Designing an Accelerator for Non-technical Founders
This chapter is a part of the book “How to Build University Start-up Ecosystems: Five Information Patterns for Success.”
Traditionally start-up accelerators are created with the assumption that a founder has a technical product and needs help with marketing, sales, and securing seed investment. This assumption makes it hard for non-technical founders to succeed because the infrastructure around them is not set up for their needs. Community Information Designers (CIDs) and Accelerator Managers can play an important within their entrepreneurship ecosystems to build accelerators that meet the needs of non-technical founders.
An accelerator set up for non-technical founders would have two key elements that are different from standard accelerators. They would have a greater emphasis on how to slowly translate non-tech into a technical product, and they would provide guidance for founders on when and how to work with outside contractors.
How to Scale Non-technical Work
Non-technical founders that come into an accelerator should already have used the Startup Loop diagram to find a process that has gained them repeat customers. Their goal in the accelerator is to make this process more efficient so they can expand the number of customers they serve.
For each of the four categories in the Start-up Loop diagram — -Marketing, Sales, Process, and Customer Retention — non-technical founders should know how much time and money they spend on each aspect of their current process. Each week in the accelerator the goal is to make their processes more efficient within each category.
Below is a chart called the “Energy Efficiency Table” that shows a rough estimation of the time, money, and expertise it takes for a person to implement a given tool. This table will be different for each person, but it is a useful exercise for founders to create their own chart in order to understand both what actions are available to them, but also the trade offs that come with each tool.
Some advice for founders as they use this Energy Efficiency diagram to make their processes more efficient:
- For each category, only do one change at a time. Ex. If you are marketing using Linkedin and want to both add marketing on Facebook, and start a weekly email, do not do both changes at once. When you make too many changes at once, it is hard to know which elements created which change, and it becomes unclear which channel is working best.
- Do not do high time/money/expertise options before trying low time/money/expertise options. The reason for this is because of energy conservation. Each person has a set amount of time and money they can devote to build their companies. The founder might know this number explicitly or unconsciously. Choosing low time and money options before high-energy options is the most effective way to conserve the founder’s energy while discovering product-market fit.
- Choose options in line with your customer base. If you are selling a SaaS platform to other businesses, Google Ads might make more sense than Tik-Tok reels. When a founder needs to decide on two equally time intensive tools, a deep understanding of what their customer is comfortable with can generally help point them in the right direction.
In an accelerator focused on non-technical founders, Accelerator Managers should sit down with founders each week to understand what methods they are testing out and how their metrics of user growth and revenue have changed week to week. These non-technical accelerator programs are likely to be far more tactical than traditional accelerator programs.
Connection over Re-creation
Non-technical founders should go as long as possible connecting existing solutions together instead of building their own from scratch.
For landing pages and basic websites, Webflow offers a great starting point. For founders that only need to host blog-posts or newsletters on their website, they might not need to build out anything further.
For founders who might need a check-out flow for purchases, or that want to utilize user generated content or large database sets, they would need to begin to dive into more technical work. To add on more complex databases to Webflow websites, Zapier or Xano offer great options. For creating web stores (such as selling clothes, shoes, food, etc.) Shopify is the current leader in the space, and for setting up monthly subscriptions there is Stripe. All of these platforms can be connected to Webflow, and while they take some expertise, it is still possible for founders that are non-technical to learn and set up. ChatGPT and other models like it can be a huge help for step-by-step guidance through the set-up process.
Working with Contractors
There might come a time when non-technical founders find that they need to do something that pre-built platforms services truly do not enable. In this case, non-technical founders will need to make the leap over to technical development.
The smallest leap is to use low-code or no-code platforms such as Bubble or Flutter.io. Each of these platforms takes around 6–12 months for a non-technical founder to become proficient in. A low code minimum viable product developed on these platforms can cost anywhere from ten to forty thousand dollars.
If non-technical founders want to develop a fintech, blockchain, AI, or other computationally intensive product they will likely need custom built software. AI can help, but they will still likely need to pay one or two engineer’s salaries for several months. This can cost anywhere from twenty five to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Because of the time and monetary investment, before working with contractors non-technical founders should have wireframes and a prototype that they have developed in Figma that has been tested with customers, not family or friends. If this prototype is more than 10–12 screens, it is too long for an initial MVP. This is the idea of having a clear scope for their work. A clear scope helps non-technical founders understand what they absolutely need from a project, and also lays a clear foundation between founder and contractor.
Non-technical founders should also structure any form of engagement in terms of work completed, not time spent in development. Structuring agreements on an hourly basis creates too strong of an incentive for the contractor to take a long time and for the founder to keep adding features.
While non-technical founders do not need to become technical, before taking on a contractor they should have enough understanding of the platform they will use to know how long each feature should take to build. It is worth it to spend several weeks taking a coding class to better be able to speak with contractors. Many conflicts between contractor and founder are from misalignments in understanding feature complexity. Non-technical founders who understand the pros and cons of the software they choose and approximately how long it should take to build a feature will be better equipped to both hire higher quality contractors, and to get the best work from them.
Structural Assistance Creates Structural Success
There are other ways that non-technical founders need guidance through product development, from how to hand over work to how to set up meeting check-ins. While this chapter cannot encompass all of the components of a successful accelerator for non-technical founders, its goal is to push for the idea that this infrastructure should exist. There are many founders that get to the point of having repeatable revenue generation, but with no understanding of how to scale or add greater efficiency to their processes they get stuck. Building the infrastructure that can help these non-technical founders slowly scale up can go a long way to help them past this drop off point and add to the diversity of successful companies that make it through a university’s entrepreneurship pipeline.
