George Miller, Author at Remarkable

Reinventing the accelerator wheel

Posted on September 28, 2020October 7, 2020 by George Miller

Earlier this year the Remarkable team were thrown the same curveball as the rest of the world — how could we adapt our team, processes and organisation so that we could deliver our disability-tech startup accelerator program remotely, instead of in person?

At the end of 2019, in Australia we were suffocating in bushfire smoke, drought was hitting regional Australia hard, and we watched on as other countries faced their own challenging experiences. Yet we continued to battle on, to walk the path of previous generations, the way things were ‘set out to be’, that those before us had decided were the norm. We didn’t think twice.

Within a few months, the global pandemic was challenging our health care systems, economies, governments, and our ways of life. We were forced, unnaturally, to live a new way of life, a life with boundaries and restrictions, one which would leave many feeling lonely and helpless.

Perhaps a global pandemic was what we needed to shake up our work habits, free us from the hamster wheel of legacy solutions and make us, for once, think about what we are really trying to achieve as individuals, organisations and communities. They say “don’t reinvent the wheel” but sometimes the world gives you no other choice but to reimagine the solutions, re-engineer your processes and rethink your objectives.

If Remarkable’s disability-tech accelerator is our wheel, here’s how we reinvented it.

What is Remarkable?

Remarkable is one of more than 7,000 accelerators worldwide, according to Hackernoon and data from the International Business Innovation Association. Remarkable is also part of the 90 percent of these accelerators that are nonprofit and are focused on programs for community economic development.

An example of Airtable being used for calendar scheduling.

Our 16-week accelerator program is aimed to equip early-stage startups with seed funding and the knowledge, skills and tools needed to become commercially viable businesses that have a positive social impact. To bring this to life we split our program up into eight key phases.

- Bootcamp
- Foundation
- Product Market Fit
- Business Model
- Go To Market Strategy
- Sustainability & Investment
- Graduation
- Transition to an Alumni

To show our commitment to our founders and their vision we offer seed funding, $35,000 cash for a 5% equity stake in each startup. We open up our network to offer support, from our mentors all the way to user testers, stakeholders and investors. Each startup also receives many opportunities to connect with industry-leading experts in both business and the disability sector, and warm introductions to potential customers.

While I think we’d always prefer to deliver an accelerator program face-to-face, such a program is not without its drawbacks. It’s important to look back at the pros and cons of an in-person accelerator before we jump into the decisions we made to take ours online.

Cohort relationships form differently, if at all

In-person cohort versus an online cohort community.

In an in-person program, on day one, you have founders flying in, facilitators lined up and the program team itching to get things kicked off. The energy is real and tangible. From the hugs, the handshakes to the emotions, the sense of family and community is felt by all. And this is just the start; from that moment on, each person in the program gradually begins to feel accountable to one another, and to the program. From day one, many things happen spontaneously, from water cooler conversations, impromptu coffee and lunch dates and evenings out. This connects individuals, reinforces team and cohort bonds, and creates channels for cross-pollination and collaboration.

In a remote program, very little happens spontaneously and people don’t get to know each other very quickly – or at all – unless they, or we, plan for activities that will bring people together. In our 2020 program, some of our participants were beginning to use video conferencing for the first time and were not yet fluent, making them quieter, more withdrawn and more reluctant to contribute than perhaps they might have been if the group were together in the same room.

Founders, mentors and facilitators work together, they are in the same room and are present, and during our masterclasses, they have no distractions — laptops are shut, phones off — they are there to learn, to engage and to progress.

But not being together, is not all bad

An in-person program has to be based somewhere, and no matter where that base is, it’s always going to be further, more inconvenient and more expensive for some to get to than others. Dates or times might not fit easily into the rest of someone’s schedule. Venues, accommodation or transportation may not be equally accessible for people living with disability, people with dependents, or people trying to blend startup founder commitments with a side-gig or career job.

The benefits of having everyone attend an accelerator program in person means the accelerator program team inevitably finds itself discouraging people from attending remotely except in exceptional circumstances. This is doubly so because non-attendance (along with late attendance, partial attention or poor engagement) is somewhat unavoidable and contagious and performance begins to suffer.

An in-person program may become so fixated on in-person attendance over time that fewer accommodations are made for people who can’t always attend in person, or who can’t attend in person as a whole.

There’s also no question that in an in-person program, the gregarious, confident, communicative and socially-fluent person has an advantage over someone who isn’t, and that person shouldn’t be penalised for their lack of proficiency in an in-person group setting.

As a program team our job is to find the balance, find out what works for the majority but there will always be some degree of inequality. I think the opportunity to run a program remotely has made us think harder about how we can be more inclusive and how we can make things more fair, for future cohorts in the Remarkable programs.

An in person event comes with many barriers; geographical, economic, environmental and accessible barriers, to name just a few. Should it be that you can’t follow your startup dream because of where you live or your freedom to pay for travel? Should it be that you can’t attend cohort events if you live with a disability? Should it be that you have to make sacrifices in your life when ultimately you are trying to improve the lives of others? These are some of the questions we should be asking ourselves.

How do you design a program that works online?

First, put away your cookie cutter. In all honesty, our advice would be to start from scratch, not to try to adapt an existing in-person program, because it seems to inevitably result in too many assumptions being made: that outcomes will be the same, that learning rates will be the same, and also a hundred other little things: that participants will only need a five minute toilet break, that they’ll be as focused on the material, or that they’ll be as familiar with Slack, Google Docs and Zoom as you are. Think not just how you can increase engagement, but also how you can be accommodating to this new way of life.

