Mar 6, 2021

The Beginning of Acapella - Join us in Building the Karma Economy!

By Shashikiran Rao • Issue #1 • View online

Hi There,

Welcome to the journey of Acapella! This is the first of many check-ins that will come to your inbox every Saturday, updating you about our lessons and milestones on our way to building something very close to our hearts.

If you haven’t subscribed to this newsletter, please do so here.

What's Acapella?

At Acapella, we believe that path-breaking ideas can originate from anywhere in the world, with the right ecosystem to support them.
This ecosystem will be led by Venture Catalysts (Read: the startup OGs) like serial entrepreneurs, angels, EIRs, exit founders, mentors, advisors, and micro-funds.
As the world moves towards deinstitutionalization, we want to enable Venture Catalysts by providing them a tool to launch cohort-based micro-accelerators (virtual/in-person) for people with ideas to discover them easily in one place.

In fewer words, what Substack did for writers, we want to do for Venture Catalysts.

What's that about a Karma Economy?

Before we jump into that, you probably need to know a little backstory -

In order to sync-up as a team and get to understand each other’s perspectives, we ended up in Goa for a week! A quaint villa was turned into a Hacker House where we reached a lot of important realizations, highs, and lows - all as a team and as individuals.

What happened in Goa?

In the spirit of building in public, what happened in Goa, will not stay there. Here’s what we did -

Day 1

We engaged in an interesting activity called ‘Linear Ideation.’
We wrote our individual edges and beliefs and then heard each others to find out if they were complementary or could be bucketed in similar categories.

While sitting down to collate our beliefs, we had one of those very intense brainstorming sessions which ran for over three hours.

Isn’t that what us startup folks live for? ;)

This exercise also made us coin ‘Karma Economy’ - just like Patreon kickstarted the Passion Economy for hobbies and OnlyFans kickstarted the Creator Economy for Gen-Z, this one’s for Venture Building.

The reason why we love these two words so much is because they perfectly capture our philosophy. Venture Catalysts have always been an under-utilized resource, who have been giving-back without much in return. We simply enable them to monetize their venture building expertise.

Day 2

The next day was for testing our Hunch.

We started rapid validation by contacting every Venture Catalyst we knew of.
The ask was simple - ‘If we invite you to start your own micro-accelerator, would you start one?’

We got more than 50 ‘YES’ in two hours! :D

Days 3 and 4

We spent the next two days working on our pitch deck.

Lots of processes were streamlined, and we gained more clarity about what we were set out to do.
Of course, lots of WOAHs were thrown around and lots of hopes were built.

You can view our prototype and pitch deck here.

A sneaky picture from our ideation on Thursday.

Day 5

We built roadmaps for Strategy, Product and Marketing - falling under each of our strengths as a team.

The last two days, of course, were for exploring Goa and spending time together as a team.

Okay, what's next?

The journey is long, but fresh and exciting!

Progress

This week entailed a lot of research, strategy and getting back in the groove.
Product validation from the ecosystem OGs are in full-swing, and we are constantly identifying the right micro-accelerators to reach out to and talk with.

Challenges

We’re looking for deeper insights in the accelerator playbook space.
We are also seeking seed-funding to kickstart our venture. Here’s the pitch deck if you’re interested or know someone who is :)

Question for you...

What is an alternate word for Venture Catalysts?

You can simply reply to this email :)

That's it, Folks!

Acapella

@JoinAcapella

We believe that the next generation of founders will be Internet-first and path-breaking ideas will come from anywhere in the world.

If you support this hunch, hop along on the journey of Acapella.

Join the Micro-movement! 🚀

7:32 PM - 25 Feb 2021

If you see the magic as well, click here to subscribe to future newsletters, and share them with your friends/colleagues.

You may also get in touch with us by writing to shashi@acapella.team and paul@acapella.team.

We promise, the best is yet to come ;)

Until next week,

Team Acapella.