Your entrepreneurial journey starts here  

Each studio startup is unique and follows its own path, but let’s try to sum up the general framework:

• Each startup studio comes up with a unique business idea to solve a pain. This idea is generally scoped through a wireframe which describes the MVP and a note which outlines the opportunity and the go-to-market strategy.
• Entrepreneurs come knocking at our door and we pitch them ideas we currently have in the pipe. Once we have assembled a founding team - typically made of two co-founders: a business and a tech profile - we can get the project started. Together with the founders, we spend 12-18 months in the same office to transform the idea into an early company. We focus on 3 dimensions: we build a product, we build a team, we acquire the first customers. Our goal is to make the company fully independent.
• Once the startup has enough traction, we pitch early stage investors (Angels, Seed funds) to raise a Seed round (typically $1-2M). The fundraising enables the company to become fully independent, it takes off from the studio and moves into its own office.
• Studios remain a key shareholder and continue to help the founders and the team on strategy and funding as well as some operational issues from time to time (e.g., recruiting, team structuring, etc.). We generally stay very close to the company, as we maintain strong relationships with the founders and know the business very well.

Every month, entrepreneurs reach out to us to express their interest in launching a company with one of our startup studios. When we sit down with them, we want to have a real and open conversation, similar to when two people meet for a coffee for the first time. The aim is to get to know each other, identify mutual areas of interest and assess the possibility of working together in the long run.

The discussions are led by the studio founders responsible for each idea.

We have three kinds of discussions in the partnering process:

• fit and skills discussion - are we a good professional match?
• idea fit - as we’re spending more and more time together working on the business idea, do we feel that we’re going in the same direction?
• ownership - as our discussion moves forward, do we feel that entrepreneurs are taking ownership of the idea and bringing their own vision and insights to it?
• co-founder match - if a co-founder's already in place, do we think there's a match?

There is no typical founder profile within Hexa. Founders we have worked with in the past differ along all dimensions: previous entrepreneurial experience, age, education, specific industry expertise.

In our initial discussions, we try to understand the founder’s profile and skills across four key dimensions:

• Entrepreneurial mindset
• Analytical skills
• Communication skills
• Specific industry expertise

The founders join at the very beginning of the venture, before the first line of code is even written or the first team member is hired, so that they can build and own the full journey. Generally, the two founders' arrival is not completely synchronized: often times the technical founder will arrive first and start building the product.

Hexa and therefore each studio isn't an agency: our core team is a full-time co-founder on each project. It takes around 18 months to build a company starting from the initial idea. During this phase, the Hexa and studio teams are  fully hands-on alongside the founding team, working on product, design, strategy, go-to-market, recruiting, funding, etc. Besides being extremely hands-on, our core objective is to build a team and help them become progressively autonomous on each of these dimensions. We build independent companies.

The key difference with integrated studios (e.g., Rocket Internet) really lies in the fact we're building independent ventures from both an operational and a financial standpoint. This means that Hexa does not provide shared resources in consulting mode to independent companies, hexa does not provide funding to independent companies. Conversely, studios acts as a co-founder involved in every aspect of the company and covers all costs until the company becomes independent. Founders are in the driver's seat, they build their own company, and Hexa and the studio teams are dedicated to providing as much help as it can along the way!

Our core team supports each project on recruiting, product, design, marketing, sales, finance, legal, and more strategic topics. Most importantly, the priority of each core team member is to help build a fully independent team for each project. It's also worth noting that we don't have software engineers in the core team working on new products. This means that each new startup's product will be built by engineers who have been recruited specifically for this company.

The project team will initially start with two or three co-founders, and we will together start growing the team by hiring software engineers and business developers. After 12-18 months, when the project becomes independent, the size of the team (including founders) is generally between 6 and 10 people.

The team will work every day from our office, literally sitting on the same bench alongside the Hexa and studio core teams. This means we work together and interact on a daily basis on all topics: product, design, recruiting, go-to-market, fundraising, team management, etc.

To ensure that we keep the right pace of delivery and that everybody is on the same page, we have a weekly sprint organization that applies to all topics (product of course, but also business, go-to-market, etc). These sprints are supported by weekly routines: kick-offs, product, recruiting and, go-to-market meetings, as well as ad hoc meetings to dig into specific questions.

Finally, we have a quarterly meeting called Demotime, where each project makes a presentation to the hexa team and all the other startup teams to take a step back on their progress and define the 3 months roadmap.

The initial idea will in most cases come from the studio teams. The numerous rich discussions we have through our deep exposure to entrepreneurs, companies, investors, and more generally the global tech ecosystem are the key source of inspiration for new pain points to solve.

An idea for us generally means (1) a pain point we want to solve, and (2) a first mockup of the initial MVP - a simple solution to start solving the pain point while providing enough value to users.

It's important to understand the idea will obviously evolve as we will be working together on the venture, driven by the founding team - and that in our experience the founders very quickly become full owners of the idea.

A question we often get is about copycats. The answer here is super simple, we build software companies and not e-commerce companies. Software businesses are driven by innovation and generally have low localization specifics (i.e. in general, apart from language, SaaS companies are essentially global from day one) - which basically means copycating a software company does not really make sense. Long story short, all our ideas are original 🙂

It's rare but worth mentioning that we have partnered with founders on an existing idea (e.g., Equify, Foxintelligence).

It's a question we get a lot which is hard to answer because success is difficult to define and takes several years to assess - but so far our failure rate has been pretty low in the initial phase, from idea to seed.

It's important to understand companies start as "projects" within Hexa and are generally incorporated 9-12 months after the first line of code, when we start getting the first positive signals from the market and the users.

If we don't find this initial traction, the founders and and each studio can collectively decide to stop the project before it is incorporated. It's already happened a few times, for instance with Solved, Illustrio and Chilli, but this remains fairly low in regards to the 30+ projects we started.

Most people joining a studio will join as early employees of one of the ventures.

Being one of the very first engineers or business developers on the team is an absolutely crucial role as you will have not only a huge impact on the product and the business but also on the company culture. Joining as an early employee when the company is still within a studio requires a very strong entrepreneurial mindset, autonomy, and a bias towards action!

You will be fully dedicated to a single project, but you'll also share best practices with other projects and with the studio and hexa teams.

Remember, we all sit on the same bench, have lunch every day together and have a lot of fun as a team!

Technically, you will initially be an employee of Hexa ("CDI") until the company you're working for is incorporated, and the team will then be transferred in the newly created company.

The studio has a dual role of (i) being a co-founder of each project and (ii) supporting all costs necessary to build the project until the newly created company raises VC funding. We split equity so that the studio retains 30% of the fully-diluted equity after leaving the studio and raising VC funding. Then, as the company grows and needs to raise money, the studio and the founders get equally diluted by new investors.

Once the company raises a seed round, they become a completely "normal" startup. The founders are in the driver's seat, they have a board comprised of the founders and the key investors (o/w the studio).

As the business grows, the team will also grow. As cash burn increases, the company generally needs to raise additional funding rounds often with VCs (Series A, B, C...). In general, startups are not profitable until a long time, as they tend to invest a lot in growing the business (e.g. by hiring engineers, sales, marketing people, etc). The studio remains as a shareholder until an "exit", the company is sold, or listed on a public market.