In future online programs we will involve our alumni more in the program design, ask for their input on what would make them comfortable in this medium, and offer them some examples of our proposed UX for feedback. So keeping your alumni close and engaged with the program after they graduate is as important as keeping them engaged during the program.

Show (don’t just say) that you care

Demo Day care packs for our #SYD20 cohort.

In an in-person program there are many opportunities to show participants that we care – from recreational fun, catered events and masterclasses, bags of treats, free work spaces, to open and regular one-on-one conversations.

For our first remote program we decided early on that we would send a series of care packages to our founders throughout the program. Over the course of the program we sent them many things – top-quality webcams with lights and wide-angle lenses to help them look and sound great online, books, food and drinks, clothing, and hand-written personalised messages of support. We felt the need to share the love with our founders, and sometimes all it takes is a small package to brighten up someone’s hour, day or week.

We also tried to remember that, although Zoom calls are booked into a calendar and generally have an agenda, not all of every catch-up needs to be about work – it’s also important to ask people how they are, how they feel, how they are coping, and what feels harder than it should be. Prompting them to allow time for exercise, rest, reflection and down-time was really important when most of our founders were experiencing significant disruptions to their usual daily routine during lockdown. Mental and physical fitness is something we should all keep top of mind and asking each other if we are OK is a great place to start.

In this new online medium, try using apps like Donut to foster hallway chats.

Half way through the program, we noticed a dip in our weekly feedback scores from our founders. We jumped to it and began conducting startup and founder health checks – in retrospect, something we should have been doing every 2-3 weeks, not just in the middle of the program.

Not another SAAS sign up – our digital tool box

Several logos of the selected apps Remarkable utilises.

Over the past six months we have shared our learnings on the systems and tools we used to bring our program to life. We’ll let you dive into them for a deeper understanding of what worked well for us, but it’s worth noting that while shiny new SAAS products to help you be a productive and happy remote team are dropping more frequently than ever, it’s important not to get blindsided by them, and it’s important not to experiment with new tools new frequently without evaluating them with a small test group first to examine whether they will actually help your teams, and whether they will integrate well with what you are already using.

Testing and experimenting with new products is great, but do so in a controlled environment, and don’t (unless it’s absolutely necessary to do so) introduce a totally new way of working half way through a project, program or initiative. These systems and tools may be intuitive to you but can cause huge disruption for others.

Our final tried-and-tested tech stack for our 2020 remote program has been Slack for day-to-day group and individual communication, Zoom for events, meetings, workshops and masterclasses, mmhmm sharing and presenting slide decks and interactive visual content, Hopin for large online events such as Demo Day, and Airtable for reporting, information management and pretty much everything else.

“You’re on mute”, the does and don’ts of online mediums

You would think that with everything that goes on in the world we would be able to start a zoom call without the classic, “How’s the weather with you” or “ How’s your day been?”

Do we do this out of awkwardness? As a conversation starter? Or is this just a filler because it would be weird to start a zoom call by just jumping straight into the meeting agenda?

Try to start each online meeting or call in an intentional way, and think about what could stimulate an interesting conversation with others in the call.

If someone’s shared some preparatory notes prior to the meeting, do them the courtesy of referring directly to a detail of their notes as your opener to your call. “You know, I was thinking about what you said about how hospitals are sometimes very concerned about risk and it reminded me of a time when…”

You might find the energy and creativity you bring to the first few minutes will have a huge impact on the remainder of the call.

Keeping it dynamic with masterclasses, sprints, workshops and events

It was clear when our mentors delivered their first few masterclasses for the cohort that many things were very different – that we would have to adapt and help our mentors adapt too. We learned that participants find it harder to pay attention online, that they are less likely to ask questions and interact with each other and the masterclass mentors, that they are even less engaged when the masterclass is mostly looking at slides and listening, and that a lecture-style of masterclass is much less engaging than an interactive, hands-on workshop style of learning.

Just because someone’s a skilled TED-style presenter, it doesn’t mean they can teach a hands-on workshop covering the same material. That meant working with some of our regular masterclass mentors to see if we could help them adapt their teaching style if they were used to a lecture-style of delivery, and in some cases helping them create and plan hands-on exercises for our participants to work on individually or alone. Let’s also recognise that our Remarkable team were learning-as-we-went too, and some of our own workshops could have been better.

However don’t take for granted that anyone already knows how to create an engaging online working session, since chances are, it will be new for most of us for some time to come. Share your top tips and feedback from other sessions, and run a short test with each mentor delivering something for your cohort, in advance of the actual event, to familiarize them with the systems and tools you will be using, invite them to practice their material with you, and give them constructive feedback.

Through researching systems that might help bring our online events to life, we found we needed to create events that put the control back in the attendees’ hands, just like at an in-person event. Arriving at a Zoom event, only to find you’ve been dropped in a breakout room, and not by your choice but on someone else’ instructions, takes away so much spontaneity and energy. We found that platforms such as Hopin helped us give freedom back to the attendee. Check out our recent demo day learnings here.

Finally, be open to feedback and foster the open and honest philosophy, you may think the session or event was the best ever but there is always room for improvement. Seek that advice and take action to implement it.

