HyperDrive Cohort 3

I’m very excited to announce that AvidTap is in HyperDrive accelerator’s 3rd cohort with a demo day set for Oct 18 and another one in Toronto. See the Communitech press release.

The Path to HyperDrive

When Kaz, Geoff and I started the company HyperDrive was the first accelerator that we looked into. However, we weren’t accepted back then when we haven’t had real traction yet. We also applied to other accelerators and also did not get an offer. I even blogged about the rejections.

The rejections didn’t stop us. We kept at it to finally launch our product in stores and continued to iterate. Once we felt the product was ready, we brought on our VP of Sales and hired a small sales team. We’ve been expanding AvidTap’s reach ever since.

Our pitch to HyperDrive the 2nd time is much better than our initial one. We have 40+ stores using our product and some users tapping in every single day. We brought in experienced people in sales who have 30+ years of experience. Our product also got much better and supports all phones without requiring people to carry anything extra.

Lots More Learning

It’s been less than a week and we already had lots of learning. Frank Erschen is our pitch coach and this week he held an initial orientation with all the cohort 3 companies. Based on the things he said I can already see where in our deck things can improve.

Furthermore, we got valuable lessons from previous cohort. We heard about the great use of customer testimony, which we’re looking into recording. We also heard about the JumpStart program, but too bad we already got the VentureStart funding ourselves so we don’t qualify for JumpStart.

Aside from learning from the accelerator program, I’m also learning a whole lot from our VP of Sales. When somebody is so good at what he does you can’t help but admire the person. I have a totally different view of sales people now.

Challenges Ahead

There are lots more challenges ahead. Bring it on!