My company was recently accepted into the 500 Startups accelerator program which, is one the most exclusive in the world. There is approx. a 3% acceptance rate. For the last couple months, I’ve been spending every other week in Silicon Valley at their HQ in Mountain View, CA. Needless to say we’ve been pushing it hard and earning a lot of sky miles.

500 Startups is a micro VC and as part of the program, they invested $100K in our company. There is also an investment made with their network of mentors and CEOs who are there to help you grow and keep you accountable.

There is a lot of hype from the outside about these accelerators. I wasn’t sure at first if I wanted to do it. After all, we had an existing business with customers and revenue. I was worried that we would get there and would be told to start over and redo our product.

What I found was different than what I had expected. We have barely talked about our product. I guess the assumption is that you already have a solid working product; otherwise you would not have been accepted into the program in the first place. The main focus is on how to scale your business. They push you for growth and then hold you accountable each week for hitting specific growth metrics.

Since joining the program we have quadrupled our level of sales outreach to build up our customer pipeline and are developing a repeatable sales process. Having a level of accountability each week where you have someone asking simple questions such as ‘why didn’t you hit your metrics?’ or ‘you didn’t have time to pick up the phone and call that prospect, really?’ all hit home hard when you’re looking someone in the eyes and you know there is a high expectation for you to deliver.

It’s not all roses. Things could be organized much better. It’s one of those deals where it’s totally up to you to get what you want out of the program. There are lots of resources available to you but it’s up to you to go get them.

We actually don’t spend the majority of our time at the program when we’re traveling there. Much of the time we spend visiting prospects in the Bay area based on our sales efforts. The amount of learning that we have done in such a short period of time has been phenomenal. There are a lot of talented people in the Bay area due to the strong startup ecosystem. We just brought on a new strategic investor after being there for only two months.

I absolutely would recommend the 500 Startups program for other entrepreneurs. The program has pushed us out of our comfort zone in a good way while providing guidance to scale our company. We’ve learned that there is no silver bullet. Growing the company into our vision is in front of us if we hustle like hell and go out and get it!