A View From Inside the Accelerator Experience

Christine Lee, an alumnus of Creative Startups, the nation’s leading startup accelerator for creative entrepreneurs, shares her experience during the 2015 accelerator program in Albuquerque.

The dust has settled after the whirlwind Creative Startups (CS) accelerator, and when I look back on that time, I think of it as a warm, big hug.

About

CS is an accelerator for — you guessed it — creative startups (think art, social good, media, retail, etc.) in Albuquerque, New Mexico that debuted last year for the first time (a startup helping other startups accelerate… meta!). It consists of six weeks of remote classes with mentors/instructors, weekly small group discussions, and then a final deep dive week in ABQ that continued classwork but starts to focus more on next steps — legal, investment, pitch decks, network building, connecting mentors and mentees. We had the opportunity to demo our product, “The Right Margin,”  to the ABQ startup community and the final day of the accelerator was spent pitching to investors. This year we were joined by eight other startups.

Going in

I forget how we first found out about the CS accelerator, but our first reaction to the description was that it sounded perfect for us — if we’d be able to get in. I think the application deadline was earlier than we thought we were ready for (we had considered looking into accelerators around the end of 2015, not mid-2015), but our CEO, Shivani, is hands down amazing at taking (and making) opportunities regardless of how ‘ready’ we feel, which keeps up our team’s momentum. Then, when we were accepted… read the full article here!