Lesson 1: The founders must be committed to the success of their venture.
Joining an accelerator or incubator comes with some strings attached — startups give up between 6 to 10 percent of their equity in exchange for some cash and structured program that usually lasts around three months. Obviously, this kind of commitment should not be taken lightly.

Too often, startups join accelerator programs before they are ready or mature enough as a team. Sometimes, a company’s idea isn’t fully baked, so they end up spending as much time “creating” their business as they do “accelerating” it. As a result, that company isn’t able to leverage an accelerator’s resources efficiently throughout the entire program … The founders need to establish a vision for the business, begin laying the groundwork for the company’s products and services, and be 100% committed to the accelerator program before joining. If you can’t say with confidence that your startup meets all three of those requirements, don’t do it. Take care of those three points and proceed to the next lesson.

Lesson 2: Be prepared to leverage what you are given.
Many startups join accelerator and incubator programs with unrealistic expectations. Participation in these programs — even the most exclusive and well-known ones — by no means guarantees that you’ll raise additional money or have a successful exit. These programs provide startups with office space, free cloud services, and access to mentors, investors, recruiters and media … Those outstanding services provide participating startups with a distinct competitive advantage, but they don’t serve up success on a silver platter. If you aren’t ready work tirelessly to leverage the benefits of a startup program, don’t bother.

Lesson 3: Take advice and criticism well; mentors are trying to help.
“Mentorship” is very tough to qualify, and criticism is difficult to take … Especially if you’re 100% committed to your business and you don’t want to be told that you’ve done something wrong. Mentors in these startup programs have “been there and done that,” and they wouldn’t be in a mentorship position if they weren’t looking out for your best interest and the ultimate success of your company.

Look programs that take mentorship seriously and can provide a broad range of expertise from strategy to marketing and business development to software architecture to building and scaling IT infrastructure. Then be intentional about listening to the people around you.

Lesson 4: Do your research and make an informed decision.
With the proliferation of startups globally, we’re also seeing an evolution in the accelerator ecosystem. There are a number accelerators being positioned to help support founders with ideas on a global, regional and local basis, but it’s important to evaluate a program’s vision with its execution of that vision. Not all startup programs are created equal, and some might not offer the right set of resources and opportunities for your team. When you’re giving up equity in your company, you should have complete confidence that the accelerator or incubator you join will deliver on its side of the deal.

Lesson 5: Leverage the network and community you will meet.
When you’ve done your homework, applied and been accepted to the perfect startup program, meet everyone you can and learn from them. One of the most tangible benefits of joining an accelerator is the way you can fast track a business idea while boosting network contacts. Much in the way someone chooses a prestigious college or joins a fraternity, some of the most valuable resources you’ll come across in these programs are the people you meet. In this way, accelerators and incubators are becoming a proxy for undergrad and graduate school … The appeal for promising entrepreneurs is simple: Why wait to make a dent in the universe? Today, more people are going to college and fewer are landing well-paying jobs after graduation, so some of the world’s best and brightest are turning to these communities and foregoing the more structured “higher education” process.

Even if your startup is plugging along smoothly, a startup accelerator or incubator program might be worth a look. Venture capitalists often trust programs like TechStars and 500 Startups to filter or vet early stage companies. If your business has the stamp of approval from one of these organizations, it’s decidedly less risky than a business idea pitched by a random entrepreneur.

If you understand each of these lessons and you take advantage of the resources and opportunities provided by startup accelerators and incubators, the sky is the limit for your business. Now get to work.

Class dismissed.

-@gkdog

I just returned from a round-the-world trip that included nearly two weeks in India as part of a 500 Startups-sponsored market exploration tour called Geeks on a Plane. The tour stopped through Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi, with meetups for local entrepreneurs, startups, investors and some of the most influential companies in India’s technology ecosystem. While in India, I had the chance to meet several SoftLayer customers — including Zoomin, PowerWeave, and Vidya Mantra — and their insight into the growing technology culture in the region was eye-opening.

One of the most interesting characteristics shared by many of the entrepreneurs I spoke with was that they were building businesses with a “hyper-local” focus: Unique business models that are specifically geared toward serving local communities while leveraging the latest technologies in mobility and e-commerce. This distinction is particularly noteworthy because they didn’t assume that they’d need to succeed in the US market or compete with companies in the US to build their businesses … And they’re absolutely right. The opportunities that exist for hyper-local entrepreneurs in these emerging markets are staggering.

