BeehiveID in Azure Accelerated – What It Takes
BeehiveID has recently graduated from the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure in Seattle. It was run by TechStars and structured like any TechStars program, but we got to work very closely with Microsoft. I haven’t talked much about our experience there but I’m going to dedicate a few blog posts to it because we have a lot of people ask us about accelerator programs in general and TechStars in specific. Plus it was a wonderful experience, kind of like a cross between graduate school and summer camp. They did a series of videos and I’ll be linking to those as well.
We actually started the program with the the tag line “Twilio for biometric matching”. Our first concept was to create an API so that other developers could incorporate biometric matching – fingerprint, iris or face – into their own applications with one or two lines of code. Biometrics is a field that is growing rapidly and there are many, many applications of the technology but it’s a bit on the arcane, poorly documented side. We thought (and still do) that it would be cool to develop a tool that would make it easier.
The thing about TechStars, and I suspect every accelerator program out there, is that despite the “Tech” in the title, the focus is on the market. It doesn’t matter how cool your technology is if nobody will buy it. More start-ups fail because they build something wonderful that nobody wanted than vice versa. It became clear early on that selling to developers was going to be difficult. So almost the first thing we did was toss out the business concept that got us accepted into the program and start over.