How this women-led incubator is providing personalised support to startups from across India?

Tanvi and Disha Singla founded Supreme Incubator to offer mentorship, infrastructure, and hands-on coaching to early-stage entrepreneurs and startups from around the country. Born in a family of entrepreneurs, Tanvi Singla and Disha Singla, co-founders of Supreme Incubator, realised the power of entrepreneurship early on. The sisters say they witnessed the result of business firsthand – jobs created, problems solved, and passions leading to a better future for everyone.

Tanvi is a graduate of Shri Ram College of Commerce. Following graduation, she joined her family-owned financial services business. Having grown up in an entrepreneurial family, she was from an early age aware of the power of entrepreneurship. Tanvi started Supreme Incubator with Disha Singla after co-leading projects over several months.

In addition to managing Supreme Incubator, she is a Global Shaper with the New Delhi Hub- an initiative of the World Economic Forum, where she is leading a project on awareness about and access to sustainable menstruation products. She strongly believes in investing in the community, and though for the time-being Supreme Incubator is sector agnostic, in the future, Tanvi expects it to have a social impact track.

Tanvi Singla, Co-founder, Supreme Incubator

Tanvi talks about why startups need incubation. She told CiOL, “At an early stage, it is critical for founders to build a strong foundation to set up for success. Through incubators, startups get access to the network of supportive and experienced mentors, who’ve “been there, done that” to guide the founders with their insights; investment ecosystem, that is the opportunity to get fund-ability feedback from a panel of angel and VC investors; and resources to develop their soft skills and tools to save costs on commonly used startup services.”

She adds, “We’ve seen many founders bit by the glam-bug of entrepreneurship, swayed by the funding announcements in the media and taking the same as a goal for their ventures. However, in the initial stages, it can help founders to be surrounded by a supportive ecosystem of mentors, resources and infrastructure that enable idea validation and market planning in the right manner.”

The Customer

Tanvi says, “Our target audience comprises early-stage founders who are truly passionate about their ventures. The selection criteria rely on 2 main factors: usability of the solution and commitment of the founders.”

“What we seek for our program are dedicated teams, who ideally are internally self-sufficient in building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and have a strong reason to be doing what they are doing. When it comes to the stage of progress, we generally take in teams that are post MVP or at an early launch stage. Geographically, with the program now being delivered virtually, founders from any part of the world can apply and get access to mentors, resources, investors and an inspiring peer community. With this move, we intend to expand this support to founders who are building solutions in places with under-developed startup ecosystems.”

Starting in October 2019, they held a pilot programme for the first cohort of Supreme Incubator, inducting a total of eight startups shortlisted from over 102 applicants across the country. So far, eight startups have graduated from their pilot cohort in Winter 2019, and 14 startups (30 founders) are enrolled in the current Summer 2020 cohort.

Additionally, 98 startup founders participated in a Startup Bootcamp series organised early during the lockdown, in collaboration with LaxmiRamaVarma Capital, and 30 founders participated in its mentor-matchmaking programme - designed to enable founders to fill a form and get matched with a mentor fit for their startup goals. Around 102 students participated in their virtual entrepreneurship fest: a series of events including a startup ideation contest and a pitching demo.

The Challenge

Tanvi talks about the three-fold problem that exists within the ecosystem. They are:

• Network access: Startups from Tier 2/3/4 cities aren’t always able to as readily access the startup networks as their metro counterparts.
• Personalised Support: In addition to the commonly available structured programs of 3/6/9 months, startups seek personalised support and 1:1 regular coaching to boost their success.
• Community: Entrepreneurship is a lonely journey, and it can go a long way for founders to get regular mentorship and build their ventures alongside a community of fellow entrepreneurs on the same ride.

...and overcoming them

Incubators and startup support ecosystems, as a whole, are going through the same magnitude of change with the advent of virtual working environments, as all companies across the globe. The only bigger challenge here is that such systems thrive on community relationships and learnings - which can only be enabled to an extent through a web conference. Most of the peer learning and program structures rely on face-to-face interaction among the founders and mentors. With the virus outbreak, Supreme Incubator immediately shifted their base online - transitioning to virtual meetings, mentor matches and sessions.

“In virtual meetings, it can be challenging to enable more peer-to-peer connections, something we believe to be the core of our program. But we’ve come to adapt different ways to keep the conversation going and augment this gap, from exploring smaller & more intimate meetings to building a technology infrastructure to take our program further.

The challenge has primarily been involving the community in an engagement outside of a bunch of web/video conferences. While the energy of an on-site program is unmatched, going virtual has its own benefits - we can cater to startups across the globe, we can engage mentors from anywhere in the world, there is increased participation, and we can explore exciting ways to offer deeper on-demand support for entrepreneurs, in a bid to redefine incubation as we know it."

The Solution

“When conceptualising the program structure, personalised mentorship and peer networking emerged as necessary pillars of building a strong support ecosystem for startup founders,” implores Tanvi. “To date, we abide by the same.”

Founders joining Supreme come with their ventures at early stages, join a community of other founders and, together with getting off the ground amidst a tight-knit network of experienced mentors and advisors. She added that they continue to focus on small cohort sizes of 10-15 companies. "Smaller the communities- the greater scope there is to foster peer-to-peer feedback and learning. The goal is to leverage the network effect of startup-Supreme, startup-startup, and startup-mentor communities," she opines.

USP

The startup enabler space has several players and is growing with a simultaneous increase in innovative startups being founded by dedicated teams. There are numerous amazing startup ecosystem enablers in our country and around the world, each with its own unique reason to support entrepreneurship. While many are for local/regional development, there are also programs for vertical niches like education or health and corporate-backed innovation centres. To add to the existing support infrastructure, Supreme is built as a horizontal incubator supporting early-stage startups with strong teams.

“What sets Supreme apart is our geography; in that, we accept startup applications from around the world and don’t limit the founders to have to locate to our headquarters in New Delhi. Additionally, we’ve built the program around helping “early-stage” startup founders - a critical stage for startups to build strong foundations and build right from the start,” she said. “Most importantly, we focus on a tailored approach for each venture, as despite being in the same segment by their stage, founders in our cohorts come in from different backstories, views and visions for their ventures - and so we leverage that to build strong one-to-one relationships with each founder to chart the way that works best for them.”

The team

Tanvi talks about her team passionately. “We each bring very different perspectives into Supreme. While Disha Singla (my sister and Co-founder of Supreme Incubator) has finance and management as her core expertise and experience with the startup ecosystem in the US, I lead the core operational and strategic arms of relationship building with stakeholders and development of the program. Together, we’ve leveraged our personal networks, and networks of our community to build a strong mentor network, investor network and partner network, each of which is critical to the success of our program,” she adds.

What defines success for you?

To this, Tanvi says, “Success for Supreme Incubator comes through more entrepreneurs succeeding, building enterprises and creating jobs. Our vision is to build a worldwide network and support founders where they are and enable them to build strong local entrepreneurial communities.”

A quick review of the graduates of Supreme Incubator

“Supreme Incubation Program was a great experience for an early-stage venture, like MyWays. From office space to some useful brainstorming and mentor sessions, it provided everything that a startup needs at that stage. Extensive mentor network is the best part of the Supreme Incubator.” - Samyak, Founder and CEO at MyWays

“Supreme incubator is one of the best incubators for Startups in India. Our startup got all the support and guidance needed. The whole program is designed to get every aspect covered needed during the initial phase of the startup to kick-start your ideas.”  - Sheetal Aroa, Co-founder at Sportsthat.