FlipKart is known as “The Amazon of India.” It’s very similar to the online shopping giant most of us know and use regularly, but with some unique regional twists. For example, because credit card and electronic payments in India are not as prevalent or reliable as they are in much of the world, orders are taken via both an online ordering system and through FlipKart call centers. Once processed, a highly developed network of “scooters” delivers about 50 percent of FlipKart’s orders, and the payment is provided at the customer’s door — IN CASH. While that might seem simplistic, each courier has a smartphone that allows them to become a geo-located, connected, data sharing entity. Hundreds of millions of dollars in FlipKart orders are delivered each year with very few issues, despite the fact that most of us can’t even imagine how the company could operate that way in the US.

Another great example of how innovators are using technology to redefine businesses is redBus, India’s largest bus ticketing company. A huge percentage of travel in India is done very inexpensively by bus, and before redBus came on the scene, travelers took their chances by buying tickets through middlemen and ticket brokers, often getting ripped off or becoming victims of double-booking. By centralizing the ticketing process, redBus is able to provide a reliable way to book a seat on any of India’s vast system of buses via phone, online or in person. redBus offers the largest selection of bus seats in the country with over 350 bus operators and a flexible network of boarding points, timing and bus types. It’s an incredibly simple service that meets a clear need for a hyper-local audience by leveraging the technologies being built and improved around the world.

If my two weeks in India taught me one thing, it was that the startups don’t need to conquer international markets … They can strive to service their local communities and interests, and they’ll be just as successful (if not more). Our Catalyst program has just begun its international expansion into India, and the future certainly looks bright. In fact, I’m proud to announce that we’ve already signed up our first Catalyst program member in India with many more to come!

As we continue working with startup communities around the globe, I learn more and more about how the world is changing, and I get a stronger appreciation for the cultural and economic ties that bind us all together.

Stay tuned!

-@gkdog

If that work environment seems like torture, you probably haven’t been on the front lines of a development team. I was a member of a band of brothers at war with poorly documented vendor APIs, trying to emerge victorious from the Battle of Version 1.0. We operated (and suffered) like a startup in its early stages, so I’ve had firsthand experience with the ups and downs of creating and innovating in technology. Little did I know that those long hours and challenges were actually preparing me to help hundreds of other developers facing similar circumstances … I was training to be a Catalyst SLayer:

You probably know a lot about Catalyst by now, but one of the perks of the program that often gets overshadowed by “free hosting” is the mentorship and feedback the SoftLayer team provides every Catalyst participant. Entrepreneurs bounce ideas off of guys like Paul Ford and George Karidis to benefit from the years of experience and success we’ve experienced, and the more technical folks can enlist our help in figuring out more efficient ways to tie their platforms to their infrastructure.

When I was forging through the startup waters, I was fortunate to have been supported by financially reinforced walls and the skilled engineers of a well-established hosting company in Tokyo. Unfortunately, that kind of support is relatively uncommon. That’s where Catalyst swoops in. SoftLayer’s roots were planted in the founders’ living rooms and garages, so we’re particularly fond of other companies who are bootstrapping, learning from failure and doing whatever it takes to succeed. In my role with Catalyst, I’ve effectively become a resource for hundreds of startups around the world … and that feels good.

Five days before my official start date, I receive a call from Josh telling me that we’d be spending my first official week on the job in Seattle with Surf Incubator and Portland with Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE). While the trip did not involve carving waves or stuffing our faces with baked goods (bummer), we did get to hear passionate people explain what keeps them up at night. We got to share a little bit about SoftLayer and how we can help them sleep better (or fuel them with more energy when they’re up at night … depending on which they preferred), and as I headed back to Los Angeles, I knew I made the right choice to become a SLayer. I’m surrounded by energy, creativity, passion, innovation and collaboration on a daily basis. It’s intoxicating.

TL;DR: I love my job.

-@andy_mui

If you look at the way people engage with their finances on a daily basis, you might think that we don’t really care about our money. Unless we’re about to run out of it, we want to do something with it, or it constrains us from doing something we want to do, we don’t spend much time managing our finances. Most of the online tools that dominate the finance space are enterprise-centric solutions that require sign-ups and API calls to categorize your historical spend. Those tools confirm that you spend too much each month on coffee and beer (in case you didn’t already know), but Planwise takes a different approach — one that focuses on the future.

Planwise is a tool that answers potentially complex financial questions quickly and clearly. “If I make one additional principal payment on my mortgage every year, what will my outstanding balance be in five years?” “How would would my long-term savings be affected if I moved to a nicer (and more expensive) apartment?” “How much money should I set aside every month if I want to travel to Europe next summer?” You shouldn’t have to dig up your old accounting textbooks or call a CPA to get a grasp on your financial future:

One of the most significant differentiators for Planwise is that you can use the tool without signing up and without any identifiable information. You just launch Planwise, add relevant numbers, and immediately see the financial impact of scenarios like paying off debt, losing your job, or changing your expenses significantly. If you find Planwise useful and you want to keep your information in the system (so you don’t have to enter it again), you can create an account to save your data by just providing your email address.

