I joined Antler Indonesia, and these are what I learned
Despite not passing the Investment Committee round, joining Antler a is positive learning experience!
I built my own startup, Personal Finance app in early 2022. I thought I already knew everything about running a Business, starting from ideation to execution. After joining Antler ID4 (4th Indonesian Batch) in June 2023, I realized that I made mistake in my previous Startup, even since the inception of ideas.
My business in Personal Finance app didn’t take off. First and foremost, Indonesian market is not ready to pay for solution like PFM (Personal Finance Management). It is tough to monetize the business if the entry point is Personal Finance features, such as budgeting, financial planning, net worth recording, expenses and budgeting, etc. Indonesian is still reluctant to pay for productivity tool. Some players in this sector usually start from other Top Down approach from sectors like Investment, e-Wallet, or Digital Banking, and then incorporate PFM as added value. Secondly, my team was not strong enough. So I came into Antler with one main purpose: to find the right co-founders, getting funded and the rest is just a bonus.
Antler, which is a Venture Capital for early stage business, open an incubator program with 3 batches in a year, to find the next businesses to fund, and Antler entered Indonesia in early 2022 after 5 years establishing itself in other part of the world. I figured that some of key points in getting into the program are the Founder’s strong characters, and experiences (usually above 7 years of industry experience). Antler accept solo founders as well as pre-existing team. When entering the program, individual founder needs to be open for new ideas, humble themselves for receive learnings, new or something they have learned before. I was once interviewed for 2nd Batch, and got rejected because I was refusing to accept any other ideas if getting in.
Here are some learning when joining Antler residency program, there are quite positive ones:
Ensure your market size is big enough before anything else
Coming to the program I had so many wild ideas. But at the end of the day, good ideas alone is not enough, it has to be big enough, at least hitting $100 Million value. Every week when each of the team presented their progress, the market size question will always be there as long as them team haven’t met the requirement.
The first idea that my team submitted were about Campaign Automation for marketing team of a company. The pain point was solid: marketer needs help when handling multiple campaign in multiple channels to achieve the winnings ads. But the question was, what size of company needs this kind of solution? how many? with the small market size, this may be self-sustaining business, but not enough to be venture-backed business.
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My junior in college once asked me in LinkedIn whether his business idea about social media manager may be a good business idea. My answer is, there may be customers for your business, but how many will be using it?
Finding co-founders fit is a big deal
In the first 5 weeks, we had Bootcamps, a series of events where solo founder teams up with whomever they want to work with, to experience how it is going to be working together with team. They will be working on an idea in a day, and presenting it the next day to the panelist and other team. The Bootcamp is intensive, and mandatory as long as the Founders have not tracked out. Track Out is a process where a team of 2–4 solo founders submitted their idea along with problem statement, solution, market size, business model, and the team. The Committee will do assessment of both the idea and founder fit. Founders fit is the situation where the at least one of the founders have experience in the domain area or unfair advantage to the sector, and where the co-founders’ skill compliments each other’s.
I heard in the first two batches, a solo Founder can proceed with the Track Out, but not anymore. Founder composition in a team weights quite high, almost similar with the weight of the idea. In the past, there were a few teams got funded more on the Founder-Fit, instead of Idea-Market-Fit scoring.
I have my fair share of struggle when building a Startup without selecting co-founders mindfully. I had smart co-founders, I knew them prior to running business together, but never really worked together with them. There were good executioners, but not so much of a missionary. Aside from being smart, turned out I also need partners who can co-pilot the business. Along time, I felt like working alone. With this experience in mind, I was determined to be more careful in selecting co-founders when joining Antler’s program. I even scanned the profile of individuals accepted in the program, and called a few of them ahead of the program just to get that early start.
You need coaching, you can’t do it alone!
My take on the Partners when giving feedbacks are: oh they are veteran, they understand this investment business in and out. No surprise, imagine hundreds — if not thousands of pitches they have listened to. My team and I were feeling on top of the world when we were able to show the demo of Creative AI Generation, where we used open source to generate Indonesian-looking construction worker, but our confidence got shot immediately with comment: “try Canva, they have AI Generation plugin.” We tried it, the character can even smile!
I enjoyed working with the coaches for the past 6 weeks. We were assigned a coach right after we tracked out. Every week, we were able to refine our idea because of inputs from the coach. As outsider, they have more objective view about the business or industry. Not only market size, business model, validation, and other important aspects of the business become subject of discussion week-on-week. We once thought the business model for B2B SaaS is straight forward: monthly subscription. We haven’t validated what is the retention rate, and how many percent of Indonesian Business are willing to pay for monthly subscription. With coaching, we found out other alternative business model that can be applied for SaaS. As much as I cannot run business without peers, I also can’t run the business well without feedbacks from an experienced coach.
Pivot might be good if you faced roadblock, but doing it too late will also cost you
We tracked out considerably early, on the second week. We refined our solution week-on-week. The sentiment after each week was always leaning toward us changing the business idea. We restrained ourselves from doing pivot early on because we thought we can still work out other angles for our marketing automation solution. When it came to Pre-IC on week 7, it finally hit us that we need to pivot. However, it was too late.
Our new idea had big market size, with sound problem statement and solution. And with the idea and our team alone, I would say our chance to pass the IC was big. However, we pivoted too late, nearing IC (Investment Committee) Day. IC Day is the Final stage where the remaining team will present for the last time, and the panelist will decide which team get funded. When it was time for check-in a week before IC Day, our team was informed that we didn’t make it into the event. Despite being disappointed for not entering IC, our team were offered the next Batch residency program ID5, for the reason that each of our team member was on ID4’s Top 20 individuals.
All-in-all, I was having fun joining Antler’s residency program. So many ups and downs. User validation and hunting Letter of Intent (LOI) were fun. Getting our idea rebuffed was least fun. But more importantly, I got what I was looking for the most: “the dream team!” My team and I decided to not take the offer to join the next batch ID5, but instead we are continuing our Stealth Startup on our own.
