Founders in the Furnace/Fender/Finance Institute accelerator describe how mentorship and community pushed them from corporate thinking to customer-first validation. One pivoted a hotel-software product to focus on revenue-generating features. Participants credit the program with rapid access to local angels and practical advice that changed their approach to building startups.
Well, it's certainly changed my outlook on how to do a startup. Coming from a big business, you look at things very differently, evaluate things, try things differently. This just completely simplifies the whole process of how you really test things and validate things. So it's made me a lot more proactive in what I'm trying to do.
It's changed my perspective actually to the launching of a business. I understood that now I need to go and ask customers first, validate that actually I'm solving a real problem, that I know that the solution that I'm building is going to satisfy the needs and the problems of the consumers.
I suppose we fortunately started, we were looking at a family hotel's problem and specific to that, and we're hoping that that would be similar across the industry, but after put in the Finance Institute feedback from mentors and through our customer validation, which was heavily pushed by the Finance Institute as well, it kind of allowed us to pivot and concentrate more on what was the biggest value add for the hotelier, which is sales and increasing their revenue. And we've changed our software and our plan towards that to ensure that we're giving the hotels the biggest bang for their buck.
Yeah, so I think a phenomenal aspect of the Going through the program is that it very quickly gets you sight of and knowledge of a lot of the angel ecosystem in a city that you go into because a lot of the mentors are angels themselves. So having access and winning access to the people who are not afraid of giving you home truths about your your great idea, your baby. It's very hard to get it any other way.
Well, I think, I suppose, one of the good things about the Fender Institute is it's not as formal as a lot of kind of interactions you'd have with companies that are on a later stage, so it's been able to be that sounding board for a few of the founders, and kind of starting their business and bouncing ideas off us, and being able to kind of give them a steer early on. To a legal problem that may ultimately come to stop their idea later on and help them tailor what they want to do to avoid a problem.
Of course, all the mentors are amazing people with great experience, with great stories. And of course, all the founders that are in the program, and that's the bit that definitely changed my life, and I hope to stay in touch with all of them.
Kind of look inside yourself and kind of ask, what do you want out of this life? It sounds pretty deep, but in fact, like, it's not for everyone, and that's the honest truth. You can be completely happy working an existing job for an employer, 9 to 5, 25, and you've got to know yourself best. If you've got this itch of something like, you know what, I wanna, I feel like I can do something, I can create something, I wanna build something bigger than myself, then I guess you owe it to yourself to at least explore the option.
Realize that everything can be learnt, and with hard work and execution, you can acquire many things and many skills around building a business.
So yeah, if you have an idea, look up the Furnace Institute and it'll help you sort of evolve it and validate it.