Planwise has been a SoftLayer customer since around August of last year, and I’ve gotten to work with them quite a bit via the Catalyst program. They built a remarkable hybrid infrastructure on SoftLayer’s platform where they leverage dedicated hardware, cloud instances and cutting-edge DB deployments to scale their environment up and down as their usage demands. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t give them a shout-out for evangelizing Catalyst to bring some other outstanding startups onboard. You’ve met one of those referred companies already (Bright Funds), and you’ll probably hear about a few more soon.

Go make some plans with Planwise.

-@JoshuaKrammes

Let me back up for a second and tell you a little about Startup Sauna and Slush. Startup Sauna hosts (among other things) a Helsinki-based seed accelerator program for early-stage startup companies from Northern Europe and Russia. They run two five-week programs every year, with more than one hundred graduated companies to date. In addition to the accelerator program, Startup Sauna also puts on annually the biggest startup conference in Northern europe called Slush. Slush was founded in 2008 with the intent to bring the local startup scene together at least once every year. Now — five years later — Slush brings more international investors and media to the region than any other event out there. This year alone, 3,500 entrepreneurs, investors and partners who converged on Slush to make connections and see the region’s most creative and innovative businesses, products and services.

In October of last year, we met the founders of Startup Sauna, and it was clear that they would be a perfect fit to join Catalyst. We offer their portfolio companies free credits for cloud and dedicated hosting, and we really try get to know the teams and alumni. Because Startup Sauna signed on just before Slush 2012 in November, they didn’t want to rock the boat by moving their site to SoftLayer before the conference. Little did we know that they’d end up needing to make the transition during the conference.

When the event started, the Slush website was inundated with traffic. Attendees were checking the agenda and learning about some of the featured startups, and the live stream of the presentation brought record numbers of unique visitors and views. That’s all great news … Until those “record numbers” pushed the site’s infrastructure to its limit. Startup Sauna CTO Lari Haataja described what happened:

The number of participants had definitely most impact on our operations. The Slush website was hosted on a standard webhotel (not by SoftLayer), and due to the tremendous traffic we faced some major problems. Everyone was busy during the first morning, and it took until noon before we had time to respond to the messages about our website not responding. Our Google Analytics were on fire, especially when Jolla took the stage to announce their big launch. We were streaming the whole program live, and anyone who wasn’t able to attend the conference wanted to be the first to know about what was happening.

The Slush website was hosted on a shared MySQL instance with a limited number of open connections, so when those connections were maxed out (quickly) by site visitors from 134 different countries, database errors abounded. The Startup Sauna team knew that a drastic change was needed to get the site back online and accessible, so they provisioned a SoftLayer cloud server and moved their site to its new home. In less than two hours (much of the time being spent waiting for files to be downloaded and for DNS changes to be recognized), the site was back online and able to accommodate the record volume of traffic.

You’ve seen a few of these cautionary tales before on the SoftLayer Blog, and that’s because these kinds of experiences are all too common. You dream about getting hundreds of thousands of visitors, but when those visitors come, you have to be ready for them. If you have an awesome startup and you want to learn more about the Startup Sauna, swing by Helsinki this week. SoftLayer Chief Strategy Officer George Karidis will be in town, and we plan on taking the Sauna family (and anyone else interested) out for drinks on January 31! Drop me a line in a comment here or over on Twitter, and I’ll make sure you get details.

-@EmilyBlitz

Bright Funds is a business that was created to provide users the ability to easily invest in complete solutions for the causes they care about. After signing on as a Catalyst partner, Bright Fund co-founders Ty Walrod and Rutul Davé invited me to lunch at the Hattery office, and I immediately accepted so I could learn more about what they are up to. Having been involved in the tech startup world for a while now, I knew that I’d be meeting two very special entrepreneurs with big hearts and even BIGGER tech startup street cred.

Rutul and Ty were not content with their user experience (UX) when it came to giving to charities and helping solve some of the world’s biggest problems. They noticed that little effort had been invested in providing donors with tools to make the act of giving both enjoyable and highly effective, so they took action. Bright Funds was created to redefine and refocus the experience of “giving to charity” … Giving shouldn’t just involve going through the motions of transferring funds from our bank accounts. They built a new giving platform to be more intuitive, rewarding and enlightening, and they did an unbelievable job.

