Startup Dhaka Incubator: Opportunity For Bangladeshi Entrepreneurs

Tarannum Tanha, 3 years ago 0 3 min read 90

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tartups face many difficulties to get support in our market at an early age. That’s why startup Dhaka organizes a 60 days incubator every year which is designed to help and mobilize the early-stage startups to move their ideas to the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) stage.

Partners of Startup Dhaka are Shohoz, LightCastle Partners, Edge Research and Consultancy, Upskill, Augmedix, and Moar.

Startup Dhaka Incubator: Activities

It is known to all that since 2014, Startup Dhaka is continuing to promote the startup ecosystem in Bangladesh. They have organized many startup workshops, GP accelerator programs, 35 startup events, facilitated 68 investments, published more than 78 online and offline courses.

Also, they try to give the entrepreneurs platform to connect with investors from the country as well as around the world.

Already Startup Dhaka has worked with more than 1500+ startups including startups like Royal Fruitz, STICK-ON, Kothon, Clinica, Backspace, Babywala, Mindo, Travel Bangladesh, BD Parlors, Dorji-e, PickEdu, CGPA Matters, etc. On 8th March 2020, the third session of this incubator has been launched.

However, the curriculum of this incubator is set according to the needs of young entrepreneurs. They’ll get to learn about many basic qualities there, like –

Systematically approaching Customer Discovery
Design Thinking
Pitch Desk design
Fundraising
Bootstrapping
Market Sizing
Product Development
Investment Readiness

In this two months incubator, participants get training and consultancy from expert mentors by intensely learning from inhouse. They also get prepared by having an investment-ready pitch desk to face investors.

At the end of the program, a team is selected by counting the votes of the mentors. The winning team gets a chance of co-working space in Baridhara for 3 months by Startup Dhaka’s partner CO+LAB.

If you want to join this incubator, then you must follow some rules. Some criteria are imposed for joining this incubator –

Applicant must have a business idea or product prototype that is ready to work
Applicant’s application/pitch desk should provide the evidence of works done and indicate an unwavering commitment to working further
Irregular teams will be deducted from the program as the authority accepts 15 teams which would be cut down to 10 teams after two months
Participants must be willing to join all the online sessions and complete assignments in order to make full use of the one on one KPI sessions
Applicants must be willing to pay 2 months program fee of 20 thousand takas (Installments available) after getting accepted to the incubator

Apart from knowing the criteria, you would also want to know what this incubator focuses on. Right? The incubator mainly focuses on three topics, like –

Teaching the participants to validate their ideas. They teach them that having a cool product doesn’t mean that the product will be accepted by the market. Rather entrepreneurs should try to understand the relationship between problems and solutions and learn about how to make their ideas worth Exploring.
Teaching the participants to build a product that will be loved by the customers. Startups have to know about customer’s needs and then produce a product that will provide certain utility. They have to keep in mind about the willingness of customers to pay for products.
Teaching the participants to make ready business pitch perfectly, collecting and tracking required information and present them effectively.

The specialty of this program is, there will be some benefits that only the top startups will assume. With the knowledge of these, we believe your interest to join this incubator would increase. The specialties are –

Investment counseling from fund managers of IDLC VC fund
Financial modeling from Light Castle Partners
Investment mentorship and Introduction to investors by Edge Consulting

To know more about Startup Dhaka, you can mail your questions at startupdhaka@gmail.com or visit https://startupdhaka.org/incubator . So hurry up and know more about this wonderful startup incubator.

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Tarannum Tanha

Since Childhood, I was a dreamer. I always dreamt to be someone who I wanted to be and do what I liked. Maybe that’s why at this stage of life, when people are running after conventional jobs, I’m working hard to add a little to my writing skills every day. The hunger to know new things, research and then apply them to writings attracted me towards content writing a few years back. Creativity seems like the most interesting thing to me, that’s why I keep engaging myself in co-curriculum activities more often. I always look up to my parents who never failed to motivate me to do something different. They’re so much inspiring and supportive that I can overcome any failure in life. They always taught me to be a good human at first, who would never indulge in any wrong deeds. I learned a lotin life and for me, being honest is the best gift anyone ever gives to himself/herself. And this is the thing that pacifies me at the end of the day that no matter, whatever happens, I try to be honest. Travelling is my most favourite hobby after photography. I often take photographs of nature as there’s no impurity in nature. Because of my father’s job, we have stayed in different places and met many people. And so I’m fond of meeting new people and places from a very early age. Every individual is so much different from each other, even if they’re connected by blood – that was kind of fascinating to me, don’t know why. Besides traveling and photography, I like to draw things or more specifically, I just love doodles. Even earlier I used to dream about having a house where the interior would be wrapped in doodles. Dreams do not cost, so why not having pleasure by thinking all these, right? After all, life is all about trying to be happy! But obviously, one shouldn’t only daydream, rather should work hard every day to get them materialised. Walking in that way, I don’t know what the outcome will be, but I believe in “No risk, no gain”. And I strongly believe that Life is totally worth it!