on your progress… Don’t show up to a mentor meeting with out researching their company and LinkedIn. Each mentor has amazing knowledge you can tap into, be sure you understand who you are talking with before meeting them. - Jon Cartwright, Foodee (Spring 2012 cohort)
The current cohort were happy to hear the alumni experience first-hand. Christine Sommers, co-founder of ePACT, said “We had some really great discussions on aspects to consider taking our business, both in regards to business development, planning for scalability, and technology.” She also added that it was great to find how “supportive everyone was both in regards to our cohorts starting to gel as a team, and how quick the alumni were to jump in and start offering advice/get excited about our product.”
Spacelist CEO, Bill MacEwen was glad to see “how the alumni build on their momentum beyond the program.” He really appreciated them spending their time and thought that it was a really good opportunity to “get perspective on how to make the most of our time here.”
Aman Mann, Procurify co-founder and CEO, added that the get together “was a great opportunity to understand the post-accelerator road map and the many possibilities from networks made. We met closely with SunnyTrail Co-founder Octav Druta, who was able to explain great insight into successful strategies for customer acquisition in our space which is crucial at a startups level such as ours.” Both GrowLab alumni and current cohort were glad to be part of this little gathering – surely this won’t be the last one.