Think of the last time you had a great user experience: An interaction that was as enjoyable as it was effective. Aesthetics play a big role, and when those aesthetics make doing what you want to do easier and more satisfying, you’ve got an awesome UX. The best user experiences involve empowering users to make informed and intelligent choices by providing them what they need and getting out of the way. Often, UX is used for site design or application metrics, but Bright Funds took the concept and used it to create an elegant and simple business model:

Bright Funds was designed to create a giving experience with an intuitive flow in mind. Instead of just writing checks or handing over cash to a charity, the experience of giving through Bright Funds is interactive and didactic. You manage your giving like you would a mutual fund portfolio — you decide what percentage of your giving should go to which types of vetted and validated causes, and you get regular performance updates from charity. I want to help save the environment. I want to give clean water to all. I want to empower the underserved. I want to educate the world. You choose which causes you want to prioritize, and Bright Funds channels your giving to the most effective organizations serving the greatest needs in the world today.

Instead of focusing on individual nonprofits, you support causes and issues that matter most to you. In that sense, Bright Funds is a very unique approach to charitable giving, and it’s a powerful force in making a difference. Visit Bright Funds for more information, and get started by building your own ‘Impact Portfolio.’ If you’re curious about what mine looks like, check it out:

What does yours look like?

-@JoshuaKrammes

I’m the West Coast community development manager for Catalyst, so I get to tell the SoftLayer story to hundreds of entrepreneurs and startups every month at various meetups, demo days, incubator office hours and conferences. In turn, I get to hear the way those entrepreneurs and startups are changing the world. It’s a pretty amazing gig. When I was chatting with a few of my colleagues recently, I realized that I’m in a pretty unique position … Not everyone gets to hear these stories. I’ve decided that I owe it to my coworkers, our Catalyst participants and anyone else who will listen to write a semi-regular blog series about some of the cool businesses SoftLayer is helping.

Picking one Catalyst participant to feature for this first blog was a pretty challenging task. With the holidays upon us, one company I’m working closely with jumped out as the perfect candidate to feature in this “season of giving”: GiveToBenefit.

GiveToBeneift (or G2B) is a social enterprise based in Philadelphia dedicated to helping non-profits receive high-quality goods from select suppliers through crowd-funding. G2B is unique among the startups in the Catalyst program in that it is a “double bottom line” company: It is designed to generate profit for its business while at the same time creating positive social impact.

Crowd-funding — raising money from the public via online donations — is a relatively new activity, but it has already become a HUGE market. In 2010, more than 38 million people gave $4.5 billion to causes online … $4.5 BILLION dollars were donated online to fuel ideas and businesses. Chances are, you’ve heard of companies like Kickstarter and DonorsChoose, so instead of taking time to talk about the crowd-funding process, I can share how GiveToBenefit differs from those other platforms:

The idea is to go beyond “doing good,” to “doing better.” I could go on and on about the innovate ways they’re “discovering better ways to do good,” but the best way to show off their platform would be to send you to the three campaigns they recently launched:

Whether you want to contribute to purchasing a Watermark water purification system for the Margaret E. Moul Home for people with neuromuscular disabilities or you want to fill the People’s Light & Theatre and Plays & Players Theater with the beautiful sounds of Hailun Pianos, you can contribute and know that your donation is making a difference for some very worthy non-profits.

If you’d like to learn more about GiveToBenefit or if you think one of your favorite non-profits could benefit from a G2B campaign, let me know (jkrammes@softlayer.com), and I’ll introduce you to G2B founder and visionary Dan Sossaman.

-@JoshuaKrammes

In addition to providing infrastructure, my team and I also try to introduce Catalyst participants to investors, incubators, accelerators and other startup founders. By building a strong network of experienced peers, entrepreneurs have a HUGE advantage as they’re building their businesses. The difficulty in making those introductions is that it’s such a labor-intensive process … Or I guess I should say that it *was* a labor-intensive process. Then we found YouNoodle.

YouNoodle is an online network for entrepreneurs that was founded in 2010 in San Francisco, California. The 18-person startup is built to connect entrepreneurs with people, startups, competitions and groups based on what’s relevant to each entrepreneur’s mission. What the Catalyst team has been doing in a labor-intensive fashion, YouNoodle has automated and streamlined! We had to meet these folks.

We heard that YouNoodle was putting together a start-up crawl during one of their immersion programs — they bring international entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley to learn best practices and make connections in the US market — and we jumped at an opportunity to provide the beer and sandwiches at one of the stops. If you’ve ever worked at a startup before, you know that the way to an entrepreneur’s heart is through his/her stomach, so we hoped it would be “love at first bite.”

