The LaunchBox Digital Experience

I really wanted to get around to writing a blog post about the LaunchBox Digital experience. I think that this experience applies to any of the many incubators popping up around the country and world, such as YCombinator, TechStars, DreamIt Ventures, and SeedCamp. The biggest benefits of these incubators is three-fold: advice, connections, and money. For every applicant, these may be important in a different order, but they're probably the main benefit for anyone joining the program. I'll just go down the list of advice, connections, and money.

Advice

Advice is important in any of the incubator programs. They usually have great, proven people behind them that know how to guide anyone through product development. For all intents and purposes, product development is what 90% of the summer is about. You need to get behind the vision and start executing on what the product should look like.

With LaunchBox Digital, we had a decent idea to begin with, but we got tons of ideas on how to tweak our present idea to be competitive and different. From those first few meetings, we began to change direction on our product vision and prototyped rapidly to test out the concepts. Given that our advisors had a clear grasp of the competitive landscape, we worked together to shape the vision.

Of course, your advisors or anyone else isn't God. They don't have all the answers. It's hard enough to launch a product of any kind, let alone get it right within the context of the problem you're trying to solve and have people use it.

Connections

If you track the LaunchBox Digital blog, we had lots of speakers over the summer. These talks were not only insightful, but provided some confidence that this can be done. These talks really did mean that we could move ahead, and launch a product successfully by the end of the summer. In most cases around DC, whenever we said that we were apart of LaunchBox, it gave us an air credibility that we were doing something legitimate. We got to meet with certain people, such as investors, startup founders, bloggers, and consultants, simply because we were apart of LaunchBox. "We won't waste your time, and we've been vetted" was the message that being part of an incubator sends.

Money

Once again, if you're apart of an incubator, your primary goal is probably to look for further investment money. Since you've already been vetted by seed or angel investors, then your likelihood for getting further investment money increases. Angel investors and institutional investors take comfort in the fact that someone else has taken the first step in investing in you. In most cases, the first check that a startup gets is the hardest.

In the case of LaunchBox Digital, much of the angel investment infrastructure is made up of the ex-AOL executives. Since we already have some connections into that community from the founders behind LaunchBox Digital, then some trust has already been built.

I hope that this blog post gives some insight into a web application business incubator. Let me know if you have any questions below.

What's this blog about?