Our Mission is Audacious Dude – To Find and Empower Neo’s.

Neo

(If you’ve not seen the movie The Matrix, Neo’s are people who have a special ability and unique role to play in making the world a better place)

To achieve this mission The Startup Race motivates gifted serial entrepreneurs (we call them Neo’s) to redefine the most effective way to build a successful startup by competing against their peers to see who can achieve the most growth in the shortest period of time.

We then share these approaches with other entrepreneurs and startup founders all around the world to increase their chances of success.

We do this because the current teaching about startup success is not doing entrepreneurs many favors.

Drawing on the largest customer development data set in the world, Patrick Campbell of Price Intelligently and ProfitWell’s recent industry research of thousands of startups has revealed that Competition is up, what people are willing to pay is down by 50% and Customer Acquisition Costs are also up by 50%. These market conditions are further compounded by the fact that:

  • Only 10% of startups have detailed Customer Personas
  • 70% don’t talk to their customers on a regular basis
  • 50% don’t test or experiment to validate their assumptions
  • 85% are primarily focused on Acquisition
  • Only 15% are focused on Monetization

The Startup Race believes there is a different way

Motivated by gamification principles such as competition, accountability and rewards, the positive peer community in The Startup Race empowers entrepreneurs to move more quickly in the right direction by focusing on their most important tasks and wasting less time on distracting activities.  Instead of spending weeks filling in startup competition application forms for some assessment panel to decide whether their idea is a good one or not, The Startup Race calls them to focus on asking the person who really matters, whether they really need and will pay good money for what they have to offer – their customer.

Instead of standing on stage after stage in front of hundreds of other entrepreneurs and their funding hanging in the balance from their ability to impress judging panels in a terrifying five minutes, The Startup Race empowers them to prove what they can deliver over a three month period and provide the information investors are really looking for and demonstrate impressive traction.

Features we will offer include:

  • Articles revealing best practices so entrepreneurs can avoid making the same mistakes
  • Tools to help Startup Founders focus on and measure their priorities
  • A community of like-minded, ambitious entrepreneurs
  • A structured process to guide their talent and effort
  • Assessment tools to determine how their startup’s doing
  • Creation of their startup’s profile so Investors can follow them
  • Curation of the world’s best startup resources

The Origin Story

The Startup Race was conceived in the autumn of 2015 as a result of a conversation between entrepreneurs based in Edinburgh who wanted to gamify the startup process…

The Team

James Shoemark

James Shoemark

Co-Founder & CEO

Serial Entrepreneur, Community Education BA from The University of Edinburgh

Michael Clouser

Michael Clouser

Co-Founder

Former VC, Academic Entrepreneur at Cornell University and The Universty of Edinburgh

Dan Drummond

Dan Drummond

Co-Founder

First in Economics and Business Management from Heriot Watt University

Anastasios Pardalis

Anastasios Pardalis

Co-Founder

Management with Marketing from The Robert Gordon University