In this guide, you'll discover everything you need to know about getting into Iterative. Learn about our admission process, how to apply, and what we look for in startups. We'll also provide tips for crafting a compelling application, share valuable insights from Iterative founders, and outline what to expect after you apply.
Applying to Iterative is simple and straightforward. You can apply online at any time. To help you succeed, we've created a section here that guides you on how to answer questions from the application form, providing tips and insights to ensure you communicate your startup’s vision effectively.
Our application is open all year round and we review applications on a rolling basis. Upon admission, we transfer the full investment. We don’t wait until the program begins.
We encourage you to apply early. It gives us an opportunity to get to know you, follow your progress and hopefully be helpful along the way. Startups that submit early have a small advantage because we have more time to read their applications.
Every application Iterative receives goes through a careful process - we work hard to make sure it gets the attention it deserves (all applications are reviewed by at least 1-2 individuals). We’re always looking for a reason to invest, not a reason to say no.
The admission process consists of the following stages:
Your application is reviewed by a mix of founders in the Iterative community, the internal Iterative team and others.
If your application is passed to the next stage, you will be scheduled for a 30 minute call with one of our Venture Partners or Iterative’s Investment Team to learn more about your startup. Most of our Venture Partners are founders who have previously gone through the program.
If the first interview is positive, you will be invited to a final interview with either Brian Ma or Hsu Ken Ooi, Iterative’s General Partners. This will be a more in-depth conversation to learn about who you are and your business.
Iterative is not consensus-driven, which means only one General Partner needs to decide they want to invest.
In general, applicants should hear back from us within two weeks of submitting an application.
Iterative offers a standard deal to all companies accepted into the accelerator. We invest between USD $150,000 and USD $500,000 using a "post-money" SAFE in return for approximately 10% of your company.
Unlike traditional investments, we spend considerable time and effort helping your company. As Paul Graham from YC suggests, the best way to evaluate our deal is to consider whether our involvement will increase your company's average outcome by more than 11%. If the answer is yes, you should take the deal.
Let's do the math. Since our deal is for 10%, you need an outcome better than 1/(1-.10) = 1.11 or 11% for it to be worth it. Suppose we improve your outcome by 12%. You come out ahead because the remaining 90% you hold is worth .9 x 1.12 = 1.008. If we improve your outcome by 50%, you come out way ahead at .9 x 1.5 = 1.35.
We believe it's almost certain we will increase your average outcome by more than 11% by helping with three key aspects:
Many founders feel isolated and struggle to find support when facing tough issues and obstacles. This can hinder their startup's growth. We designed Iterative to be the best founder community in Southeast Asia. This means a community of founders in various industries, sectors, countries, and company stages who support each other. As challenges and questions arise, someone in the community can likely help.
Often, a company's growth is hindered not by money but by its founders. Without proper guidance, founders can struggle to prioritize tasks and avoid mistakes, leading to stagnation. At Iterative, we focus on helping founders improve because their growth directly impacts the company’s growth. Our program helps you set priorities, avoid mistakes, and prepare for future challenges, ensuring your startup grows steadily and quickly.
Some founders struggle with raising money, while others excel at it. The surprising thing is that fundraising is a skill you can significantly improve with the right guidance. We will likely increase your average outcome by more than 11% simply by teaching you how to fundraise effectively.
If you'd like to learn more about the specific deal mechanics and exceptions to the standard structure, you can read more here.
Iterative hosts two 12-week programs each year:
The overarching goal of our program is to significantly increase the value of startups. The best way to increase the value is by showing evidence that the startup is working on an important problem - and that it's growing fast. It's why we've structured the program to support founders and help their startups grow 5-7% every week.
To learn more about what exactly happens during the Iterative program and how we help startups grow fast, read What Happens at Iterative.
Iterative is industry and growth stage agnostic. We invest in all startups, whether you are just starting out or well along your journey. Companies that started mere weeks prior to our investment with just an idea, as well as companies with millions in revenue, have been part of the Iterative program.
