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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.