Last year we covered an interesting new global initiative. The rash of new accelerators across the world created a problem – how to apply for many of them. To the rescue came f6S.com, a way for startups to keep track of these programs on one platform. Verily, you can apply directly from the site for many of the programs. That of course has created something of a honeypot for service providers who want to, well, give away stuff to startups in return for the ensuing PR uplift (to be blunt).
Although launched just under two years ago by a rag-tag bunch of tech people involved in startups and accelerators, they neglected to check how many startup deals had been given away off the platform. Now, they’ve run the numbers and found that over $100 million of startup deals have been given via by the F6S “Startup Card”.
Ok, what does this ad up to. Well, it’s included about $300,000 worth of free or discounted startup deals in 28 different flavours – such as hosting, email infrastructure, analytics and customer service tools via the “f6s Card”. Fairly handy to very early stage companies.
Anyone can get this card.
The F6S Startup Card is a “pay it forward” scheme. Companies such as Google, Rackspace, Zopim, Microsoft, Sendgrid and Stripe can add a deal to the F6S Startup Card immediately and without charge.
100 Million Dollars is a big number for sure, but the bigger story is that it represents more than 100 Million Dollars in generosity from – so far – 685 different companies and counting.
They’ve also released us some stats:
• 64% of the 31.337 F6S Startups have taken at least one deal available through their F6S Startup Card
• F6S Startups have gotten $5,272 in value on average from their Card
• The most popular five categories for Card holders are Cloud Services (21%), Design (9.75%), Hosting (5.95%), Analytics (5.95%) and E-Mail (5.35%)
• Startups from 120 countries have received deals.
• Startups from 62 countries have provided deals.
The deals have included some from Rackspace (Hosting), Mailchimp (E-mail), Sendgrid (E-mail), Stripe, (Payment Processing) and Moz (SEO).
The community has now expanded into areas like Deals and Jobs.
Now, not all this is altruistic of course.
F6S is co-founded by at least two named individuals: Jon Bradford (MD TechStars) and Sean Kane (formerly VP Bebo, SVP and mp3.com). F6S is a UK-based entity (F6S Network Ltd) operating from Hackney, London.
Also ‘involved’ are over 2,000 heads of startup programs globally ranging from UK (TechStars, Oxygen, etc.), US (Tech Wildcatters, TechStars, DreamIt, etc.), Canada (GrowLab, etc.), Australia/NZ (AngelCube, PushStart, etc.), Asia (Spark Labs, JFDI, etc.), India (the Morpheus, GSF India, etc.) to South America (NXTP, Nazca).