Many founders think they need to have traction to be considered “ready” to apply to Iterative. This is a misconception. At Iterative, we’ve invested in companies that were just concepts, without any traction. Founders often also think that strong traction is better than a strong story when fundraising, but you might be surprised by Hsu Ken’s answer here.
If you're unsure about your readiness, you should apply anyway. Here’s why:
For startups that are still in the concept stage, we evaluate them on the same criteria as those with traction: (1) Is the startup solving an important problem? and (2) Do the founders have the ability to solve that problem? To understand how we assess these two criteria, read more here.
Accelerators are often thought of as only being helpful with early stage companies but founders of companies with millions in revenue have found our program helpful. Here's how we help them:
To sustain substantial growth, a company needs to be able to do two things in the right proportion:
Once a company grows to 15 or 20 people, it needs to go from a small tight-knit band of people to an effective organisation. In our experience, it's quite a significant shift internally and often feels like a different company afterwards. As a founder, being able to make that leap successfully is often the difference between a promising young startup and a $1B business.
Later stage fundraising is very different from all the other fundraises before it. It's a clear turning point where investors no longer will invest in just hopes and dreams. They want to see a great business. We work with founders on what they should work on how to get ready for their fundraise.
Founders often struggle to understand what venture capitalists are truly looking for, leading to frustration. Imagine pouring your heart and soul into your startup, only to face rejection because you couldn't clearly communicate the key elements investors care about. It can be discouraging, and many promising startups fail to secure funding simply due to a lack of alignment with investor expectations.
At Iterative, we want to demystify the process and help founders like you understand exactly what we look for in startups. We are always looking for reasons to invest, not reasons to say no.
A startup exists to solve a problem. The significance of the problem it addresses is crucial, as it shapes the market size, the product, and the team needed. For a startup to succeed, it must tackle a significant and important problem.
The most important problems are those that affect many people and are felt acutely by each individual. To evaluate if your startup is solving an important problem, see this post.
There are 3 key things we look for when evaluating startups:
We view the market as a by-product of the problem. Essentially, the size of the market for your product correlates with the magnitude of the problem.
As venture capitalists, we aim to back companies that can potentially reach $50-100M in revenue within 5-10 years.
To justify this, your market size should fall into one of these categories:
Understanding whether a company operates in a venture-backable market is a critical part of our funding decision process. To better understand how we look at the problem and market, watch a video of Hsu Ken's explanation here.
We look for proof that a problem exists, even at the early stages. While some might call this traction, at Iterative, we invest very early when there may be no product yet, so we prefer to call it evidence. We want to see that the founder has identified a significant pain point and gathered evidence that their solution directly addresses it. This evidence could come from product traction or other forms of validation that don't require a live product.
If you are at the idea stage and haven't gathered evidence of the problem, we highly recommend you do so. Check out this guide on how to validate your idea. You can typically gather some evidence in under a week at virtually no cost.
We assess founders based on their strengths (spikes) and weaknesses (flags). The best founders have standout qualities that set them apart, such as being highly convincing, deeply internally motivated by their problem statement, excellent at execution, and structured thinkers. To understand how we assess these qualities, read The 3 Things We Look For in Founders.
Conversely, all founders have weaknesses. We look for founders with more strengths than weaknesses, who are also self-aware and willing to work on their areas for improvement.
We held an online event where Hsu Ken Ooi shared his perspective on what we look for in founders. Click here to watch the video.
Here is a video of Cathy Guo, Principal at Iterative, sharing more about what we look for when evaluating a startup for investment.
Communicating what your startup does effectively and concisely can be surprisingly difficult. It’s a challenge because you’re often unsure of what the other person is looking for, whether you’re explaining your startup to users, investors, or prospective hires.
