FasterCapital in Bangladesh

What is FasterCapital?
FasterCapital is a virtual incubator based in Dubai Internet City. We help IT startups through our acceleration and incubation programs. FasterCapital was established in 2010 and our model has been publicly available since 2014. Fastercapital has 20 graduated startups that are fully functional now, around 26 startups in incubation program, 287+ startups in the acceleration program, 862+ representatives/regional partners and 503 offices worldwide. FasterCapital has four rounds of funding per year that anyone can apply to them for free. FasterCapital is also committed to investing $ 2.55M in 19 startups.

Challenges
Most accelerators/incubators target fresh graduates in technology, give them some money (in exchange for equity) and put them under one roof for 3-6 months to build their startup (MVP). While this approach is producing some of the top class companies worldwide, it still has several problems:
1. Fresh graduate students are technology oriented and they don’t have real life experience so they tend to build technologies rather than products. This is always a challenge.
2. Inexperienced founders are not suitable to build ready-to-be-used products for enterprises or targeted audience. They haven’t worked in an enterprise and don’t understand how difficult it is to reach a product where different managers in the enterprise agree on. They are nevertheless good at building mass-user products like twitter, instagram and such. Those founders will most likely fail when we are talking about a small market where the needs have to be studied carefully and products have to be specifically crafted.
3. Most of the ideas that these founders have are things that can be used by general public and there are always fewer startups that are addressing enterprises needs in an industry.
4. The left out segment: There are lot of senior non-technical entrepreneur who have an experience in an industry and who can easily spot an idea or a need (example a financial expert in a bank). Those are generally left out from incubators because most incubators require that the founding team has technical experience. It’s also difficult for those senior entrepreneurs to find technical cofounders. It is not sufficient nowadays to have only one technical cofounder because of the sheer number of platforms that should be covered (web, android, iphone. .etc) and the different skills needed to write a professional service. So the senior non-technical entrepreneurs have the following options:
1. Wait until s/he finds the technical cofounders

2. Invest some of his/her own money to recruit a team: This option has lot of challenges especially for someone who doesn’t have technical abilities to help assess the team and how they can work together. There is another big challenge with the keeping the team employed even after finishing the MVP. Most lean development methodologies will need time to get feedback from customers and this is an extra cost for the entrepreneur.
3. Outsource the development: Everybody knows and understand the challenges involved with this option. The outsourcing company might deliver but later they might be dissolved or busier with other things. It will be difficult to hand the code to another team to continue the development. Lean methodology requires many different iterations that need to be done quickly and if the entrepreneur is hiring an outsourcing company then it’s a big problem as the outsourcing company prioritize based on income of projects rather than the value added. So the entrepreneur might be left.

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