How I Wound Up in the Iowa Startup Accelerator

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To say the last 10 days have been eventful would be an understatement. For those reading this that don’t already know, I am participating in the 2016 cohort of the Iowa Startup Accelerator. I hadn’t said anything about it in the last couple of posts not because I was applying for any startup I’m building, but because I’m leading this year’s corporate innovation team, currently called QuickScore, which is a tool built by NewBoCo that plugs into the Canvas open-source learning management system that automates scoring of non-“bubble sheet” paper-and-pencil assessments.

QuickScore was originally built for one beta customer, and the team at NewBoCo thought that there might be other school districts that are having issues with their paper-based progress assessments or other quizzes that teachers are currently hand-grading – problems like the scoring and data entry taking away too much time from other teacher responsibilities, or the district not receiving as much of the raw data from the assessments as they would like. It’s a solid Web application built by some very smart people, and hopefully there will be more traction than just one customer. This is where I come in.

I was pulled aside the Wednesday before the start of the accelerator program while I was working on some freelance projects at Vault in Cedar Rapids. The NewBoCo team knew I’d taken two startups through the Venture School program. They had been toying around with the idea of taking this corporate innovation through the accelerator, but they needed someone with a decent amount of customer discovery experience to lead the way. I think that going through the Iowa Startup Accelerator – or any major accelerator program like it – is a once in a lifetime opportunity that you can’t pass up. Over 100 teams applied to the program this year and only 6 teams made the cut for the actual program. Nine teams made it in last year, and ten the year prior. I had to say yes.

So, I said yes, but with the stipulation that I couldn’t just drop everything and live at the building in Cedar Rapids for the next three months. I still have to be the primary parent running the household, and I have clients expecting work to be done. I said that I could rearrange some things and work there full time the first week or two, but after that, 20 hours per week is my hard maximum. They agreed that we could make this work. At this point, everything seemed completely surreal.

The reality of actually being a part of this year’s cohort gradually sank in over the course of the last week, and finally hit me completely on Friday morning when I had to get up and give my first elevator pitch/demo/progress report. Even before that, each of the teams had to do a 5-minute pitch first thing on Monday morning when we all got there, and it still hadn’t hit me at that point when I got up and – not having more than 24 hours to put together something to say since I had been officially brought onto the team – managed to make it through without too many issues. I was able to learn a great deal over the following four days about the problem that our beta district was having and why they had approached NewBoCo about building out this product.

Getting up to give the pitches is also a major change for me. I was never the pitch person for the teams I helped take through Venture School or helped build during the Startup Weekends I’ve attended. I have always ended up in the background, building the slide deck and video recording the pitches. It’s a big change being in front of the audience, and is still something I’ll be getting used to over the next three months. I don’t have trouble speaking in front of audiences, but it’s completely different when you are essentially presenting someone else’s idea that you just learned about shortly before the presentation. One of the things I have on my inner to-do list is to make QuickScore “mine” over the next couple of weeks. I want to feel as though QuickScore was my idea and my creation, and I feel like I’ll have more of a stake in the success of the product and have more enthusiasm in my pitches and demos if it feels like my own baby.

How do you make something “your baby”? By spending as much time with it as you can. I gained access to the demo version of the product early in the week, and I’ve been digging around inside the program to see what it can really do. However, that’s not the only thing I’ve been up to over the last week. I’m also doing an extensive amount of research on different learning management systems to see if there are any direct competitors to what we have built. As part of my experience taking startups through Venture School and creating startups during Startup Weekends, I’ve had to do research in the past to create competitive tables, to see if we are entering an existing market or creating a new market; the former making my job in customer discovery a fair bit easier than the latter.

Add to the mountain of work several days of orientation and training courses on everything from the nuts and bolts of the accelerator, to training on the Agile Methodology and Scrum, and an entire day focused on customer discovery, development, and creating marketing language around a startup. We spent Monday through Wednesday in the classroom for the most part, and we received so much good information that I’m still parsing through some of it today. I hadn’t had any formal Agile or Scrum training in the past, and it is much easier to understand once someone qualified has explained it. I had the same type of “a-ha” moment with Scrum after the workshop on Tuesday as I did with the Business Model Canvas after I’d gone through Steve Blank’s Udacity course before starting Venture School.

I’m still wrapping my brain around the fact that I’ve been put in charge of a project of this size. It’s the first project of this magnitude where I’ve been the team lead, and I don’t want to let the rest of the team down. My freelance projects have not been nearly as complex, time consuming, and time boxed as this. While there are deadlines for the Web sites I build, there never is this major sense of urgency that the Countdown to Launch Day clock provides in the accelerator room.

While the first week of the accelerator was packed with seminars and meetings, things ease up a bit over the rest of the weeks so that we can all have the time to get our customer discovery completed and the rest of the administrative stuff done. I was given access to the cohort calendar at the end of the week, and it looks like we have a fair number of workshops and opportunities to meet with mentors each week. Fridays are always the demo and administrative meeting day where I’ll be pulling my entire team together to reflect on the week and plan for the next. Even at 20 hours per week, I’ll probably be putting in the largest number of hours of any team member. My designer and developer are both working on other projects for NewBoCo. The fourth member of the team is there is a dual mentor/teammate role and will only be able to put in 5 or so hours per week on this project. We are all going to try to touch base each morning, but that might be a challenge some days. In particular, I will be the only team member in Cedar Rapids almost the entire upcoming week.

As the Iowa Startup Accelerator moves along, I might consolidate this blog with an e-mail newsletter that I’m required to start publishing weekly during the program. It will result in less duplication of information, which is good for everyone. I will have the opt-in information for that e-mail list available soon.

Put this date on your calendar: November 3. The Iowa Startup Accelerator Launch Day event is at 5 pm that day, and you should attend. Hundreds of people have attended the previous two Launch Day events, and you’ll have an opportunity to watch me present QuickScore! In three months, I’m hoping to have a great deal of good news to present to everyone. I will not be attending too many other events between now and Launch Day – I have to keep my nose to the grindstone for the most part over the next three months if I want to have some time off at the end of the year to enjoy the holidays.

Wish me luck as I keep plugging away over the next several weeks. I’m going to need as much energy as you can spare me to get this thing done.