Without knowing exactly what information to provide or how to present it, you might struggle to convey the true potential of your startup, leaving others confused or uninterested.
To help you overcome this challenge, we’ve broken down some of the key questions in our application form. We’ll explain why we ask them and what we’re looking for, making it easier for you to provide the information that will make your application stand out.
There are 26 questions in the application form - we break down 13 of them below as they require more thought and context to answer.
We ask this question so we can quickly understand what the company does at a glance.
It’s also an indication of how deeply the founder has thought about what their company does. We find that if it’s very broad or full of jargon, they probably haven’t thought that deeply about what they’re doing. On the flip side, descriptions that are concise and specific tend to indicate that founders have thought deeply about what they’re doing.
Tip: If you find yourself with broad answers that are full of jargon, we’d encourage you to try and explain your company in as plainly as possible. Often the best explanations are those that anyone can understand regardless of what field they work in.
To Iterative, the problem that you’re trying to solve is the most important thing about your startup. It dictates your market size, what your product does, whether you’re the right people to work on it, etc.
We’re looking for startups solving important problems (see this). The most important problems are those that many people have and that each person feels acutely. They are the problems that if solved have the largest impact and as a result, have the largest market size.
Most startups describe their problem by talking about their solution or an outcome they want. Neither of these is actually a problem. For example, if you say you want to “help SMEs in Indonesia” — that’s not actually a problem. That’s a thing you want to have happen, not a problem. Instead, you want to think about things like, are they losing out on sales because they can’t take online orders? Are they unable to pay taxes because they don’t have good enough accounting records of their transactions?
Tip: If you’re having a hard time writing a concise and simple answer, try to explain it to someone who doesn’t work in tech. Parents are often good people to practice with. Can you get your parents to understand the problem you’re solving?
We’re looking for evidence that the problem you’re working on is important and that people want what you’re building.
The most valuable evidence is lots of people using your product and you’re growing quickly. If you don’t have that, it’s still valuable to have a small number of people who use your product or have signed up for it. The least valuable evidence is if you’ve done surveys. We just don’t believe that people actually behave like they say they will in surveys.
Tip: If you have no evidence, we highly recommend you get some. See this on how to validate your idea or watch this video. You can typically get some evidence in under a week for virtually no cost.
This is the market size question just phrased differently. We phrase it differently because we think of the market as a by-product of the problem. So really, how big the market for your product is, is a question of how big of a problem it is (see this for more details).
There are lots of ways to answer this question (the most common is calculating TAM either bottoms up or top down) but typically you’re making one of the following cases:
You can still do the classic TAM thing but remember to make the case for one of the above.
We ask this question to see what the founders know or believe that we don’t know or believe. We believe that all startups represent a contrarian view (often many). A startup’s success depends on whether that contrarian view is correct and the magnitude of the success is proportional to how contrarian the view is. If you know or believe something fundamental about the world that nobody else does and you’re right, that’s a very big deal.
As an example, the unique insight or approach that Uber had was (1) people are willing to get into cars with strangers, (2) by allowing strangers to drive cars, there would be 100x more people available to give rides which would make it significantly more convenient for people looking for rides and (3) the fact that phones now had GPS would make all of this possible.
This is our version of the competition question. We ask it in this way because, for a lot of startups, their competition is not another startup but a manual process or a spreadsheet. Just because you make a product for something, it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone will stop using a spreadsheet and use your product. There are always switching costs. People get used to doing something a certain way and they won’t switch unless the new way is 10x better. Knowing what people do now without your product helps us figure that out.
If you’re building a tool that helps offline SMEs track transactions, explain what the business owner does after each transaction. Do they have a physical transaction notebook that they write in after each transaction? Do they try and remember transactions and write them in the notebook when they can?
Like with all answers, explain this as simply and concisely as possible. In almost all cases, it’s not that complicated.
