This is a guest post by Caitlin Reimers Brumme, Managing Director of MassChallenge Boston. Prior to MassChallenge, Caitlin led the Impact Collaboratory at the Harvard Business School, a multi-faceted effort to develop world class academic leadership on the topic of “Investing in the 21st Century” including sustainable, ESG and impact investing. Caitlin holds an MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar, and a B.A. with honors from The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Accelerating a startup is like pouring rocket fuel into the tank of some crazy, untested contraption. If the engine is strong and built for speed, there’s potential for an explosive reaction.

It’s the job of accelerators to make sure the company they’re funding and mentoring will create the right kind of explosion. Because funding can hurt a company, and mentoring can go to waste if the foundations of a startup aren’t solid.

That’s why some select accelerator success stories like Stripe, Mopub, and SendGrid have graduated and gone on to raise record amounts, go public in record time, or be acquired for vast sums of money.

It’s also the reason why some never make it.

Accelerators are hyper-competitive because they’re looking for startups that have a lot of the scaling infrastructure or potential already in place. With the funding, mentoring, and connections they provide, a startup with a great idea and MVP can break through from obscurity and see headline-grabbing success in a matter of months.

But exactly how likely is it that your startup will get accepted into an accelerator? What are the processes that underpin accelerator programs, and the resources these organizations offer startups that makes it possible to scale so rapidly?

In this article, we take a look at startup acceleration by the numbers, starting with a brief note on what an accelerator actually is.

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I read an interesting post the other day by Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy about how he has been training his son to have a “growth­ mindset”.

Here is a quote from the post:

Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones.

What this means is that our intelligence is not fixed, and the best way that we can grow our intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail.

However, not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not, that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset, however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity and effort could change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the latter group more actively pushing themselves and growing intellectually.

In short someone with a growth mindset will embrace challenges and be willing to fail multiple times before reaching their goal, whereas someone with a fixed mindset will not even try.

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In my last post for Process Street (and the first after being hired as a full-time content writer!) I took a look at the Duct Tape Marketing System and published the Duct Tape Marketing System review previously, but today I’m bringing you the top five hacks from this innovative course by small business expert John Jantsch. These are points John made that resonated with me as a unique take on something that seems obsolete or a new angle on something too well-established to be changed.

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There are many things that Process Street, our process management platform, can be used for including onboarding new clients or launching a website. But an interesting use case that has cropped up recently is using Process Street for managing podcast releases.

Many podcast publishers run a checklist to help them manage the recording, publishing and promoting of each podcast episode. Checklists are a great tool to make sure things get done right, and since Process Street is the ultimate recurring checklist software, it only makes sense that podcasters would gravitate towards our platform.

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The Currency of the Internet

Pretty much everything is free on the internet.

One of the reasons you like it so much is because you can get a ton of value for just the price of your monthly contract. With millions of books, videos, podcasts, services and apps around for free, it’s no wonder people are hesitant to part with their money without trust and priming first.

So how can people built sustainable businesses by giving away so much good stuff for free?

Well, there are generally two ways.

1. They sell ads, you probably know this model well if you have ever used Google or Facebook.
2. They capture leads with the hope to sell you something in the future.

In this post, we will be focusing on the latter: Lead generation.

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Note: This is a review of the Duct Tape Marketing System course and coaching program. If you are interested in a review of the book, check out the Amazon reviews here.

BONUS FREE STUFF – If you’re considering buying the Duct Tape Marketing System make sure to check out our exclusive bonus valued at $1,500 just for using this link. You can find all the details at the bottom of this post.

Why I’m writing this review

Recently I was hired by Vinay as the new content creator for Process Street. With a history of ghost-writing product descriptions and other mundane copy I was excited to get underway with something more personal and varied. Unlike in the past, this job needs me to research topics I don’t know much about. I hadn’t heard of more than two big marketing blogs and was lost for words when asked my opinions about them.

It’s scary having to talk about business and marketing when you’re a music technology graduate, but my first checklist was, coincidentally, relevant to my skills! Intentionally or not, my next project involved writing about a marketing course that is applicable to plenty of different people, teaching the basic theory of what seems to be a science of holding attention spans that have shrunk down massively since the introduction of all this easy-to-read content on the internet. Writing this review (and another upcoming post) gave me my first freedom to write as myself and expanded my marketing knowledge hugely.

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Organizations, including businesses, do not exist in a vacuum. Every organization is embedded in a wider web of societal, political, and environmental systems, that spans from smaller local networks to expansive and complex global systems.

As IAG puts it:

“Sustainability is neither a program nor an initiative, it’s considered simply good management.”

This statement recognizes the link between an organization and the social, environmental and economic wellbeing of the communities in which they operate.

An organization’s relationship to the society and wider environment in which they exist and operate is a key factor in their ability to succeed and thrive. It can also be an insight into their general performance.

ISO 26000 is a set of guiding principles for businesses and organizations to use to steer them in a more socially responsible direction.

In order to better contribute to the health and welfare of their supporting societies and environments, businesses must enforce principles of ethical and transparent behaviour.

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It’s no secret that documenting and analyzing your business processes is vital to creating a healthy business.

Yet, despite the benefits of bpm software and business process mapping being readily talked about, value stream mapping doesn’t get the same share of attention.

This is a mistake.

Value stream mapping is just as, if not more, important to reducing waste and increasing your business’ efficiency than standard process mapping.

That’s why I’ll be showing you how to make a value stream map from start to finish, with no wasted time and no needlessly confusing terms.

Let’s go.

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SWOT: Whether or not the acronym conjures images of riot gear and armored vehicles for you, we are of course talking about a business methodology for evaluating the internal and external factors governing the performance of your business.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. A SWOT analysis is a way of evaluating a part of (or even a whole) business, based on the criteria of each of the words in the acronym.

If you just want to dive right in and skip the details, here’s the template, as promised:

When you actually run it, conditional logic will show only the tasks relevant to you, to save you a whole lot of manual work and messing around in the long run.

If you’re interested in learning how to use the template, plus some best practice SWOT principles, real-world use cases and some post-SWOT advice, read on.

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If you have a problem, it’s in your best interest to ensure that trying to solve that problem doesn’t end up causing more problems. This is a good way to think about low-code development platforms.

Each business has its own set of tools for solving problems and getting things done, and for the most part, these problems can be solved by existing commercial apps.

But of course, there are certain needs that off-the-shelf solutions cannot meet, and for these needs a business could approach the problem a few different ways.

If a proprietary tool doesn’t exist, then the best option may be for the business to try and build a solution themselves. This is often done from scratch, and it’s called software development.

That’s fine, except it costs a lot of money, takes a long time, and is difficult to make changes once things are in motion. It also means everything gets more complex, because it’s not just the development team you’re bringing onboard, but designers, testers, data analysts and many others as well.

The simple truth is that it takes a small village to develop good software with conventional methods.

However, there are tools that are designed to give businesses the freedom to build their own solutions, without all of the excess baggage.

These tools are known as low-code development platforms.

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