This week we celebrated an important milestone while we prepare for the road ahead.
In August 2017, we applied to the Founder Institute accelerator in San Francisco. Out of the thousands of applicants only 40 got accepted ... and we were one of them! Millions of butterflies in our stomachs!
But it became immediately clear to us that getting in was the easiest part. FI is known for being one of the toughest Startup accelerator programs in the world. Only if you fully surrender yourself and give it your all will you be able to keep up. Sometimes that means to give up on your original idea and pivot into something new, something better.
Probably one of the many reasons that only 10% of the original cohort makes it to the finish line. The Graduation!
Yoobe went through weekly vetting by expert mentors and FI directors, which drove the development of the platform with enormous speed and focus. Weekly challenges included:
Validation of problem and the idea;
Market and customer research;
Company incorporation;
Establishment of a solid advisory board;
Development of the product form idea to MVP;
Onboarding of strategic team members and development of the platform;
Test runs and Alpha launch with selected, early customers;
Data gathering and early traction.
And finally, we are here, graduated at Founder Institute!
We enjoyed this wonderful opportunity to build and matured the platform, and launched a successful Alpha version.
Something that we learned from all of this:
Never think that you cannot do something just because you are the first to conceptualize or validate your idea. This is the law of innovation. This is the north star of the pathfinders. If it doesn’t exist, it’s because nobody was prepared to go for it. If they don’t use it, it’s because nobody has put it in their hands yet. If they don’t know how it could work, it’s because we haven’t built the prototype yet. Only if you try hard, work hard and go for it will you be certain what will lead to success.
"Every spark of thought we produce in Yoobe can inspire a new idea that can change the way we create and produce things. Never lose the opportunity to tell or express what you think, however stupid it may seem." - Genau Lopes, Founder of Yoobe