Magic Sauce
So, you’re probably wondering why we’re giving away free stuff and why we’re asking people to join a waiting list to get access to an online accelerator.
Our journey began a few years back as the only tech accelerator in the East of England. In that time we’ve been selective over the companies we’ve wanted to help, and the survival rate of those we’ve helped is fantastic at roughly 80%.
We focused on quality over quantity in that time, and we’ve made our mistakes. We’ve either tried to help companies that didn’t actually want or need investment, we’ve tried to help companies and we’ve discovered that the founder isn’t fully focused on the platform they’ve approached us to help with, and above all, there’s been an honest feedback loop between us and our startups.
We’ve always struggled though with the desire to reach more people in more recent times as we’ve become better at what we do. We’ve found that we don’t need people around us from 9-5 to get stuff done (founders need to focus on getting startup stuff done like meeting the people who’ll build the product, buy the product and invest in the product for example).
The CV19 pandemic meant we HAD to work differently because we were equity dependent, sponsors dried up (along with their money) and the accelerator wasn’t reaching enough people to help them on their journey. As much as that meant we had necessity to change how we worked, it also meant an opportunity to fulfil other aspects of our vision.
We wanted to democratise tech startup acceleration and we noticed the following on our journey:-
1. People who weren’t white, middle-aged men struggled to either join an accelerator or get invested
2. There were plenty of deck aggregation sites out there who’d feed your deck to waiting investors, but investors found quality lacking in favour of quantity
3. There was a lack of trust from front to back in the startup to investor journey and we wanted to change that through early definition of the ambition or ability to scale of a startup to help filter
4. The rise of ‘spin-off’ businesses meant that there was an underserved market of people who wanted to accelerate outside of 9-5 hours
5. We’ve talked to plenty of founders who’d prefer to pay cash for services rather than equity
6. We wanted to join a cap table from our own choice (and money reserves once built) as we think that would lend credibility as a lead investor
7. We wanted to focus on tech platform businesses (SaaS/PaaS) as that’s what we’re best at, particularly B2B
8. Nobody wants to help companies with an idea and no money, so we wanted to provide a journey to help them that started with free stuff and graduated to our acceleration programme that’s designed to help people once they have a proof of concept and then get them to work through their strategy and investment proposition. Once that’s ready, they’ll get that deck in front of investors who want to see the type of thing they’re looking to scale.
9. We wanted to give something back, so we designed a way to get investors involved early in deck feedback and give something to charity as a result.
10. We wanted to offer expert advice from people who’ve been there and done it as part of the journey, and build a community so we can create our own online ecosystem of partners, founders and investors to share stories and tips.
Hence Magic Sauce was born in lockdown, and it’s worked so far (kinda virtual).
The next step on the journey is our own investment round to build and scale a platform that can allow people to accelerate their startup, discover its’ potential (or not) and get some key strategies nailed that will help them get to the next point in their journey. We want the platform up and running in the New Year, so get moving on that proof of concept and we’ll see you on the waiting list.
You can get in touch with Magic Sauce here
