Hotbed Accelerate

A free 6 week programme for post pre-seed founders who are looking to raise their seed round.

Have you...


01

Raised pre-seed or got early revenues?

You've raised friends and family money, or a pre-seed round of at least £75k, or have early revenue equating to that number


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


03

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 AWS: The AWS team gets the challenges that come with building a startup and go the extra mile to offer support through their own programmes and introductions.

Amazing for: Building, iterating and scaling your product.

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.. Learn 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

Learn more ->

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! Learn more ->

"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*

The Hotbed team

Perdie Alder

Co-founder & CCO

Find me on Twitter →

M Coyle

Co-founder & CEO

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Join today