I launch startups and develop inventions for a living and mentor a lot of entrepreneurs in my spare time.

In the last 6 months I reviewed Accelerator applications for muru-D, CSIRO Accelerator (Australian Government funded Scientific & Industrial Research organisation, 5000+ scientists) and Incubate.org.

In addition I get over 100 pitches a month on my tech blog Startup88.com and I also reviewed over 500 inventions in the last 3 years in my day job, so I get to see a lot of ideas and startups and repeatedly see the same patterns.

Here’s is the take home for entrepreneurs from the 300+ applications I reviewed recently.

• You must have the accelerator smashed into the floor. Most startups I see are not operating at full throttle.
• Traction and growth beats everything else. If you have traction you can get away with anything. Crappy looking business plan, no idea how to make money, team with no track record, all can be forgiven in the presence of a user base who has adopted the product and is really using it, paying users are even better.
• If you have major traction, proprietary technology or amazing test results please don’t hide them in the back of your pitch, or as they say in newspapers “don’t bury the lede” it needs to be at the very front of application (this happened numerous times, I was amazed to find a really compelling test result on page 19 of 28 page pitch deck)
• Don’t have a 28 page pitch deck.
• You are probably kidding yourself if you think you can raise money or get accepted to a decent incubator or accelerator without an MVP, preferably with users, the competition is just too fierce. The following exceptions might apply: amazing proprietary technology that has come out of lab or entrepreneurs with a track record.
• At some point you need to decide that your startup is open for business. Until then its all theory and assumptions and both are probably wrong to some extent. The sooner this happens and you start learning from someone who matters the better chance you have of being successful.
• Demonstrating you have learnt from your initial user actions and experiments and adapted is important. The last thing an accelerator wants is a startup that won’t experiment, learn and adapt, examples where you have used customer feedback/data to improve are influential.
• Spend much more time on user acquisition. Remember this
  • Many teams can build a product,
  • Some teams can get product market fit,
  • Very few teams can work out how to acquire enough customers to breakeven and company failure is almost always because of lack of customers and cash not product.
• If you can’t convince me you are solving a real problem that someone cares about in the first few paragraphs you have lost me.
• If you are just starting to build an “Uber for X or AirBnB for Y” you are 3 years too late. Move on.
• If you are replicating a business model that already has significant funding, Pets, Food Delivery, Uber for X, IOT, Parking, Jobs and you don’t have something highly proprietary/competitive that solves their problems forget it.
• If you don’t have at least one customer acquisition strategy that is working you are toast.
• If you are pitching hardware and you haven’t got a sort of working prototype or at least a detailed design its going to be challenging (with the exception of dedicated Hardware incubators like Hax or Bolt but even there the winners will probably have more than a breadboard prototype)
• In larger competitions (>100 entries) the judges get fatigued (usually around letter M), you cannot afford to be verbose or vague in the first few sections i.e. You must have concise believable answers to the following;
  • What does your startup do?
  • Whose problem do you solve and why do they care?
  • Why do you have an advantage?
  • How will you win?
  • Often there isn’t a section that specifically asks about traction, but you should weave this into your answers to the first few questions.
• If you can’t come up with a compelling advantage and reasons why you will be successful then you might want to rethink your entry. I saw numerous (>10) examples of businesses who answered that their business would be easy to copy or couldn’t provide competitive advantages. Seriously WTF.
• If you are at University and building something that specifically targets a problem which exists primarily in the mind of an undergrad (i.e. food, transport or study) and there are 10 other startups doing the same thing (on your campus) then find something else to do, its not going to end well.
• If I see another babysitter app, parking app, nightclub booking, drinks ordering app, food delivery to your dorm room app, Im going to scream. Please stop it.
• Many accelerators require full time commitment by all founders for the term of the program, not much point applying if you can’t be there for the program.

If you are serious about getting into a good accelerator I believe you need to run a few practice attempts. Find last years questions, put together an application, 6 months before the competition (when its not crazy) ask one of the mentors or selectors for feedback about your application and your business.

In the 6 month lead-up to the actual selection process really hammer the testing and customer acquisition and demonstrate to the mentor you have resolved the issues they raised, keep them updated.

If the mentor can see you have benefited from their guidance and made progress and you are coachable then they will probably advocate for you. (note this might not work for the really large US accelerators but give it a try).

Im always happy to have a look at a pitch or help an entrepreneur, if I can help please message me on Twitter @mikenicholls88

After an animated heated conversation last week with a new entrepreneur who was busy trying to build an end user product for a technology component that was not yet working or capable of being manufactured, I felt the need to highlight one of the little known but big traps on the path to commercialise new technologies.

This post is for the scientists, technologists, lab guys, engineers and inventors and their managers who develop the technology stack rather than the people who use it.

Note, I am specifically talking about the development of new technologies and products which derive from technological, scientific or engineering developments from Universities, Labs, or Inventors.

Hardcore STEM tech development rather than mobile apps whipped up in an hackathon on a weekend, the sort of developments that made smart phones and apps possible such as GPS, camera sensors, accelerometers, languages, processors, platform technologies or 1000s of other components/parts/materials of the technology stack that enable our modern world.

It has been said that every new sensor developed creates a billion $ year business and in the case of components such as solid state GPS, accelerometers, magnetometers or gyroscopes have basically enabled the smart phone and helped create new industries which are counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

If there is one thing you get from this post, understand that the smartphone revolution and massive growth in apps and web platforms would not have been possible without the 10000s of scientists, inventors and engineers in labs and Universities who worked out how to take processors, disks, mechanical gyroscope, GPS and accelerometers the size of engines and turn them into 5mm square solid state chip that can be soldered on to a PCB robotically and programmed. Likewise Chemists, Electrical and Materials Engineers who worked out how to build touch screens and OLED displays.

