<aside> 🤩 Hi there, this is Wouter from Lanced ✌🏼.
You are reading our first official Investors Update… If you told me a couple of years ago that I would be writing Investors Updates, I would have laughed! I always wanted my own production company, not the company that would be behind the software of those productions 🤪. But in all honesty, I love going down this tech entrepreneurship route 🤩.
But that’s enough personal storytelling for now. Let’s get to the stuff that you are interested in; what have we been up to?
</aside>
First of all, I am excited to share that Lanced is the first Dutch Startup 🇳🇱 to join the CultTech Accelerator in Vienna.
We started the program off with a 2-day kick-off in Vienna. It was incredibly informative and mostly just great to be with other founders of CultTech startups.
In the coming months, we will be working with an incredible team of coaches, mentors, advisors, and experts from both the Culture & Technology sectors.
We launched our MVP in December 2022 and have worked with 3 large theaters in Switzerland and Germany. Working with these theaters has gotten us a lot of new insight into how they use our MVP and what they would like to see added.
But even though our MVP lacks features and certain functionalities, they absolutely love our product! The directors have even already started to recommend it to directors of other theaters.
Here’s what they had to say:
We are currently very busy with V2 of our product. V2 will have a brand-new navigation interface and will include multi-user workspaces, personalized notes, and more dynamic features for auditions and castings.
We are in the process of raising a Pre-Seed round of €500k.
Yeah, that’s a lot of money! So what will we use the money for?
Since we have gotten our first paying test customers and gotten such great feedback from them, it is time to bring our product to the market. Bringing our product to market means that we need to expand its features into a more marketable product, set up a marketing strategy, and build out our sales funnels.
That’s a lot of work to do with just the 2 of us.
So, that’s we plan to use the funds to expand our team and hire in sales, tech, and marketing roles.
The €500k will predominantly be used for this next phase of our venture → the go-to-market phase.
The CultTech Accelerator was inspired by the Immaterial Future Association and created in collaboration with Female Founders, as its strategic partner for the initial phase, bringing together expertise and networks across the startup, tech, culture, and art scenes in Europe and beyond. The Accelerator was born with the vision of creating a unique accelerator program dedicated to supporting and guiding the most promising startups in the CultTech scene, into becoming global players, and to creating the CultTech movement by providing a space for a global and growing community. The startups who take part in this program all have a venture concept that addresses either innovation, growth, management, or societal impact concerning and affecting the culture industry.
The CultTech scene is growing, but there are challenges these startups face, making the funding process unique to the sector. Misconceptions on CultTech ventures exist, such as it being too much of a niche product and for a small target group only, or that it can provide high social impact only, but no high profitability, and that it is not easy to find a scalable business model for this type of startup. So far, no accelerator programs exist for all-encompassing cultural startups, but the CultTech Accelerator is determined to see these promising ventures rise up to their potential.
Taking these challenges into consideration, the 3-month, equity-free CultTech accelerator program, also includes deep-dive sessions with successful founders in the CultTech space, hands-on workshops with Europe’s leading early-stage investors, and personal support from experienced mentors. What’s more, the program unites like-minded people, organizations, and stakeholders in the CultTech community, building a fantastic long-term networking environment. Founders will have the opportunity to meet, exchange, and learn from one another.