We’re still not perfect, our learnings and improvements for next year’s program

One our 2020 remote accelerator program had concluded, we ran a retro to look back at the main segments of our program and used the ‘Stop, Start and Continue’ method to analyse the quality of our program, what we feel could have been better, and what we could do without in coming years.

Learnings from our first online accelerator program.

Over the 15 stages of our program, from launching our first campaign through to graduation, we noted 100 insights which we then themed together into groups. The top seven themes are:

Startup DNA

Find ways to better understand your founders and their businesses. This has been a lot harder online with the lack of spontaneous conversations or coffee chats.

Emotion

Dig deeper into understanding how others are feeling, offer greater support, and foster human-centric conversations and experiences.

Community Support

Not being able to get everyone into the same room creates challenges, a lack of cross-pollination being one. Look for better ways to close the network gap.

Reach

With geographical less of a barrier, think about how you can involve a wider audience in your program.

Founder engagement

Find better ways to keep the focus. Think deeper about the UX of your sessions and pick your facilitators with greater knowledge.

Knowledge alignment

A bespoke program tailored to each startup is not possible but remember that one size does not fit all. Look at ways to support those with greater knowledge gaps.

Communication

Ask your audience what their preferred communication method is, rather than presuming the way you think things should be communicated is the best.

There’s no ‘I’ in team, but there is an ‘Om’ in Zoom

Thinking about your audience and making things right for them starts with fostering an inclusive environment for your own team and leading by example.

As we move into a new age of changing working environments, listening to those around you for what they really want in their working style is key. In the past, introverts have been bound by working from offices alongside their extrovert counterparts, but now, working from home has allowed them the freedom to work as they have almost certainly always wished they could have done. Ask your employees how they do their best work and try to build your ways of working policies around them, make them less static and more fluid with the aim to encourage autonomy.

It’s unclear what more will change in the workplace in the future, but ask yourself if the money you are spending on your space is worth it and think about whether there might be other areas some of that money could make a bigger difference. Maybe ten permanent desks which are <40% filled could be replaced by a team offsite once a month or a two-day team conference? These alternatives go a long way of increasing morale and bringing employees closer to your brand.

Returning to old habits, our thoughts on the future of our programs and community interactions

Whilst the themes in this post have been broad they are aimed not to give you all the answers but to start the conversations, to make you think and hopefully make you consider changing some of the ways you are currently working.

We at Remarkable are far from perfect and like everyone else, we too are still finding our feet in this new way of work. But we hope opening up and sharing our story gives you some confidence to share yours too, which might help us all deliver an even better remote program in future — an experience that is inclusive, accessible and leaves them wanting more.

Note: If our passion for accelerating early-stage startups which have a positive social impact resonates with you then please share our story, subscribe to our channels and spread the world that we are now accepting registrations of interest for our #SYD21 cohort.

How to run a successful inclusive online event – our Demo Day lessons

Posted on August 11, 2020August 14, 2020 by George Miller

Demo Day… Our chance to showcase the culmination of the #SYD20 founders’ efforts, their hustle and their sheer grit over the past 16 weeks in our accelerator program. This cohort completed hundreds of hours of customer interviews; they’ve been building, testing, marketing and selling, and this was their chance to show off, catch eyes, turn heads, and gain traction.

This year the global pandemic meant an in-person showcase was impossible so we went totally online, and while the initial transition was difficult because it was so sudden, we now wonder if it should be the norm. The power of an online demo day is huge: it brings high quality, reduces barriers to entry, and most importantly, creates the broad accessibility which is core to our values.

We got a lot of positive feedback about this year’s online Remarkable Demo Day event, about the production quality, audience interaction, startup information and tools we used, so we thought it could help other remote accelerator managers if we took note of some of the things we’ve learned in delivering our Demo Day. This is our story.

If you were unlucky enough to miss Demo Day, we who heartedly recommend you catching up on the action before reading on.

How would we usually run a demo day, and what had to change because of the pandemic?

In previous years, Demo Days have been run as face-to-face events for a couple of hundred people, all lubricated with vino and canapes. While we would never contravene any fire codes for the number of people we squeeze into each square meter, we would get pretty close — as we aimed to get as many people physically at the event as we could. The event was also broadcast via Facebook Live, however, the focus was on those in the room, at the event, rather than the experience of our online viewers.

Each startup would create their own startup booth, printing wobbly pull-up banners, cobbling together flyers and perhaps printing some t-shirts, attempting to get that professional trade show look on an extremely tight budget.

The venue would be set up with staging, lighting, the expo zone and main stage with seating tightly packed in for our guests. Many of the features of the content of the night remain consistent, but the focus was squarely on nailing the ‘performance’ of the pitches — with coaching given by seasoned stage performers on how to best engage the in-person audience.

The events had their own energy as many live performances do; founders nervously rehearsing their pitches in the wings, right up until that fateful moment when they step out into the spotlight on stage. Conversely, responses are felt in the moment as applause is heard, nods and smiles are seen, even if not remembered consciously. Celebration ensues, founders patting each other on the back for a job well done or (at the very least) for surviving the ordeal!

These events are definitely a highlight of our year. So when you can’t pack people into a room like sardines, then what do you do to create that same atmosphere?

What were some of the options we considered but rejected and why?

To comply with lockdown regulations, trying to do our usual live event was probably impossible — we might have been able to host 20 guests rather than our usual 200, which would create a very empty vibe, we would be asking our founders to take a personal health risk to travel interstate (assuming interstate travel would be possible) and we’d be taking a considerable risk bringing our cohort founders together with our program team.

