Seed-DB was launched on July 25th, and since then it’s been a fascinating ride. Here is the latest news on everything related to seed accelerators and Seed-DB.
Follow Seed-DB on Twitter
Seed-DB now has a Twitter account: @GoSeedDB. Follow it to get all of the latest updates and announcements on the site. Like this newsletter, it will be low-traffic with just important updates for startups, accelerators, and investors.
Y Combinator Demo Day — public/stealth analysis
Some accelerators (like TechStars) publicly announce all of their companies at their Demo Days; while startups in other program (like Y Combinator) only publicly announce when they’re ready. Y Combinator’s Demo Day is taking place on Tuesday, August 21st.
In this years’ Y Combinator Summer 2012 class, there are 84 startups. As of today (Monday, August 20th), 50 of these startups (60%) have already gone public. I would expect another 10–15 startups to go public on Demo Day, leaving 20–30% of the startups to go public at some point in the future.
This past month on Seed-DB
I’ve focused effort on Seed-DB in the last month on two main themes:
- improving breadth and quality of data
- bug fixes in the application
In less than 30 days, the number of companies in the database has increased 25% to over 1600 companies. VC funding tracked has also increased by about 25% to over $1.28billion. And the number of jobs also increased 25% to over 3700 jobs created. Thanks to lot of feedback from accelerators and startups, I’ve cleaned up the data sources to improve the quality of data on Seed-DB, too. (There’s a link on every page where you can get in touch with me if you have data to correct!)
One problem with articles like Jared Konczal’s in Forbes is that the data in Seed-DB is still very preliminary; there are many gaps. I’ve tried to make these clear; users can now see what startups are associated with Crunchbase pages (and thus I’ve able to get funding/employee data) and which startups don’t have this data.
Finally, by launching and getting valuable feedback from a number of people I’ve identified and fixed a number of bugs in the application. Thank you to everyone that’s reached out to me with corrections.
Important upcoming feature
The biggest upcoming feature is an application deadline tracker. I’ll be adding a column to my list of accelerators to highlight programs that are open for applications. I hope this will help startups find accelerators that they might not otherwise know about.
Seed accelerators in my list will be able to send me the date applications open and close, as well as a link to their application page. If you run a seed accelerator, please e-mail me and I’ll add you to my announcements list once this functionality is ready to go.
Advice for seed accelerators
There are a few recommendations I have for seed accelerators everywhere:
- Make it easy to find your startups; a portfolio page or something similar. (You’d be surprised how difficult it is to find startups from some programs.) If you can’t promote your startups on your own website, why are you doing it? Ideally categorize them by class.
- Get startups to create a Crunchbase entry, and at least ensure they add the funding they got from your accelerator.
Thanks for listening; and be sure to follow @GoSeedDB!
Jed Christiansen 