CUNY Startups Accelerator
Our experience with working with the mentorship program offered by the City University of New York.
What CUNY Accelerator Offers
CUNY Startup aims to give its current and alumnus students the tools to achieve their entrepreneurship goals by offering various resources to support that journey. Launched in 2014, the accelerator is located in Baruch College and is connected with 25 CUNY Colleges spread across the five boroughs of New York City. They provide mentors, tools, and support in funding, ideation, legal, marketing, website development, project management, public profiles, sales, team building, and access to their sponsors and partners.
Our Progress While at the Accelerator
We applied to the CUNY Startup Accelerator with our startup idea, Picsplore Social. At the time, we had a very rough business plan, a mediocre pitch deck, and an MVP that was only a few weeks away. Zachary, a cofounder and alumni of Baruch University, allowed us to apply to the program.
During our time at the accelerator, we;
Updated, evolved, and practiced our Pitch Deck.
Refined our business plan.
Released our MVP.
We sourced our first users and created a feedback loop, which allowed us to prioritize further bug and feature updates.
We received survey feedback and user feedback that impacts us today.
Connected with other startup founders and experts in the startup and New York event communities.
Accessed legal advice to help us better understand how to protect ourselves and be ready for investors.
Our mentors were supportive and realistic about our ideas and what lay ahead—guiding us on how and when to survey an audience, user acquisition, and pivot when we experience failure. The program structure included lessons in a class format, time with experts, and then meetings directly with our mentors. This allowed us to learn, practice, and apply these lessons to our project. Resources that we received during this time accelerated our rate of iteration and helped us to understand our goals, our business, and how to better operate when everything is going to shit.
I would recommend attending the accelerator, especially if you're like us: have no idea what you're doing, an interest in learning and doing whatever it takes to succeed, an understanding that no job is above you, even if it does hurt your ego, and are ignorant enough to think that with enough effort, you have a fighting chance to find success.
Support After
To this day, we continue to contact Remy Arteaga, the Executive Director of the Accelerator. He has taken the time and made a great effort to help us as we inch closer to some form of success.
At the accelerator don’t expect funding or a direct roadmap to success, for that you should instead be blowing your money in the lottery. Instead, the accelerator will help you start to think in a startup mindset, dealing with everything failing and falling apart, learning to better articulate yourself and your idea as well as the beginnings of your network in NYC’s startup community.
Where are we at?
Picsplore Social is still a loser, a social network with no users, but don’t pity us. We’re one pivot closer to success. We're actively working on our next iteration, and many of the lessons we learned from the CUNY Accelerator and Remy are being applied as we get closer to releasing our next public beta.
Till our next conversation, remember you're nobody, just a person and a dream. If you were any smarter, you would be spending the time you have sipping a drink instead of trying to will a dream into reality, but good luck to you and me alike.
The accelerator: cunystartups.com
If you have any questions or comments, my email is thomasmjumper@gmail.com