Of course, coming up with the best solution wasn’t something we stumbled across overnight. It was born from lengthy discussions, platform testing and consultations with founders, partners, mentors, and people living with disability, to ensure our demo day would be aligned with our objectives.

A few ideas we had for bringing Demo Day to life were:

Live, online – all subjects in the same studio (or multiple studios) beaming in live.
A mix of live and pre-recorded online – live MC throwing to pre-recorded pitch videos.
Why didn’t we just have founders pitch from home? Just straight-up Zoom live to camera.

Whilst lockdown restrictions but the breaks on some of these ideas, we still felt the element of community was missing and moreover, we still needed a platform to host the event on.

What adaptation did we finally decide on?

Our number one objective for Demo Day is to give each cohort the best possible platform to share their big ideas with the world. It was without question that their pitches would need to be produced at the highest quality especially if turning to a virtual demo day would take away the raw human interaction we are all so used to with in-person events.

We settled on a full pre-record but a live hosting service… more details on the technicalities of that later on.

The pre-record…

We had seen recent work by the fantastic team at Clothesline Content who despite the pandemic were continuing to find creative solutions to bring events to life. With their background in TV broadcasting, we were confident we were in the right hands.

The hosting service…

Next up we needed a platform to host Demo Day on. We had tried them all, Zoom, teams, webinars and many more but one platform stood out above the rest, Hopin. Hopin is a virtual event space that mimics the same core functions you may expect to find at an in-person event. A stage, the opportunity to network, live sessions and even expo booths. Yes, that’s right, picture a trade fair you have ever been to, a concert or even an expo, Hopin now gives you the opportunity to attend these virtually. To read more on how we came across Hopin, read a recent blog post on hosting virtual events here.

The tools we used and why we used them

No virtual event would be complete without a plethora of SAAS products. Airtable, Hopin, mmhmm are our most notable and whilst we may like to keep our secrets to making this demo day a cut above the rest, we also believe that sharing our learnings can only bring good to the ecosystem and best of all, ensure all events are accessible to everyone. Let’s dive into the tools we used.

Airtable

Since the beginning of the program, we’ve been using Airtable to manage a database of all the people connected to our accelerator program — staff, founders and their teams, mentors, corporate partners, investors, media and people in the ecosystem.

We used an Airtable form to allow people to RSVP to the event months in advance, connected to Zapier to send them an email with a .ics calendar attachment so they could add the event to their work calendar, which we think helped them remember the event and plan to attend it.

Hopin

What makes an event so appealing is often the freedom. To come and go when you please, to network with those you want to meet and to interact with the topics and individuals that matter to you. It was always our quest to find a platform that despite living in a new virtual world we could offer such freedom whilst also ensuring that our Demo Day was accessible.

Hopin certainly ticks all the boxes. It brings to life the same elements of a physical event environment in a virtual medium. We used the stage, networking and expo functions to bring our Demo Day to life. Our main stage was to host our pre-recorded live stream, networking for attendees to meet others at random and expo to allow founders and attendees to meet “face to face” to continue the conversation post pitching.

The live chat feature saw a record of 456 messages between the audience and our cohort and between each other. These messages brought the atmosphere to the main stage, it really did feel like we were all there together.

We believe this new way of hosting events despite lacking the human connection is a step in the right direction. It allowed us to showcase our cohort in a way that would not have been possible with the likes of Zoom, it was engaging, interactive and above all, giving complete freedom to the attendees.

We are not the only ones who believe in Hopin potential. George our Operations manager has conducted five personal demos to others looking to replicate the success of our biggest event to date, a testament to its success.

If you’re looking to try out Hopin for yourself, you can sign up here.

Hopin AV delivery

Within Hopin, there are many ways to live stream onto a stage. The built-in session function allows speakers to meet backstage where a moderator will control who goes on stage and at what time. You can use Vimeo, YouTube or Wistia to stream directly in from a third party or you can use RTMP streaming to push content to the stage as live.

The RTMP streaming was our choice on the night. Youtube and Vimeo would have meant the attendees would have needed to press play when they arrived at the main stage which not only takes away the element of ‘live’ but also would mean that all attendees would be watching the pitches at a different time meaning the live chat would have been out of sync for everyone.

We used Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) to stream to the main stage. This free application was very simple to use. It’s worth noting that you can’t stop, pause, rewind or fast forward using this so once you start the stream that’s it. Probably for the best.

Hopin booths

During the event, Hopin allowed attendees to join a video chat and a text chat with one startup at a time, in a ‘booth’ (an online equivalent of a booth or stand in a physical expo or conference). This was really helpful for attendees to ask follow-up questions of each startup’s founders and it was a great way for mentors to show their support for a founder by joining them in the booth. Founders could play a pre-recorded video or deck to show further details about their business or their product in their booth. It allowed them to register their expressions of interest with each startup for a follow-up discussion. After Demo Day, Hopin allowed us to export a CSV file of the expressions of interest and share those with the startups, and also allowed us to export an HTML file of the entire text chat from the booth so founders could ‘playback’ and reflect on the questions and feedback they received.

