Getting Started With Gust for Accelerators

Welcome to Gust

Welcome to Gust for Accelerators! This guide will walk you through signing up your organization, creating your first program, editing your application, and adding your evaluators. Gust's Accelerator Platform works on the concept of "cohorts" which is a jargon-y way of saying "rounds" or "classes". This makes GAP a good fit for Business Plan Competitions and Incubators as well as Accelerators. 

After you've created a main profile for your organization, you'll want to create a program each time you're accepting candidates for a new program or class, but first, let's get started creating a profile for your organization.

Open Your GAP Account

From the marketing page at gust.com/accelerators you can click "Open Your Accelerator Program For Free." If you don't already have a Gust account, the first thing we'll do is ask you to sign up and provide some basic personal information. Then we'll ask you for some information about your organization. 

Locations: You can pick more than one location for your accelerator if you run cohorts in more than one geographic location. When you add a location, begin typing and Gust will suggest matches from a dropdown that you can select. 

Industries: You can select as many industries as you like from a standardized list of industries.

Once you've created a profile for your organization you can make changes to it, and upload a banner image and logo to help brand your organization's page. This branding will also appear on your individual program pages by default when you create them. 

Create a New Program

Once your organization is signed up, the first thing you'll want to do is create your first program profile and application. You can run more than one program concurrently and clone your applications, but you'll set up each program profile one at a time. To set up your first program click on the blue New Program button or use the dropdown at the top of the page and select "+ Add a Program"

Once you've created a program you can create an application for it. The first thing you'll be asked for is the Application Deadline. Your application will expire at 11:59 pm on the night of your deadline. You can edit your deadline after you've created to extend applications if need be, or you can close your application manually if you'd like the deadline to end at the end of your business day. 

Applications can contain separate sections, and in each section you can include text questions, require a file upload or a video link, or use multiple choice dropdowns. 

Note: Sometimes it's best to hold off on clicking "START ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS" until after you've organized your evaluation pipeline. You can come back to this section and your work will be automatically saved.

Building Your Evaluation Pipeline

After you've created your application, the next step is setting up your evaluation pipeline. GAP has a default template that you can use that includes Applied, Screening, Interviews, and Selected. Each of these stages also has default evaluation criteria. Every time an application is moved to a new stage in your pipeline it's ready to be reviewed again according to that stage's criteria. Depending on your group's process, you may wish to use different criteria for different evaluations stages.

Adding Evaluators

Once your pipeline and application are set up, you'll want to start adding your Team of Evaluators. Adding them is simple, just provide a name and email address and Gust will invite them to the platform. When adding Team Members you'll have the option of adding them as Admins or limiting their access as an Evaluator. 

Admins get unrestricted access to the program, can edit it's application and pipeline, add other evaluators and publish or unpublish the program.

When adding an evaluator you can restrict which stages in your pipeline they can view. This is helpful if you have judges that should be reviewing companies that make it past a screening process so that they only see the companies that have been selected as finalists or serious applicants. 

Accepting Applications

Once you've created an application, configured your pipeline, and added your evaluators, you're ready to start accepting applications. When companies apply you'll see them in the first stage of the pipeline. You can decline companies, filter them by industry, export applications to CSV, or assign an evaluator to them using the buttons in the top left of the evaluations module. 

By clicking on "Evaluations" you can review evaluations from your team members, and leave evaluations yourself. Remember that when you move an application to the next stage they'll be ready for a new set of evaluations.