Startups face different problems at different stages. We find knowing a startup's metrics gives us a better indication of their stage than the amount fundraised. It also gives us a clearer sense of the type of problems the startup is facing and we can start thinking about how we can help them.
You don’t have to impress us with all the metrics you track. Pick the 3 to 5 metrics you think are most important to your business and give us those numbers on a monthly or weekly basis for the last few periods. It’s important that you give us more than one period because we care about trajectory more than the current level (see this).
Note: This is similar to the validation question but we’re explicitly asking for metrics.
We ask this question to gauge how good are the founders at learning from their users.
A strong indicator of whether a startup is going to be successful is how quickly can the founders learn about their users and do they learn things that are non-obvious. If they can do both of those things, they’re probably going to be in good shape. On the flip side, if you’ve been working on a problem for a while (more than a year) and you know as much about the problem as I do (as someone who hasn’t worked on the problem) then you’re probably in trouble.
Most of the high-quality answers to this question have to do with users. It’s often an observation about the type of people who have this problem, a non-obvious insight into how they want it to be solved or how solving it in some new way will yield a 10x better solution.
Note: This is not a question about what you’ve learned about startups. It’s about the problem and the users you’re building for. A lot of people end up sharing about their startup experience which is nice but not what the question is about.
Although we invest in the startup, often the startup is basically just the founders. This question gives us some colour on the type of people we’re investing in. There’s no right answer. Just be honest and have some fun with it.
This is mainly so we can look at who the co-founders are and how much each person owns. We do prefer to see a relatively even split between co-founders.
This is just so we’re aware. It doesn’t have a significant impact on our admissions process. We’ve invested in companies that haven’t raised any money and those that have raised over a million.
This is just so we’re aware. It doesn’t have a significant impact on our admissions process.
There’s a lot that can happen with startups. This is a catch-all question so founders can tell us early if there are any special circumstances that we should be aware of. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been anything anyone has put that caused us to reject their application out of hand. We have however rejected applications because they didn’t disclose something and we found out later. Our advice here is, to be honest and transparent.
Investors aren't incentivised to give founders feedback, so if founders do receive any, it's often vague or unhelpful. In fact, Hsu Ken hosted an online event to help teach founders How To Decode Investor Feedback.
Without feedback, founders struggle to understand why their ideas are rejected and how they can better communicate their strengths and vision. This uncertainty can hinder their progress and diminish their chances of getting funded.
To help founders navigate this challenge, we’re sharing our common rejection reasons. By understanding these, we hope founders can better communicate why they are great founders with good ideas, ultimately improving their chances of success.
This is one of the most common reasons - and the most easily misinterpreted. The definition of validation is fuzzy and means different things for different founders. We often see founders say they've successfully validated the idea or achieved significant traction, but not all validation is created equal. Customer interviews or surveys are a helpful gauge, but they aren't indicators that there's actual demand for what you're building.
A startup idea is a hypothesis about how the world is or how it works. For a startup idea to be promising, (1) the problem needs to be sufficiently large and (2) the hypothesis needs to be true.
What we mean by validation is real-life validation on the hypothesis. How many users are there? Is it growing? What's the retention like? If there's no product yet, is there a signup page to prove interest? Experimental evidence that the hypothesis is true is what we look for.
If you're really early (you're only in the ideation stage), validation is naturally harder to obtain. In this case, we'll look at other areas, like if there's a clear thesis, how strong is the market, is the space interesting, etc.
There are two markets founders operate in: (1) No competitors zone (2) Highly competitive areas. The former makes us wonder if the product is needed in the first place, while the latter is where differentiation matters. What we usually see is unconvincing differentiation from founders.
Having a better design than competitors is an example. Unless there's a unique aspect to why your customers need that better design, and it's a real hypothesis, it's not clear that having a better design is going to win.
Being cheaper is another one. Businesses rarely win a race to the bottom (unless there's a fundamental reason for it) - your solution needs to be an order of magnitude better.
