Womentum 2018: The impact of taking startups to the next level

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Womentum 2018: The impact of taking startups to the next level

Womentum is all about the impact. Every component is engineered to give our entrepreneurs the support they need to thrive in tough environments and drive their businesses to success.

From business and financial modeling, to marketing and branding, the program is built to get startups investment ready all while leveraging womena’s media platform to give them exposure to a global audience.

We surveyed the graduates of our first accelerator cycle about the impact it had on their startups and their personal growth. Overall, they gave womentum a Net Promoter Score of 97.5 percent.

“Womentum took us from a struggling startup to this more polished, stronger, confident, investment-inclined business,” says Ingi Naguib, co-founder of Furnwish, one of the Egypt-based startups our 2018 cohort.

We tracked the before and after results in order to determine the program’s impact, and here are a few highlights:

Exposure, marketing and branding

One of the hardest challenges entrepreneurs face is getting the exposure and access to potential clients that they need with very little marketing dollars. Womentum’s media platform gives startups the opportunity to reach a global audience. Womentum-related media pieces reached an audience of 5 million, resulting in a marked increase in startups’ regional exposure by an average of 75 percent. They also saw a 224 percent increase in website traffic, which has translated into an average of 58 percent increase in users of the participating startups.

Building a strong company

Any company preparing to scale and survive in the long term needs to be building on strong business fundamentals. The womentum program focuses on helping entrepreneurs get it right from the bottom up. The program tackles issues like financial and business model, setting up vital legal components and building strong trust and relationships between the co-founders. As a result, the graduating companies estimated a 78 percent improvement in their financial model, with 53 percent implementing changes in their business model during the program. Founders estimated a 67 percent improvement in their legal structures and knowledge, while rating their personal growth at 85 percent. These points resulted in an improvement in overall business health by 78.6 percent.

Preparing for investment

Success at raising capital is a combination of having a strong business case, accessing investor networks and the skills to be able to create a memorable pitch. As investors ourselves, we designed every step of the program with investment and investiblity in mind. Pitch training happens throughout the program, focusing on everything from pitch deck redesign and branding, to presentation skills and investor Q&A. The graduating startups reported an average of 82.5 percent improvement in their investment pitch. The demo day and networking events are exclusive to investors, with startups coming away from the program in talks with an average of five investors and closing more than $550,000 post-cycle to date.

If you are a women-led early-stage startup in MENA, apply now to be part of our next Womentum cohort.

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