We chatted with the YouNoodle team, and they showed us the recently released 2.0 version of Podium, the SaaS platform they built to manage the selection process for entrepreneurial competitions and challenges from organizations like Start-Up Chile, The Next Web, Intel, NASA and seven out of the top ten universities around the world. Basically, Podium enables the most talented individuals and innovative startups to rise to the top and get the opportunities they deserve.

YouNoodle was an obvious fit for Catalyst, and Catalyst was an obvious fit for YouNoodle. Other Catalyst participants could join the thriving community of entrepreneurs that YouNoodle has built, and YouNoodle could take advantage of the power of SoftLayer’s hosting platform. And by helping support YouNoodle, Catalyst gets to indirectly help even more entrepreneurs and startups … Very “meta!”

Over the past two years, YouNoodle has managed over 400 competitions which have received entries from more than 28,000 entrepreneurs around the world. They’re a key player in the acceleration of global entrepreneurship, and they share our vision of breaking down the geographic barriers to innovation. And with the momentum they’ve got now, it’s clear that they’re just getting started.

If you have a second, head over to YouNoodle.com to check out the fresh, easy-to-use interface they launched to help users discover, get inspired by and connect with like-minded individuals on a global scale.

-@PaulFord

About a year ago, we kicked off a huge effort to give back to the startup community. We jumped headfirst into the world of startups, incubators, accelerators, angel investors, venture capitalists and private equity firms. This was our new ecosystem. We started to make connections with the likes of TechStars and MassChallenge, and we quickly became a preferred hosting environment for their participants’ most promising and ambitious ideas. This ambitious undertaking evolved into our Catalyst Program.

When it came to getting involved, we knew we could give back from an infrastructure perspective. We decided to extend a $1,000/mo hosting credit to each Catalyst company for one full year, and the response was phenomenal. That was just the beginning, though. Beyond the servers, storage and networking, we wanted to be a resource to the entrepreneurs and developers who could learn from our experience, so we committed to mentoring and making ourselves available to answer any and all questions. That’s not just lip service … We pledged access to our entire executive team, and we made engineering resources available for problem-solving technical challenges. We’re in a position to broker introductions and provide office space, so we wanted didn’t want to pass up that opportunity.

One of the superstars and soon-to-be graduates of Catalyst is MODX, and they have an incredible story. MODX has become leading web content management platform (#4 open source PHP CMS globally) by providing designers, developers, content creators and Unix nerds with all the tools they need to manage, build, protect and scale a web site.

Back in December 2011, the MODX team entered the program as a small company coming out of the open source world, trying to figure out how to monetize and come up with a viable commercial offering. Just over 10 months later, the company has grown to 14+ employees with a new flagship product ready to launch later this month: MODX Cloud. This new cloud-hosting platform, built on SoftLayer’s infrastructure, levels the playing field allowing users to scale and reach everyone with just a few clicks of a mouse and not need to worry about IT administration or back-end servers. Everything associated with managing a web site is fully automated with single-click functionality, so designers and small agencies can compete globally.

We’re proud of what the MODX team has accomplished in such a short period of time, and I would like to think that SoftLayer played a significant role in getting them there. The MODX tag line is “Creative Freedom,” and that might be why they were drawn to the Catalyst Program. We want to “liberate” entrepreneurs from distractions and allow them to focus on developing their products – you know, the part of the business that they are most passionate about.

I can’t wait to see what comes out of Catalyst next … We’re always looking to recruit innovative, passionate and creative startups who’d love to have SoftLayer as a partner, so if you have a business that fits the bill, let us help!

-@gkdog

Pinterest has been getting a lot of attention since 2011, but it still hasn’t really been able to penetrate the male demographic; maybe because it’s been so effective at cultivating content around fashion, recipes, DIY home ideas and cute puppies (Watch College Humor’s “The Fall of Pinterest,” and you’ll see what I mean). The Dudepins team noticed an unmet demand for a male-oriented visual bookmarking site, and they seized the opportunity to build that platform.

Their Formula: 2 dudes + 2 computers + 1 idea + infinite scotch – non-infinite income = Dudepins!

I fired off a few questions to the Dudes at Dudepins to get a little insight into how they built their business and what they’d recommend to other entrepreneurs in the same position … They did not disappoint:

I hate to cut the Q&A short, but TechStars Boulder Demo Day is starting, and I have to go meet the next class of future SoftLayer customers!

If you’ve got a brilliant, creative, innovative or otherwise awesome startup, and you think Catalyst could be a good fit for you, make sure you hit us up from the “Apply” page on the SoftLayer Catalyst site.

-@PaulFord