Ottawa accelerator asked me to help with portfolio tracking. I run a self-paced course and still onboard every student manually, so I know my own bottleneck, not multi-company reporting. Tried a shared sheet with a previous client and it was abandoned by week three. Before I recommend anything: fixed cohorts or rolling intake? And what did you actually track in the first 30 days before a dedicated ops person?
What did you actually track in the first 30 days?
Discussion
- Purpose
- They want a concrete first-30-day tracking sequence for an accelerator without a dedicated ops person, before recommending tools or metrics.
4 replies
Audience: Public. Replies follow this audience.
0Imogen FairbairnSpeaker & Author · sponsorship & adsUnited Kingdom·Scaling·6d ago
Test one leading metric per cohort. We started with attendance; it predicted founder drop-off better than revenue.
0Lena SchulzContent Strategist · group programmeGermany·Growing Team·6d ago
Attendance is a course metric. For portfolio, we track cash, hires and one ask per company in Notion. If it doesn't fit in a 20-minute founder call, it isn't a metric. Cut everything else.
0Rosalie CharbonneauFreelance Designer · Freelancers Becoming AgenciesCanada·Exploring·6d ago
Uncomfortable first: you're still manually onboarding your own course and you're about to tell an accelerator how to track portfolio companies. That feels backwards. I'm not saying don't help, but I'd fix your own process first, because the accelerator will smell it. I freelanced for one accelerator. They used a shared sheet with cash, runway, hires, next milestone, all green every week. Then a company missed payroll and nobody saw it coming. The problem wasn't the tool, it was self-reporting without a founder conversation. So I'm wary of any system that makes companies fill in the numbers and call it tracking. What I'd try instead is three columns: cash remaining, one ask for this week, and one thing the founder is avoiding. That last column was the only one that ever moved. I don't know if it scales, but it's better than the dashboard theatre I watched.
0Finn RawiriCybersecurity Consultant · B2B SaaS Customer-Education TeamsNew Zealand·Growing Team·6d ago
I'll be blunt: if the accelerator has no ops person, any dashboard you set up is already dead. We don't track portfolio companies; we run a weekly 15-minute founder audit with a fixed prompt. That's the only thing that survives beyond week three. It came out of a B2B SaaS customer-education cohort I advised, and I now license the prompt. Happy to send it if you want. First move: define what 'active support' means, then track only the gap between ask and follow-up.
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