Most people can’t name these scientists and engineers, sadly they get little of the fame, glory, or wealth but without them there is no Steve Jobs….

Product Development vs Technology Development

Its critically important to understand these are not the same thing, although they are frequently treated as the same thing by most people.

Most people cannot separate the two.

The STEM Technology development process is not very sexy. Taking Science from idea to early stage prototypes, materials, chemistry, chip fabrication and the thousands of experiments may be attractive to the hardware geeks but it doesn’t result sexy consumer items and nor should it.

Nor is it very fast. Everyone who wants you to build a product expects it next quarter, yet STEM developments created from basic science or materials research can take years or even decades to productise.

Your job at this stage is to prove the technological development actually works and you have a pathway to making it into a component or deploying it commercially.

If you have worked out how to make the most sensitive touch screens, or a new type of medical sensor this does not qualify to you to build an iPhone or wearable competitor.

Product Development on the other hand primarily deals with the design and integration of technologies and materials that others have developed.

Often this blurs when we look at a company like Apple where they do both often at the same time in dozens of different fields and so its easy to think that you can also do both at the same time.

The important thing to note is that Apple has $100 billion in cash sitting in offshore accounts. They have hundreds of technology development companies working for them as well as their tens of thousands of their own product development people, they can do whatever they like but you have to stick to your knitting.

Generally speaking you can’t do both. You are not Apple.

Even Apple doesn’t do it all, they have hundreds of components developed and manufactured by other companies.

Your Role

If you find yourself in the position where you are developing the next big new sensor or some new non trivial technology or material it is critically important not to get confused about your role in the world.

Your job is to develop the life changing but not very sexy technology, not the beautiful shiny new product that all your friends will be talking about over dinner.

Its easy to get drawn into the flashy world of product development with the sexy sketches and mood boards, lovely materials and finishes long before the technology is ready to be integrated into a product.

Don’t fall for the trap.

Everyone will be sprouting the Lean Startup model to you, Lean Startup however is the wrong model for hardcore STEM technology developments. I have seen too many STEM startups prematurely pushed into markets where they are putting resources into product development for a technology that still hasn’t been proven.

So much time and effort is wasted in trying to develop product features that should be used to complete the tech development.

There is little point talking to 50 customers in a specific market and building specific features if you still don’t have a proven technology that can be productised.

Yes you should talk to customers, but most likely they will be a product manufacturing business, Apple, Samsung, HTC, Xiaomi, not end users who will wear the products that they make.

I have personally lived through this mistake more than once (both my fault and VCs/managers) and I still carry the scars.

The Trap

This is where the trap is laid. When you are developing the next generation chip set, screen, networking technology or wearable sensor, its very tempting to start to visualise and try to build the actual product that your technology will enable.

Imagine for a moment you are developing a new sensor that can sense real time ECG from a watch (not really possible without holding it with both hands).

Its very exciting, everyone wants one, the market is potentially massive, excitement is high, management is rubbing their hands in anticipation of big headlines and big deals.

Everyone around you will be egging you on, they will be pushing you to build the next Apple Watch, Fitbit, Jawbone, iPhone or Nest.

The Lean Startup movement will have you asking 100s of end users about what you should build for them, where they want to wear their new technology, what it should look like and how it should operate.

Step back for a moment. Some science only works in particular ways, places and methods.

Just because a consumer wants it in a particular way doesn’t change basic science and wishing doesn’t make it so.

You can’t put an ECG on your head and expect it to work because it needs to be positioned on opposite sides of your body. Measuring temperature on the fingers is a waste of time because its several degrees lower than your core temperature and is effected by external temperature, your clothing and your fat/muscle composition.

The temptation will be to start mocking up or even prototyping industrial designs of what a device using your sensor might look like.

Pretty soon you will be looking at plastics, rubbers, materials, metals and finishes, injection moulding, spending money on Industrial Designers and Mechanical Engineers, often before your new technology is even able to be proven in the lab.

You will have people at your company or University pulling you into customer engagements, trying to sell the product (that doesn’t yet exist) or license the technology (that isn’t yet proven).

Everyone is already mentally spending the cheques from the massive exit they think is coming.

Very few people understand the process of getting science to product, its murky and very few people have the secret recipe.

In the history of our world there have only been a handful of wizards who have been able to make the jump across from technology development to product development.

Normally technology and product developers are separate teams in separate companies, the technology developers largely spend years developing the tech in labs and end up get little recognition or money for their work. Their name rarely appears on the product that the public gets to know and love.

On the other hand the product developer gets rich and looks like a rock star. Its an understandable temptation to want to be a rock star.

But here is the rub, if you are resource constrained like most companies you can’t do both. You will convince yourself you can and everyone will be encouraging you to do both.

However heed my warning, if you are still trying to develop the technology so that it can be deployed into product and you start trying to build a product you will almost certainly fail.

Few companies have the cash or the human resources to do both.

If you find yourself doing any of the following take a deep breath and make sure you have done everything to prove out the underlying technology before you start building a product.

Warning Signs

• Brainstorming what the new case looks like
• Engaging Industrial Designers
• Trying to understand Injection Moulding.
• Building software apps for a product whose technology that hasn’t been proven yet
• Sales reps trying to sell the new wonder product before it even has a viable production candidate.
• Requests to ship demo units to customers (cracks me up)
• News stories about the latest wearable being constantly forwarded to you or compared to your project
• Thinking you can get a product to ship in under a year
• Trying to arrange production or packaging
• Writing marketing copy

If you find yourself on a project where this is happening, run away, the ship is sinking, if you are running the project stop it now and focus on getting the tech out the door.

Image Credit Micky Aldridge CC