Mmhmm

Yep, that’s not a typo. mmhmm is arguably the best real-time video creation tool out there. It brings your Zooms to life and sets a completely new bar for engaging video streaming. mmhmm is not just useful for live video streaming, it’s also great for product demos. We wanted to give our attendees the best experience on Hopin so created a four-minute demo of how they can access the platform and how best to navigate it during Demo Day. Our ops manager George turned to mmhmm to create this content. We think you’ll agree, it’s way cooler than a picture in picture zoom recording.

If you’re keen to try it out, reach out to demoday@remarkable.org.au we have five invitations to access the mmhmm beta.

Marketing/communications that ensured we had an audience

In a world of saturated online events, how do you go about exciting people for another online event? The keyword is ‘people’. In technical terms, our Demo Day’s target audience is primarily investors and potential partners – but ultimately it is a celebration of the progress of the incredible people who make up our startup cohorts. For our first online Demo Day, we wanted to celebrate with as many people as possible, including friends and family, so we opened invites to the public. How did we do this on social media?

Pre-event…

Countdown: Our startups have been counting down the days until Demo Day since the very beginning. To bring our audience on this journey we started a countdown from four weeks away all the way day to the day of, which allowed us to start celebrating Demo Day well before it arrived.

Event pages: We listed Demo Day to all online event listings as well as hosted a Facebook event page where we posted information about our startups the weeks prior to the event.

Provide your friends with social posts: There’s nothing quite as lovely as having someone send you a prepared example of a social post including the tags, images, copy and image descriptions so that’s exactly what we did and it worked a treat!

On the day…

A quote from Gecko Traxx Demo Day pitch video.

Pre-made posts: As an online Demo Day doesn’t allow for real-time pictures we created a collection of graphics including quotes from the pitches that were shared throughout the evening in time with the pre-recorded pitches, (see an example below). The purpose of this was to encourage a discussion with our guests and to highlight the key takeouts from our startups’ pitches. It was also a great way to promote the event to a wider audience who weren’t able to attend.

Respond to your community: To bridge the gap between a virtual and in-person event we made sure to share our hashtag with our guests and respond to as many social posts throughout the evening so that our guests felt like they were really experiencing a connected event.

Auslan interpreter and closed captions, ensuring this Demo Day was inclusive.

Remarkable is a disability tech accelerator program so accessibility has always been a core value in the events we produce and we had to adapt our usual process to ensure we had closed captions and an Auslan interpreter signing the dialogue from all the pitch videos and guest speakers.

Expectation vs reality

There is no doubt about it, despite pre-recording demo day the event jitters and nerves were still felt by all. Would people show up, would our tech stack hold up, did we make the right decision to pre-record… The endless questions we were asking ourselves as the countdown clock ticked down.

It’s safe to say we may have even succeeded our own expectations for this Demo Day. This was uncharted territory but the praise, the thanks, and congratulations we received from those who attended proved that this just may have been the best Remarkable Demo Day yet.

With over 450 attendees tuning in live from 9 countries, from founders to investors, mentors to students, sharing over 500 individual messages on our event chat, and engaging in over 50 dynamic conversations with our founders, we are proud to look back with pride and accomplishment.

For our founders, we stood up to our objective to give them the best possible platform to showcase their business. Here are a few live chat comments which speak to this.

“Speech Frog should connect to Coviu – could be hosted on their platform and get in front of speech pathologists”

“Great traction Gecko Traxx. And well done on the Dyson award.”

“Really interested to learn more about Maslow”

“Great pitch Neurodiversity Media – fantastic opportunity to build economic participation & workplace diversity – accessible information benefits all.”

“How good is Handi. Simply brilliant!!!”

“Excellent pitch Brian Hoare and CPToy Swap sounds fantastic.”

“There is so much potential for ResusRight. Congratulations!!”

For our community, we stood up to our objective to provide accessibility, informative entertainment, and freedom. A few comments which make us believe we got this one right.

“The awesome pitches combined with very slick MCing… setting the standard for inclusive demo days with subtitles and auslan. Great job others should follow.”

“Smooth and seamless technology, great pitches.”

“It was great to see the pitches, then go into the booths to hear the questions raised.”

“Everything about the Demo Day is memorable since that’s the best virtual event that I have ever participated…. if the first ever virtual Demo day is this good I cannot way to witness the future events…..”

“An exceptional event with incredible pitches. Well done to the startups and the Remarkable team!”

We get we are not perfect, two notes to self for next time

More accessibility

Here at Remarkable, we aim to create accessible environments where everyone is welcome and included. We believe our events are a safe and innovative space for people across every gender, race, ethnicity, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, visible and invisible disability, and age. In our quest to make Demo day one of our most accessible events to date we do acknowledge that this event was lacking Audio Description for those with vision impairments, something we will be working hard to introduce to our events in the future.

As live studio

Pre-recording is great, it certainly takes the pressure off of us and our founders but does it cause a lack of reality? Whilst we believe having pitches pre-recorded brings the best outcome we would love to explore using an “As Live” studio for our next demo day. A studio where our MC, panelists and Remarkable team members can come together to create an engaging and dynamic live feel to our production.

That’s it for another year, who knows the state of the world in 12 months time, maybe we’ll be streaming demo day live from Mars, who knows? One thing’s for sure, sometimes you need to be thrown out of your comfort zone in order to reevaluate your ways of working.

