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What is Zinnstarter?

Zinnstarter is a Bay Area-based accelerator program that was created by its namesake, Ray Zinn. Ray created the business and entrepreneurship accelerator program so that he can help other young individuals grow through pitching practice, insightful feedback from working professionals in Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial landscape, and constant product development.

Zinnstarter receives a multitude of applications from startups that are run by students at SJSU and chooses 12 teams for their cohort. We were fortunate enough to be chosen to receive monetary support and development under their guidance.

Why Did We Join Zinnstarter?

As a newly formed team, we joined so that we could gain experience with talking to peers for pitching and receiving feedback to make our business idea easy to understand for general audiences. Since joining this accelerator program required weekly meetings for pitch practice from January to late April, we knew this would be advantageous for us in the long run.

We still had many questions to answer regarding our list of features and our branding. Zinnstarter was the perfect environment to test out our ideas without any worries and difficulty with finding advisors.

What was Zinnstarter Like?

Like any program, you get what you put into your projects. The experience also depends on your teammates and their priorities. Our team had a great time being part of the Bay Area-based, business accelerator program since we had a shared understanding of our product’s impact and a common goal to make our business concept understandable.

Our weekly meetings with Zinnstarter’s advisory boards meant taking frequent notes of criticisms as our CEO, Nicolas Didonato, would present a five-minute elevator pitch to the audience. The unexpected change of circumstances due to the Covid-19 pandemic made our meetings go from an in-person environment to remotely on Zoom.

Improving Our Business Concept in an Online Accelerator Environment

Most of our time at Zinnstarter was spent doing our first round of product testing interviews with our Figma mockup. We interviewed around 25 people throughout the Bay Area to test their reception of our business idea and their user experience on the platform.

Pitching to the advisory board of the Zinnstarter program gave us new ideas to shorten our explanation of our business concept. We came into the program having difficulty with conveying our competitive edge compared to today’s most popular digital platforms. The advisors made helpful suggestions to make our pitch straightforward. For example, one of the advisors told us to distinguish our platform by emphasizing the compatibility aspect. Simplify the matching feature into layman’s terms for your grandma to understand. This piece of advice helped us with our marketing efforts and our presentation style, especially in the final round of SJSU’s other entrepreneurial initiative called the Silicon Valley Business Plan Competition.

Feedback from the Advisors

The weekly checkups with the advisory board were meant to prepare for the final event: presenting a 5-7 minute elevator pitch to Ray Zinn for his personal input. Our CEO was the one to present all of our business’s information while the rest of the team sat on the sidelines to answer any questions from the advisory board.

We still had issues when having the audience understand our business concept and how it differed from other social platforms. Ray Zinn even questioned us on how we can keep our platform censorship free in a politically polarized environment. This question came from him having difficulty understanding that we were not running another typical social network. His criticism was helpful for us when figuring out our elevator pitch since we had to work on our clarification.

The criticism from our advisors in this program helped us realize that we needed to enforce the idea that we are more than a social network. We don’t want to rely on constant scrolling and engagement for monetary gain since it goes against our ethics. We want to be a community building platform that makes money through subscriptions and creates a comfortable hub for finding your lifelong friends.

Another question we encountered from the board was regarding our algorithm. The idea of matching people from personality metrics certainly is new technology. This makes it hard for people to easily understand since the method of personality matching has no clear references other than existing research articles. We are still undergoing development to refine our algorithm and personality evaluations so that we can make it easier for more people to understand our technology.

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How Did Zinnstarter Impact Our Product Development Process?

Despite the criticisms we received, going through this program was beneficial to our company’s vision. Enrolling in the program while establishing our marketing team helped us modify our business model and create a distinct brand. We finally figured out our payment tiers and our supporting research to summarize our business within minutes. It was a privilege to have well-known people in Silicon Valley give us advice based on their own personal experiences. Without them, we would not have figured out other possible pivots in terms of our target audience or our business model.

This accelerator program helped teach us the importance of pivoting. Of course, you will always hear the concept of failing fast. How will you get back up from your failures? This idea can seem daunting when you don’t know what to expect from your business.

Zinnstarter: A Good Starting Point for Refining Business Ideas

Zinnstarter was the perfect starting point for us to fail without fear. Through constant trial and error with testing and presenting, our team has undoubtedly come out with confidence in making our idea a reality and helping others change their lives for the better.

If you ever have any doubts about enrolling in the program, we recommend giving yourself a shot and enrolling. Keep in mind that this program requires the team to have current SJSU students or alumni in order to enroll.