How to get accepted to a Kiuas program 2022
During the past three years, over 1000 startups have applied to Kiuas programs, but only a fraction of those startups have made it through. Reflecting back on the applications, we recognized a few common themes that have affected the startups’ chances of getting accepted to first the interviews and eventually to the program itself. This year, however, Kiuas Accelerator goes global and at the same time is more focused on creating impact to the whole world in a positive way. We want to make a change.
Getting into a Kiuas program is not rocket science: we assess the most fundamental factors in terms of your product and team, as well as the validation you've received from potential customers. We are looking for pre-seed to seed-stage companies that are eager to scale and go international. As the world's future is in our (everyone's) hands, we want to make sure the impact and legacy we leave are impactful and significant.
Your startup should solve a problem, and you should be able to understand and state the problem well. Solving a problem that you or your co-founders have encountered in your own lives, instead of solving a problem for someone else, is a bonus.
We want to create a better world by helping startups, and we prioritize startups that solve bigger and deeper problems. In addition to stating the problem, point out clearly, what is the potential impact of solving it.
Optimally, you should have put some effort to also validate whether the problem (or the solution, depending on your stage) you’ve settled on is something that has demand and is thus worth pursuing. Preferably, you should already have your first paying customers and a functioning product that can be presented to partners and/or investors.
Your founding team (or you, in the case of a solo-founder) should have the needed capabilities to build your own product, test it, iterate it, receive valuable feedback and then make the needed changes based on your findings. In most cases, this means that the team consists of at least one technical person. Having people with domain expertise in the founding team is great, but we are equally excited about accepting startups founded by students.
Even though you’re still early on your journey, there should exist a high-level plan for what you will be spending your precious time on – at least during the next years. Having achieved a lot in a short amount of time (and with little resources) is always impressive, as is the ability to take risks and take the next steps towards scaling and internationalization, in case you haven’t done that yet.
Kiuas is expanding, and we are happy to offer our programs to not only Finnish teams, but to any startup in the world.
We know that your startup is not yet perfect, so don’t hesitate to be open about the things you’re still missing and need to work on. More importantly, you don’t have to make yourself look better or optimize on the same metrics as you maybe would with investors.
Our goal with you is not to make a billion-dollar exit – we are much more excited about selecting teams with great potential and offering them an optimal environment and tools to build their startup.
The majority of the rejections we have had to make during the past couple of years have been due to the following reasons – tackle these and you will be much better off!
Although the questions are purposefully broad to leave room for your own insights, you should still answer them in a structured manner. You would be surprised to see how many applicants have answered the problem question “What problem is your startup solving?” with a description of their solution “We are building a…”! You should also know that we never accept such applying teams to our programs.
So, you’ve worked on your startup for 4 years and it’s yet to be launched? In that case, we’d love to hear what makes the current timing different from the past and how your progress will look like going forward.
Quite often applicants fail in expressing any problem that their startup is solving, or haven’t done proper validation to determine whether the problem truly exists. Also, we are looking for problems that are meaningful (optimizing ads is not what we are looking for).
P.S. having validated the problem with your mom is not enough.
As mentioned, the founding team should be equipped with skills to bring a product into the market. If your solution is a mobile app, your founding team should be able to build a mobile app. Outsourcing development is a no-go – here’s why.
At Kiuas Accelerator we want you to be fully dedicated to your startup by now. If raising external funding is an ultimate requirement for you to jump full-time on your startup, you are likely to run into a chicken-and-egg problem while fundraising. You should be able to tolerate risks since that’s what startups are fundamentally about.
Kiuas Accelerator is all about getting expert advice from coaches (who are most likely more experienced entrepreneurs than you), so entering a quarrel with one of our coaches in the interview phase is not a great start for the program!
Founders apply to Kiuas for various reasons: some for support & community, whereas some more for tools & other perks – and that’s fine. However, what’s not fine is relying too much on Kiuas to determine your success. We’ve interviewed founders who say that their whole startup is dependent on whether they get into the program or not – and that’s not really what the role of Kiuas should be. Not being able to state your motivation to join the program is equally bad.
Applications to Kiuas Accelerator are open until the 28th of January – Apply here!
