Inside Antler India Residency

About Me

First of all, I would like to tell you about my situation and what lead me to apply to Antler.

I am a tech guy, I can code, and have built SAAS products in the past.

But for me the challenge was I don’t have ideas and domain knowledge to solve problems and build a product for them. And that's why I wanted to join Antler to find people with business ideas looking for tech co-founders and builders. As I am good at building and product thinking I believe utilizing my strong side and helping someone else build makes more sense than forcing myself to look for an idea of my own.

I was in the first cohort of the Antler India Residency program.

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About the Interview

For me, the interview had 4 rounds for some people it can be lesser as well.

In the interview, they mainly try to find out below things about yourself.

• They want to know about your journey,
• what have you done in the past for entrepreneurial aspirations,
• Why you wanna build a company,
• Why this is the right time for you to get into it full-time to build a company

My suggestions for the interview

So there isn’t any specific preparation you can do for it.
The only thing you need to do is tell about your journey, motivations, aspirations etc in detail. Be yourself.

In the program

The first 2 weeks of the programme were offline and it was in Bangalore. The main purpose of the 2 weeks was to get to know your cohort. Each and every person.

The rest of the 10 weeks were online.

My suggestions when you are in the programme

If you are reading this section then I am presuming you have made it to the programme and congratulations on that.

Below are some points I will suggest when you are on the programme

• If you have an idea already, then don’t stop building it when you are in the programme.
  Don’t think I will first find the co-founder and then only will start or continue building it.
  Keep doing whatever you can to make progress in the idea. Do user research, get UI UX designs built etc
• Most of the teams won’t get funding and if you invested the whole 3 months without making any progress in your idea it is very unproductive of your time.
• Try to balance out things between giving efforts to find a co-founder and building your idea.

About finding the co-founder

The key is to ask difficult questions with whom you are looking to partner. For a longterm good relation. Antler will help you with this as well.

A few hard questions I can think of which wasn’t there in the Antler spreadsheet

• What will happen if your team doesn’t get funding from Antler
• Are you going to look for other funding opportunities or are you going to bootstrap it till some traction is there?
• If you are going with bootstrapping how much money can the team put into for building the product, doing marketing etc
• All about equity split, ESOP pool, the monthly salary for founders, vesting etc(these were there in Antler Provided Spreadsheet)

Commons Questions

1. Did you end up finding your cofounder/business idea?

   Answer:
   Yes, I did join a team, it was a healthcare product idea, but we didn't get funding from Antler and the other founders were not inclined to pitch to other investors for funding and for some other reasons I exited from the team.

2. Is the program really worth it if you already have a cofounder and an idea but you're just trying to expand your team and possible funding?

   Answer:
   I feel it's not worth it if you already have a cofounder and have an idea, you can directly pitch to Antler or any other VC for funding

3. what happens after the 3 months?

   Answer:
   In the last month, teams pitched to Antler for funding, If you get selected and get funding from Antler then you continue building, and Antler remains involved as a VC.
   If a team doesn't get funding from Antler then the team is on their own, whatever they want to do, continue building, pitch to other investors etc, all of it is up to the team and Antler doesn't have anything to do with the team anymore legally. But you will always be part of the network and community.

Disclaimer

All of it is my personal thoughts and there isn’t anything right or wrong about it.
Take this just as a piece of casual advice and do things as per you find suitable.