Welcome to Techstars
By: Parabol
Tags: Friday Ship, Startup, Metrics, SaaS, Techstars

Last week we kicked off with Techstars Anywhere 2019. It’s the first Techstars program delivered remotely, allowing for participation from companies in geographies not yet served by the accelerator ecosystem:

…there are plenty of parents in the class, including a first time dad to a five month old baby girl and one co-founder currently pregnant with twins, due just after Demo Day. By providing broader accessibility to the Techstars network, Techstars Anywhere helps great entrepreneurs start and build great companies just about anywhere.

Techstars commitment to a remote program is an important validation of our company’s thinking: almost every type of organization is being retooled to work online and across geographies and timezones, including startup accelerators.

Just as we convene our employees quarterly for in-person workshops, our Techstars leadership (Ryan Kuder, Kendra Dixon, Leandro Jaime) will bring our class together a total of three times over the course of the program. The directors understand that while almost everything can be done remotely, making it work still depends on getting together.

We spent kickoff week getting to know one another, learning about each other’s companies, and sharing what we hope to get out of the program (see photos here). For us at Parabol, our program goal is to figure out how to take our recent product adoption momentum and turn it into a sustainable business. After the first week, we felt like we’re just where we belong.

Mentor Madness

This week was the first of two weeks of Techstars “Mentor Madness.” By the end of the day today, we will have spoken to 30 potential mentors in 4 days. All the meetings are remote video calls. Because Techstars doesn’t have to constrain its mentor pool to a local geography, we’re getting access to the folks best able to advise us or business.

Techstars Class 158

Follow along here to learn about our experience in the third class of Techstars Anywhere, and how it helps shape our business over the coming months. And make sure to check out the rest of the 2019 Anywhere companies:

www.bloominous.com / @Bloominous

www.civiceagle.com

www.echoar.xyz

www.ienrichher.com / @iEnrichHER

www.eventslocker.com / @eventslocker

www.gamefuly.com / @gamefuly

www.quickcarl.com

www.speedwellandyarrow.com

www.summed.co / @hellosummed

Metrics

Top-of-funnel activity was down slightly over last week. However, we made significant gains on the search keywords we targeted late last year — moving from page 3 to page 2 (come on page 1; we’re almost there!)

The adoption funnel continues to looks strong. While the number of active teams this week dipped slightly from 130 to 111, we hit a new all-time high of 1,182 MAU.

This week we…

…shipped v3.4.0 to production. See last week’s Friday Ship for its contents. Originally we had planned on shipping the release last week, but held off when we found a regression (yay for integration testing!).

…met with over 30 potential mentors in Techstars. Thank you 🙏to everyone we met for your time and generosity.

…drafted a new #longread for SEO. Next week, we’ll post the second article in a three-part series on running effective retrospectives.

…wrapped up development Sprint 25. We hit our sprint goals of fixing high priority bugs, reducing tech debt, and improving our automatic bug report capturning.

…shipped our 2019Q4 investor update.

Next week we’ll…

…plan and kick off development Sprint 26.

…meet with 30+ more Techstars mentors.