Participants Learning Google Launchpad Accelerator Third Batch

After participating in an intensive program for 2 weeks in San Francisco, United States, the participants of the third stage of the Google Launchpad Accelerator have returned to their homeland and shared their experiences with the media crew. Terms such as "Design Sprint" and Objective and Key Results (OKR)" are jargon adopted by startup activists who experience firsthand how to learn with experienced mentors.

PicMix, Ruma, Qlue, Snapcart, Jurnal, and iGrow are the 6 lucky startups participating in the Launchpad Accelerator program this time. Various interesting and unique experiences were presented by them, but 2 points became things that were constantly mentioned, namely the application of the Design Sprint and OKR in product development and the startup itself.

Menurut manifesto, Design Sprint is a process within 5 days to answer critical business questions through the design process, prototyping, and testing ideas directly to consumers.

Ruma CEO Aldi Haryopratomo said that at first he did not believe Design Sprint was able to solve the problems faced by his startup. After meeting with mentors who are experts in this field, he finally believes that Design Sprint is a concept that every startup should use to ensure the products developed are in line with consumer needs.

Identification of consumers and validation of ideas are considered important when a startup wants to develop a product to solve a problem. The participants of this third batch of Launchpad agreed that if they could change the time and run their startup from scratch, they would do these things first.

Determination of focus metrics is also an important point for a startup. Through methodology OKR, startups can find out which metrics should be the focus of attention (and goals) for a startup. Before using OKR, most startups probably only cared about revenue metrics, download metrics, or even app store ratings. It turns out that this is not necessarily true if the goal is to get valid data from consumers or solve consumer problems.

Of course, Launchpad is not just about technical problems. Many aspects of the business are discussed to help startups solve the problems they face.

"Google's Launchpad Accelerator program has completely changed my perspective on how to run a business," said Journal CEO Daniel Witono.

After an intensive acceleration period of 2 weeks, for the next 6 months, startups participating in Launchpad Accelerator will continue to receive guidance from mentors via video conferencing. They also get $50k worth of non-equity funds, most of which will be put into pool of funds product development. In total, until batch Third, Google has provided $1 million in funding for Indonesian startups

Launchpad Accelerator fourth stage and Android Pursuit

Google also announced the opening Launchpad Accelerator fourth stage which will be open until April 24, 2017 and Android Pursuit activities in Indonesia. This series of activities is the realization of Google's promise to help the Indonesian government train 100 thousand developers.

The fourth phase of Launchpad will increase the number of participants from new countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. It is expected that participants from Indonesia will remain 6 teams like batch previously. One of Launchpad's current developments is the use of dedicated space in Launchpad Space, the number of mentors reaching more than 150 people, and dedicated time slots for important topics, such as Design Sprint,

When asked about the diversity of participating startups, such as startups based on women's issues or women's products, Google Southeast Asia Developer Relations Program Manager Erica Hanson answered that he hopes to embrace more startups in this segment. For three batch In progress, Launchpad has only recently taken on a startup based on women's products, namely HijUp.

Android Kejar, on the other hand, is an Android programming teaching program through workshops and supported online learning through Udacity. Throughout 2016, it was stated that Google's mentors had trained 3311 Indonesian developers.