Hosting Virtual Events

Posted on June 1, 2020May 31, 2022 by George Miller

On Tuesday the 19th of May we hosted our Stakeholder and Investor night event online and it was brilliant! George our in-house tech-genius realised our guests would probably be feeling totally “Zoomed out”, so to keep everyone engaged for this event he trialled a new platform called Hopin! George has written a blog to tell you all the ins and outs of this new platform and how we’ve adapted our events due to the new restrictions.

Pete presenting at a Remarkable event in 2019.

We’re many months into the pandemic that has changed our lives as we knew them and despite not wanting to dwell on COVID-19 in yet another blog post, for many, it truly has changed the way in which we go about our daily lives. Here at Remarkable and the majority of many organisations, community events are at the core of our business and a fantastic channel that we use to reach new audiences, to empower, to inspire and to provide a platform for debate or knowledge sharing.

As the pandemic swept through the world events were one of the first to go due to their mass participation. Naturally, we all turned to technology to find a quick fix for hosting events in a virtual world and at first, I’ll admit, the virtual event landscape looked bleak. Of course, we have the likes of Zoom and it’s webinar function, we have google hangouts, Microsoft teams and many other video conferencing style products, we even saw the rise of video platforms outside of work with the likes of House Party becoming popular amongst friendship groups.

Although there were many options to choose from for video conferencing did any of them really tick all the boxes for events or would we need to change our event structure to adapt?

You see, the problem with many of these online video conferencing platforms is how much they suck the freedom and power from the attendee, yes you may be able to use a Q&A feature in a live webinar, update your webcam background or turn yourself into an AR robot, but as an event attendee is this what we really want? Let’s take a look back at what makes an in-person event so special.

A reminder to why we host events

We’ve all been to an event in some way shape or form, events come in all different shapes and sizes but normally they have similar core themes. We are among many who attend, we go there for a purpose, objective or outcome and we usually have to travel to get there.

Virtual events have been around for a while now but the majority of us will prefer to go to an event in person, and in some respect, the event organisers would rather this. It’s more engaging, it’s tangible and we feel more connected to the purpose. There are downsides to in-person events too. I’m sure we have all been there, it’s 5pm, you’ve just finished work and all you want to do is go home, have dinner and switch off. Then you remember you have an event to go to and it’s probably the last thing you want to do but you said you’re going so that’s what you do.

Chances are you actually enjoy it when you arrive but for an event organiser, attendee dropouts are the cause of many sleepless nights and something that virtual events in some way combat.

Replication, a personable virtual event

So how do you successfully pivot an in-person event to be run virtually? First things first, it’s not just about copying and pasting your run sheet and expecting things to just work, timings will be different, people’s attention spans will change, their motivation to attend will be less and most importantly their willingness to participate and engage will be impacted dramatically.

Our Remarkable COVID-19 care packages included lollies, t-shirts, pens, webcams and most importantly toilet paper. Something similar would be great for guests of an online event!

One thing’s for sure, hosting a virtual event will cost considerably less than an in-person event but try not to just pocket the savings for a rainy day, think about how you can use some of this budget to enhance the event experience. You could send out a tangible ticket to all attendees in the post, you could recruit a videographer to ensure your event streaming looks awesome or maybe even send your attendees a take out voucher for the likes of Uber Eats or Deliveroo to get themselves some snacks or a drink for the event. Not only will these suggestions make your attendees more likely to show up but at the same time will make them feel more connected to the event community.

Creating accessible events

Here at Remarkable, we looked at what made our events so special, what drove people to attend and what is the core objective for hosting them in the first place. We then looked at the positives of hosting a virtual event and how we could use these to our advantage. Cost savings and having the ability to enhance the event experience with this budget was on the list but as we came closer to hosting our first virtual event it became clear that in the process we had created a much more accessible event. We were no longer bound by geography, by physical spaces or by timings and whilst Remarkable strives to host inclusive events in person we are also conscious that for those people living with a disability, attending events can be challenging.

By creating a virtual event you automatically open up your doors to a much wider audience, audiences you may have never considered previously such as those overseas and you will inevitably have created a much more inclusive event in the process.

With all of this said it’s important to think about how taking an event online may have an impact on those who rely on certain aspects of physical events. Some people may not have access to a digital device, they may be living with a disability that makes it hard to connect via a virtual medium or they may rely on physical events for a sense of human connection. Whatever event platform you decide to use it’s worth keeping accessibility at the top of mind and to ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to attend.

Our virtual event toolbox

The “virtual booth” page displays the option to click on any of the #SYD20 startup booths to be able to talk with them virtually and ask any questions about their product.

When doing research on the platforms that were on the market to allow for virtual events we stumbled across Hopin. A virtual event space that mimics the same core functions you may expect to find at an in-person event. A stage, the opportunity to network, live sessions and even expo booths. Yes, that’s right, picture a trade fair you have ever been to, a concert or even an expo, Hopin now gives you the opportunity to attend these virtually.

On further research, we found that the reason Hopin was founded was to combat the very thing we had discovered from hosting our first virtual event, accessibility. To the founders of Hopin they saw a gap in the market, they saw the opportunity to create inclusive events for anyone in the world to attend with limited to no barriers of entry.

Whilst Hopin is still in its early stages of development, it proved to be hugely successful at our most recent Stakeholder & Investor night. Not only did we see the largest audience at and S&I event but we were also able to give complete control back to the attendees. They were able to navigate themselves to our startup expo booths, they were able to network with other attendees and engage with event organisers and others in the live event chat. No longer were attendees bound to us the organiser putting them in virtual boxes.

