It has been very helpful for me. I am a tech guy and they have assisted in various ways for me to find a cofounder, for example with opportunities to work on mock business cases with the other people in the program, lots of time to chat and allowed us to take our time when to decide to partner up, most people teamed up after 3-4 weeks.
Speaking about other people, as I mentioned it's about 72 of us, 40% ish with tech background, the rest with business and/or industry experience.
They provided us with advice on what to do first to validate the idea, get traction with first customers, and many opportunities to do mock investment pitches where we would get comments from a committee with what we need to improve or what investors would ask.
Additionally there were some courses about different aspects of startups, from design thinking to unit economics, sort of like a mini mba.
So far it has been very valuable for me.
However, on the criticism side, it's sort of early days for them so they could not give too much advice for example on how to tell if a team works or not, with my first team that I had formed we spent 5 weeks (out of 10) spinning in circles not being able to decide on any idea. We generated around 12 but discarded them as soon as any friction came. So we had disbanded and stressed out, then I met another person who had a firm idea what to do and had already validated it, just needed a tech person, and this is going much better now.
Slightly off-topic, but as a non-tech guy (unless you count making websites with Bootstrap as 'tech') with significant experience in the business/marketing side of things, would attending an accelerator with the intention of finding a tech co-founder help? I can self-fund a product for a few years at least so I would bring that into the equation as well.
Speaking about other people, as I mentioned it's about 72 of us, 40% ish with tech background, the rest with business and/or industry experience.
They provided us with advice on what to do first to validate the idea, get traction with first customers, and many opportunities to do mock investment pitches where we would get comments from a committee with what we need to improve or what investors would ask.
Additionally there were some courses about different aspects of startups, from design thinking to unit economics, sort of like a mini mba.
So far it has been very valuable for me.
However, on the criticism side, it's sort of early days for them so they could not give too much advice for example on how to tell if a team works or not, with my first team that I had formed we spent 5 weeks (out of 10) spinning in circles not being able to decide on any idea. We generated around 12 but discarded them as soon as any friction came. So we had disbanded and stressed out, then I met another person who had a firm idea what to do and had already validated it, just needed a tech person, and this is going much better now.