What is getPegasus and why should you care? We have worked at, with or by accelerators/incubators/startup programs for the past 15 years. And we felt the pain of wasted time first-hand. This is the story of getPegasus, an accelerator admin tool, how it came about and what we have planned.
getPegasus has 3 founders, Kadri, who was the co-founder and CEO of GameFounders. Andra, who was mentoring the GameFounders’ teams on business model design. And Antonio, who was a founder at the 2nd cycle of GameFounders in 2013 with his company Dev9K. The team is thus formed by a manager, a mentor and a startup founder of an accelerator. This gives us a 360 degree overview of the activities and struggles of each role when participating in a program.
After running GameFounders in Estonia for 2 years, it become apparent that the time wasted on admin tasks and coordinating information flow was taking up more than half the time. When GF had the opportunity to open our 2nd location in Malaysia, Kadri decided to develop an in-house tool to make it easier. Antonio was happy to help and the first version of the platform was ready by fall 2015. After this it was used by all of the 40 teams and 150 mentors, that took part of the GameFounders Asia program during 2015-2017. The first version included applications, evaluation, teams, mentors, partners, materials, feedback and reporting. We were very happy with the performance of it. The fact that it also included an automatically generated website, made updating information a breeze. You can still see the style of the website is the same as the getPegasus demo!
Moving back from Asia, we realised the tool was too good not to share and the team started generating ideas how to make it even more user friendly and efficient. At some point we started showing it to our friends running incubators and accelerators. Based on their feedback we added mentor time tracking, better mentor search, notification system and much more. During the pandemic we also added online mentor scheduling, integration of team collaboration tools and online conferencing. All this was aimed to make remote program management easier in the new situation we all found ourselves in. Now the system is ready, tested and has its first users.
We are also happy to launch the getPegasus blog, where we share our experiences, look for best practices, introduce useful tools and just support the organisations, that are there to support the startups. This is the story of getPegasus, the accelerator admin tool that makes the life of any incubator or accelerator manager much much easier.
