Hotbed Accelerate
A free 6 week programme for post pre-seed founders who are looking to raise their seed round.
Have you...
Raised pre-seed or got early revenues?
02
Got a product or beta in the market?
You have a product in the market, or an MVP/proof of concept / beta that's had customers/users interact with it
Got plans to raise seed in 2023?
You're looking to raise again in the next 6-12 months, and are proving out your business model until then.
Hotbed Accelerate is a new 6 week programme designed especially for startups at your stage.
WEEK 1: MANAGING YOUR MONEY
You've got your friends and family, crowd, or pre-seed funding in the bank. How do you prioritise spending, decrease costs, increase your run rate, and report all this to investors?
WEEK 2: THE METRICS THAT MATTER
User acquisition, growth, DAU/MAUs, retention, CAC etc. Now you've got a product in the market and can spend on marketing and user growth, what does 'good' look like to a seed investor, and how can you set yourself up for success?
WEEK 3: PRODUCT ROADMAP & AUTOMATION
How do you prioritise your product development and focus on building what matters? How do you add more depth to your product to deliver more value? Is there a way to automate? What should your product roadmap look like at this point?
WEEK 4: MANAGING YOUR TEAM
How do you prioritise hiring? What is your approach to engaging, onboarding, training new hires? Do you recruit in-house or use agency? What's best practice for bad hires?
WEEK 5: BUILDING OUT CUSTOMER OPS
What is best practice for customer ops? How do you leverage databases for outbound communication? Is it time to create a CRM? What does a good cold email look like? How big should your sales funnel be at this point?
WEEK 6: INVESTOR ENGAGEMENT
How do you start getting inbound interest from investors? What should you communicate to current investors this raise regarding investment/dilution? When do you start building relationships with new investors?
The programme will run virtually (via Zoom), and the time commitment is 3 hours per week, where cohort members will benefit from talks from founders, domain experts and investors. Founders will also be split into industry specific groups, and assigned a mentor. Following the programme, we'll host a private pitch event where founders will have the chance to pitch a room of investors.
Speakers week 1: Managing your money
Seb Wallace
VC Investor at Triple Point, Co-Founder at Further
Investor
Vineta Bajaj
CFO, Accountant & Angel. Former Finance Director, Ocado
Domain Expert
Andres Korin
Co-founder & CFO at Debite
Knowledgable Founder
Speakers week 2: The metrics that matter
Dan Bowyer
Founder and Investor, Superseed VC
Anthony Rose
Founder and CEO, SeedLegals
Rory Sadler
CEO, trumpet
Speakers week 3: Product prioritisation
Karolina Kukielka
Investor, InReach Ventures
John Radford
Founder Borne & Product Manager
Ashutosh Bhat
Founder, Pillar, ex-Revolut
Speakers week 4: Managing your team
Greta Anderson
Principle, Balderton Capital
Mik Strøyberg
Co-founder Humani | Ex Founder, Good Monday (acq. DEAS)| & Ex Founder, Lemonsqueeze (acq. Knotel)
Kenny Ewan
Founder, WeFarm
Speakers week 5: Building out customer ops
Chris Smith
Managing Partner, Playfair Capital
Jeremy Ambrose
VC/Startup Partnerships, Zendesk
TBC
TBC
Speakers week 6: Investor outreach
Tayga Baltacioglu
Founder, Debite & Angel investor
Flavia Richardson
Investor, Velocity Juice
Sam Marchant
Investor, Hambro Perks
Join today
Key dates and schedule
Session schedule
Mondays @2pm & 3PM
Wednesdays @2pm
17 FEB
REGISTRATION CLOSE
20 FEB
PROGRAMME STARTS
5 APRIL
FINAL SESSION
LATE APRIL
INVESTOR PITCHES
Cost: Free! ... but read on.
Our programmes are free and we take no equity, as it is ESSENTIAL to us that we have the best startups join our community, not just the startups who can afford it.
Our structure is different. We are making arrangements to support founders financially, so we secure the rights to invest in the startups who go through our programmes via a Warrant. Founders are required to offer us an equity warrant to give Hotbed the right (but not the obligation) to subscribe in cash for shares at the same time you obtain investment in any future round, on the terms set out below.
Our terms are simple, and you'll receive the full Warrant and terms are available here. You'll receive a full copy (via our brilliant partners at SeedLegals) which needs to be signed prior to the start of the programme.
For non-discounted rounds (like a traditional priced-round), we take a 10% discount, and we can invest up to £100k. **
*This is a discount to the subscription price paid by your investors in a particular investment round.
**No investment is guaranteed.
(The equity warrant shall apply for a period of 24 months commencing from the Hotbed Accelerate programme end date.)
About Hotbed
2,500+
Startups supported
6
Previous programmes
9.6
NPS
Our partners
Our partners make our programmes possible! They are the best of the best, and we're so fortunate to work with them.
Why we <3 SeedLegals: Founders in our community love SeedLegals for their knowledgable customer service team who are on-call even on the weekends. Most importantly, everything is incredibly affordable (perfect for early stage startups)!
Amazing for: Legal support of funding rounds, securing you SEIS/EIS advanced assurance, key employee documents, share option schemes, and much, much more...
Why we <3 Zendesk: Zendesk offers a solution to customer ops. As we start and scale our businesses, customer engagement and customer service is more important than ever. With Zendesk for Startups, you can build customer ops using their very generous startup offer, and keep your customers happy and engaged.
Amazing for: Customer ops, building out customer success/service
Why we <3 Debite: Debite offers a superpowered corporate card with built-in instalments providing founders with more flexible access to cash to fuel your growth. Need to pay for equipment, marketing or software? Use Debite to pay upfront, with flexible repayment terms to meet the needs of founders.
We love getting cashback on our purchases, and one founder in our community described his Debite card as "oxygen for [his] business!"
Amazing for: Managing cashflow, buying your team laptops without draining your bank account & getting cashback!
"Of all the companies, VC's, advisors and mentors we have worked with on our journey growing our startup, [this] has been the most useful, inspirational, educational and provided the most relevant support. This is the most important community we've been privileged enough to be a part of!"
– Tersha Willis CEO, terrible*