Of course, being a new platform there were a few teething issues but we are confident enough in the platform to have decided to use it again for our Demo Day next month. Demo day is our chance to showcase our fantastic #SYD20 cohort made up of seven incredible startups solving real-world issues in the disability space using technology. If you are an investor or are just interested to find out more about our startups and their founding teams then please let us know by dropping us an RSVP here.

Conclusion

Whilst we are sure in-person events will make a comeback in the not too distant future we have found the silver lining amongst some very dark clouds. It hasn’t been an easy transition for us and there has been lots to consider but we’re happy with the resolution we have come to. We still see the value of in-person events but now see the true value in hosting them virtually too. We have thought about our attendees as humans and as a community and not just digital footprints sat behind screens if you can take one thing forward to your next virtual event, take this and consider how you can host them in a new and inclusive light.

Business as Unusual

Posted on April 26, 2020June 2, 2020 by George Miller

Our Operations and Community Manager, George, loves finding technical solutions to problems so while we’re all working from home he has written a few tips on how to use technology to allow us to carry on as business as unusual.

Are you looking for ideas on how to adapt a face-to-face learning program to go online during the pandemic?

Here at Remarkable, we are four weeks into our #SYD20 accelerator program and we have had to adapt, make changes to our ways of working and think differently, and maybe some of the changes we’ve made and tools we’ve adopted might help you too.

Running an entire accelerator program online with seven startups, 14 founders, nine startup team members, 17 keynote speakers, 30 mentors, and six Remarkable team members, is by no means an easy feat. But we are lucky to have access to some incredible systems, tools, and processes to make things run that little more smoothly.

Let’s dive a little deeper into our tech stack before turning our thoughts to a human way of thinking during this time of isolation and virtual communication.

Have you heard of this new SAAS tool?

There are more tools on the market today than ever before and in this new virtual world, we have seen the entrepreneurs among us creating new platforms to help combat our new everyday problems. Let’s look at three aspects of our accelerator program, Planning, Communicating and (Visual) Human contact.

1. PLANNING

When it comes to planning an accelerator program, gone are the days of using spreadsheets, documents and calendars. Siloed information and data is a thing of the past and with this, having tens of tabs open at once just to stay on top of things. There are a handful of tools on the market to help combat the mess: Asana, Confluence, Notion, Monday.com just to name a few we’ve tried. But one tool that stands out to us is Airtable.

A screenshot of an Airtable table list. Showing the different use cases.

Airtable is Remarkable’s ‘mission control’ and is home to everything from a startup team’s contact details, weekly feedback from and about the startups, our program calendars, mentor network contact lists and more. Keeping all information in one place and linking relevant records creates a seamless and easy to use information base. Airtable’s built-in ‘blocks’ are a set of easy templates that allow us to view our program information in useful ways such as graphs of NPS scores over time, a Gantt chart of our program workshop dates and the resources required, even an easy way for us to see which mentors have been matched with which startup founders and why. It all reflects real-time data, meaning nothing is lost, reports can be generated on the fly, and no key information is missed.

Tip… Activate beast mode by unleashing Zapier and automate tasks that you find yourself repeating on a daily/weekly basis.

2. Communication

Where would we be without Slack!? There is no question that running anything virtually without a team messaging platform would be a logistical nightmare. Slack reduces email clutter, keeps relevant information in one place and means that nothing is ever missed. Here at Remarkable if Airtable is the brains of the operation, Slack is the eyes and the ears. We have over 100 active members and in any given month we see slack traffic reach well over 4,000 individual messages.

The schema we use for our Slack channels is:

#syd20	A private channel everything the Remarkable team and the whole #SYD20 cohort need to discuss
#cptoys, #geckotaxx, #handi etc…	A private channel for each startup in the cohort, for the startup team to message with each other, for our team or their mentors to message just that startup’s team without the rest of the cohort seeing.
#productsprint, #salessprint etc…	Public channels for each of our themed ‘sprint’ weeks which includes the cohort startups, Remarkable team, their mentors and subject matter experts who work with the teams just during these sprints.
#mc-custacquisition, #mc-customerdiscovery, mc-productdemo	Public channels for each of the program masterclasses – a half day workshop with presentation and team assignments. Work is posted here, copies of presentation decks, video recordings, etc.
#events, #hiring, #reading_watching, #tools etc	Public channels for specific perennial topics so that founders, mentors and Remarkable team can all share great resources, tips and ideas
#alumni	Public channel for startups from our previous cohorts continue to help each other out, help mentor our latest cohort, and seek help from the Remarkable team and mentors.

Slack Tips:

George Miller’s Slack user profile including headshot image and his contact details.

Encourage the use of message threads rather than clogging up channels with inline replies.
Airtable can post a message automatically to Slack whenever data changes in Airtable. We’ve set them up so that when a startup completes their weekly WIP report on Airtable, it posts the report directly to the #automation_updates channel on Slack.
While we don’t currently do it, we can also use Zapier to update information in Airtable from Slack. For instance, we could have a bot in Slack that asks founders to give us a ranked score on how they’re feeling today and have it update the founder’s record on Airtable.
Google Calendar can be integrated with Slack to give everyone yet one more reminder that their next Zoom call is starting soon.
Encourage everyone to fully complete their profile on Slack, including a headshot (of their actual face, not some cartoon character), startup name, team role, email and phone number. It’s hard enough to build lasting relationships between people online without people being hard to recognise and harder to reach.

