Fábrica de Startups: Discoveries Travel and Tourism Startup Accelerator

Smart Business Modeler collaborated with Fábrica de Startups to pilot our venture creation and coaching platform as FabStart Academy, premiered by the Discoveries Travel and Tourism Startup Accelerator 2019 program.

Discoveries: Travel and Tourism Startup Accelerator

Discoveries is an intensive four-week acceleration program that aims to help entrepreneurs transform fresh ideas into successful businesses through a set of onsite bootcamps. Using the Smart Business Modeler platform, FabStart Academy digitized the entire program for a blended on-site bootcamp and online collaboration that leveraged a number of valuable venture creation and coaching tools.

Startup Teams

For the entrepreneurs, it was important to have a digital project space where they could clearly understand the goal and focus of each step, and organize their submitted and improved tasks. In this sense, some of the most valuable features and tools provided included the following:

Collaborative team environment, enabling multiple members to work remotely and simultaneously on their project;
Business model integrated cash flow calculator, for on-the-fly cash flow analysis;
AI-based ecosystem radar, leveraging a global database of thousands of companies to automatically evaluate a business model’s competitive ecosystem.

“We have done other accelerator programs in the United Kingdom and in Austria and I think that this one [Discoveries] is very well done, particularly due to the supportive digital platform provided by Smart Business Modeler. I found the use of this digital platform very important because it really helped us to complete each task and each step in a structured and cohesive way. Honestly, I believe that this is a great system which all accelerators should consider integrating.”

Fábio Bufalini, Founder and CEO of B2Book.net

Rome, Italy

Startup Mentors

For the mentors, it was important to have a streamlined process to creating and managing the acceleration programs that frees them to have more time to focus on what really matters – just-in-time constructive and insightful feedback for nearly every task. To this purpose, some of the most valuable features and tools provided included the following:

Progress overview, for a real-time centralized overview of all project’s progress;
Evaluation and feedback, supporting task-specific feedback;
Tag-team management, allowing multiple mentors to share the mentoring space and co-mentor different projects.

“The Smart Business Modeler platform is great for coaching and managing different startup teams. As an entrepreneurship coach, the backend of Smart Business Modeler allows me to see the progress of teams in real-time, give immediate feedback on the fly, and get manageable access to the output of the teams. This is streamlining my process tremendously and allows us to focus on our core value-added – coaching – instead of spending hours on administration.”

Filipe Estrela, Acceleration Manager at Fábrica de Startups

Lisbon, Portugal

Fábrica de Startups

Founded in 2012, Fábrica de Startups is a Lisbon-based startup accelerator and incubator, which recently also expanded to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Dedicated to helping anyone become a successful entrepreneur, their acceleration programs leverage their own methodology based on five pillars: identifying business ideas, creating teams, designing their business model, finding customers, and launching the company.

We would like to thank António Lucena de Faria, Filipe Estrela, and Carolina Amorim for their constructive feedback, time, and support in working together to pilot our venture creation and coaching platform as FabStart Academy. Congratulations go to all participants for their magnificent ideas and remarkable effort, with a special mention to B2Book.net, DGROOPS, and Guide121 whose travel and tourism startup pitch won the most support from the audience and investors.