Beta Boom

Beta Boom develops promising founders like sports academies develop elite athletes.

Beta Boom is a startup academy and venture fund focused on helping diverse founders of software startups build a strong foundation, grow their startup, and raise funding with daily coaching from product, marketing, and fundraising experts.

Women's Academy 2020 ❯

6 Months of Daily Coaching from Expert Coaches

Founders that are accepted to Beta Boom’s startup academy receive daily coaching from product and marketing experts. Our experts not only bring startup domain experience, but are also trained coaches.

On average, founders spend close to 200 hours with their coaches over 6 months. That is 8-12X more time than founders get from mentors in an accelerator.

Beta Boom product and marketing coaches guide founders as they execute a customized strategy to find product-market fit. They work hands on as founders develop skills and implement various tactics to build a fundamentally strong high-growth software company.

Beyond immediately improving product-market fit, we also seek to build internal capacity among each team, so they can continue to execute far into the future.

Focus on Product-Market Fit

In the earliest stages of a startup, the key goal is to build a great product and sell it to the right customer. Unfortunately, many promising startups get this wrong and underperform or fail. In fact, 4 of the top 10 reasons why startups fail were related to poor product-market fit.

Beta Boom helps startups hone in on product-market fit by pairing founders with product and marketing experts, who coach them every single day for six months. The goal is to identify the perfect customer, find an effective way to market to them, and deliver a product that is clearly better than anything else they currently have.

Over the course of our 6-month academy, founders take baseline measurements of product-market fit, interview and survey current and prospective customers, hone in on positioning, optimize marketing channels and messaging, and iteratively improve their product.

A Typical Week at Beta Boom

The first few weeks of the academy are focused on setting groundwork for product and marketing experiments. After that, the remaining weeks center around measuring, speaking to customers, running marketing experiments, and optimizing the product.

Everything at Beta Boom happens in weekly sprints that begin on Monday and end on Friday. A typical week looks something like this:

Monday: Group workshops; sprint planning with your coach.

Tuesday-Thursday: Daily check-in with your coach; run marketing experiments and make product enhancements; talk to and survey prospective and current customers; executive coaching sessions.

Friday: Sprint review and retrospective with your coach; group retrospective to share best practices.

Investment and Post-Academy Support

The startup teams that execute most effectively over the course of the program have a chance to receive $150-200K of investment as well as additional hands-on support from our product and marketing experts, who will continue to work with them on a weekly basis.

Other teams will continue on to top accelerators or might raise capital from angel investors or venture capital firms.

All teams that successfully complete the 6-month academy program and are in good standing will receive an agent whose job is to help make connections to investors, mentors, advisors, customers, and strategic partners.

Who we’re looking for

Our startups are chosen from an open application process. Our focus is on for-profit startups that are building a high-growth, software business. Many already have a prototype or product in the market. Above all, we seek to support deeply committed founders that are solving a massive problem.

There are three critical characteristics that we seek out in our teams:

Creativity

We look for teams of entrepreneurs with exceptional imagination that have a product, prototype, and vision of their product that addresses a real, pressing challenge.

Grit

The startup journey is not for the faint of heart. You need incredible grit and cleverness to both weather challenges and find imaginative solutions to overcome them.

Expertise

We want to see that you have extreme market knowledge, direct experience and a reasonable plan for developing a product and building your business.

Got what it takes?

Apply