One thing that all accelerator programmes seem to have in common is a demo day at the. The Microsoft Ventures Accelerator is no different and we are working towards ours which takes place on 6th December.

I haven’t yet worked out quite why it is called a demo day as there isn’t going to be any time for a demo given that we have a three minute slot.

We started this week with a session with the “Pitch Doctor” who took us through our existing presentation in excruciating detail and it really felt like being back at school with a … Read the rest

Working from your spare room at home can be a lonely existence and having conversations with colleagues on Skype really is no substitute. It also can be a pretty sedentary life as the distance from my bed to the office is probably less than 20 paces. The distance to the kitchen where the biscuits live is slightly more but not so far as to be a distraction. So all in all home working is not good for your health and fitness.

On the other hand being in an office means you get to see great street art such as that … Read the rest

There was only one organised session this week and that was on “old school PR”. Unfortunately I had to attend a sales meeting and so wasn’t able to attend. However, what this did mean was that my diary was much clearer for getting on with the day job.

The stage your business is at when you join an accelerator will determine both how much you get out of it and how much of an impact it will have on your working day. When we joined we had already been in business a year and were making early sales. For us … Read the rest

A busy 7th week was started with an early morning meeting with one of our mentors from Yammer. We met in their offices where the meeting room tables converted to allow you to play table tennis and there was a pop-up sign in reception encouraging people to bring their dogs into work for  dog week, which seems like a recipe for disaster to me. We stuck to the meeting and got some sound advice once again.

From Yammer it was straight to TwiloCon Europe, a full days conference organised by Twilo and pretty impressive it was too. I have been … Read the rest

The observant amongst you will have noticed that weeks four and five are missing. This is because that I have been away on holiday and so haven’t been around to do an update but I am back now and straight back into it.

Of course the accelerator doesn’t stop while I have been away sunning myself so there was some catching up to do along with all the emails and business as usual stuff I would have normally had to do.

Just before I went away we were assigned our mentors. You may remember that early on we had a … Read the rest