Founders need to understand why the solution they have for the problem is particularly suited and differentiated for the market they're in. Great founders understand specific insights they have into their markets and use those to build moats around their businesses.
Sounds straightforward, but it's a lot more than just founders not filling up certain fields. More often than not, founders leave out key pieces of information that they likely didn't think was necessary or useful.
For example, most applications typically have reasons for why the problem area is important or why the market is huge (with buzzword-heavy descriptions), but misses out on the solution they're bringing to solve the problem. Sometimes, it's also missing what exactly they're trying to build. You know your business the best - remember to tell us what it is exactly that you're building!
There are cases where we see companies solving an important problem, but the market isn't large enough to sustain a venture business. Venture capital is about the magnitude of wins, not the number of wins. While businesses that get to $10M can do very well, venture capital requires companies to get to $150M+ businesses in short periods of time to make sense.
If you're pitching your business as a sure thing (probability of win) and not how big it can be (magnitude of win), it might be tougher for you to raise capital from venture capitalists.
There’s a big difference between being “software-enabled” vs. being a “tech startup”.We typically invest in the latter, which means we look for businesses with technology as the key differentiator. We know the word ‘technology’ is diluted, so one way to think about it is: “Is this startup going to win because of a tech advantage?” If the answer's no (even if the startup may be end up being a good business, like consultancies or florists), we're more inclined to pass.
To better understand how to tackle some of our common rejection reasons, watch this video.
If you are unsuccessful in your application, you can apply again for the following batch. We provide detailed feedback to every company we interview to help founders improve their chances of success.
Founders might believe that reapplying will hurt their chances of success. However, our data shows that applying multiple times actually increases the chances of being accepted:
Many Iterative founders first applied with just an idea at the beginning of their journey. By reapplying to each subsequent batch, they allowed us to be part of their progress and understand how they grow, execute, and learn.
The company either needs to be based in Southeast Asia or focused on a market in Southeast Asia.
We prefer all founders join as we are investing in a team of founders, not one specific person.
Generally, within two weeks. Right before an application deadline, we usually experience a spike in applications, which can cause some delays. We encourage folks to apply as early as possible to hear back from us in a timely manner.
We invest in both solo founders and co-founding teams.
No, you don’t need to incorporate before applying. You will need to incorporate to get funded, but we make our decisions to invest in a company regardless of whether they’re incorporated. If we want to invest and you haven’t incorporated, we can help you get incorporated.
We strongly recommend being a Singapore entity because you'll vastly increase your chances of getting subsequent funding from investors. That said, it’s not necessary to be a Singapore entity to apply to Iterative. We've helped our companies make this transition during the program.
No, a college degree does not matter to us. We accept founders who have dropped out or not graduated. In fact, there are no hard requirements when applying to Iterative.
We don’t invest in founders who are not working on their startup full-time. Regardless of the number of hours you’re spending on the startup. In our experience, startups are hard enough if it’s the only thing someone is focused on. We think it’s too difficult to be the founder of a successful startup with other academic or professional obligations.
Yes, you can still apply to Iterative. We've invested in companies that have come from other accelerators.
If your application gets passed to the interview stage, we’ll want to have a good understanding of why you think it's necessary to join another accelerator. If you are looking to learn something specific, we’ll want to understand why your previous accelerator didn’t help you do that.
Our main reason for these types of questions is we want to make sure that we can help you fill these gaps. If we don’t feel like we can help you, we will tell you.
You can apply once per batch. For example, if you applied already for the S23 batch program, you will need to wait until the next batch application opens to apply again.But do apply! Historically, companies that applied to us multiple times tended to have a higher acceptance rate (2x higher) than for first-time applicants.
You can absolutely apply again. Previously applying does not hurt your chances. Historically, companies that applied to us multiple times tended to have a higher acceptance rate (2x higher) than for first-time applicants.
If you’re unsure whether you’re at the right stage, we recommend you apply.
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