ZOOM TIPS:

Visual presence

It’s all well and good having things organised and being well connected behind our keyboard but when it comes to humanising virtual life nothing comes closer than a virtual meeting. We, like so many others, use Zoom as our video conferencing tool. Breakout rooms, waiting rooms and virtual whiteboards are among some of the features that we use to make a group video session more useful.

If we can’t see or hear you, we can’t help you. There’s not much we can do about the quality of a founder’s home internet connection or the kitchen they’re connecting from but there are still some things we can do to help.

We’ve sent a number of care packages in the mail to our startup founders since the program began. In the first care package we included a Logitech C930e webcam for each founder. It was recommended as producing a much better video image than most laptop and PC cameras, can be swivelled if the user’s monitor is not directly in front, has a built-in light and high-quality microphone. It took a bit of work to find the 30 we needed and they weren’t cheap but we were able to get a bit of a discount for ordering so many at once.

Zoom mission control. The standard setup for all Zoom calls.

Tip… Use the participant view on the host account to keep control of attendee’s microphones and mute them when necessary. No one likes random background breathing, eating or barking dogs.

More breaks

One of the things we’ve learned the hard way is that masterclasses, workshops and group work online are harder for most people than in-person. People may be interrupted by their children, pets and home-working spouses or housemates. Someone may start operating a leaf blower just outside their window. And just wearing those headphones and staring at that screen seems to be more tiring than sitting in a workshop room watching and listening to someone in real life.

So we’re experimenting with taking more breaks during the course of a workshop, sprint or masterclass, trying to keep each unit of work to about 45mins with a 10min break (and allowing 5mins for stragglers and dodgy internet connections).

Listening is harder

We think we’ve also observed that listening for long periods of time is harder and founders may not naturally take notes. So we’re collaborating with our subject matter experts who join us to teach masterclasses to see if there are ways we can switch a masterclass that’s mostly about listening toward something which is partly listening, partly doing, to make sure we’re embedding more of the learning after the Zoom call has ended.

Tip: When you ask a cohort of startup founders to applaud to thank someone who’s just delivered a great class, remember that everyone can only hear one person clapping at a time because of the way Zoom handles audio. So, experiment with creative ways of visually expressing gratitude, with, say, video high-fives, waves, or dance moves.

Main rooms and breakout rooms

Breakout rooms are a double-edged sword in Zoom. In theory, it sounds great that you can put subsets of 30 people into separate rooms of four or five people so they can collaborate on a shared goal, or get to know each other better. In practice, there is a lot of shuffling of people to do, and a bit of waiting for the people involved as the admin of the Zoom call moves each person to their breakout room.

Make sure your admin person is ready to start (perhaps via the Zoom chat window) before announcing that it’s time to move into breakout rooms. Ask participants to return to the main Zoom room or to ping you in the chat window if they have questions/problems in their breakout room they need help with, or they may sit there in the breakout room twiddling their thumbs, not realising they’re allowed to ask for help.

And when a breakout room ends, you can decide on the length of time it takes before returning participants to the main room, make sure you leave enough time for the participants to finish up and capture everything they were working on (note: no video recordings are kept of breakout room discussions) so it’s a good idea for the admin to drop someone into each breakout room with 5mins, 2mins and 1min to go, just to give the teams a heads-up that they need to finish and capture their work/resolve any unresolved issues. Alternatively use the breakout room chat feature to communicate with all rooms.

3. Hello? are you there? (human contact)

We are all feeling further away from one another than ever before, the morning coffee catch up rituals are a thing of the past and Friday team drinks are a distant memory. As much as technology is great, one thing that comes with technology is the lack of personal connection and in these times this is what we all need most.

Here are just a few ways we at Remarkable try to make things a little more personal.

Personal Check-ins: Zoom calls are great but nothing beats getting a phone call out of the blue from someone checking in to make sure you’re ok. On any given week you will find the Remarkable team picking up the phone and reaching out to our network for check-ins. Tip… Try not to spend all the conversation talking about COVID-19 but encourage people to talk about what they need to talk about by trying to ask open-ended questions — “How have you been feeling?” is better than “How are you feeling right now?” and also better than, “Are you feeling a bit overwhelmed and stressed?” None of us are therapists and have no business offering therapy though, so our parent organisation, Cerebral Palsy Alliance, makes its employee counselling service available to our startup founders and the Remarkable team, for which we’re very grateful.
Look out for each other: We’re all in this together and it’s not always about work. In an office environment, we would catch up with one another about our weekends, our pets, our hobbies and everything in between. It’s a little harder to facilitate this virtually but tools like hallway.chat make a good start at bringing people together outside of fixed meetings. Tip… Start your next meeting with a 5 minute icebreaker where work talk is forbidden. Icebreaker.video is a fun tool for automating the icebreaker process online.
Don’t hide behind your screen: It’s so easy to sit at our desk when presenting on zoom but we wouldn’t dream of sitting behind our desk to present in a room full of people, so why do we do it virtually? We encourage all keynote speakers to move away from their cameras when presenting to enhance body language and interaction. Tip… Play around with the settings in your video client to maximise microphone quality when standing back from your computer. It may be necessary to ensure they have wireless earbuds.

As we all continue to embark on this new and uncertain way of working it’s important to remember that we are all human and that as much as technology helps us to run our business in this virtual world, now is the time to think about being human.