What an accelerator did for Nochi

This past May, Nochi got accepted into a startup accelerator called The Desai Accelerator. Accelerators invest in startup companies by providing mentorship and educational programming - sometimes they also provide investment capital. Luckily, Desai did invest in Nochi so we were able to pay for a team to help push Sifting Thyme out for publishing over the summer. There’s a nice press article about the accelerator and Nochi here.

One of Desai’s perks is that they offer interns to work on projects. Over the summer, we worked with a group of Desai Interns to help us create things such as our social media posts (check out the “what you missed in class” series on the Sifting Thyme game page!) and a framework for this website. Nochi is a small team of 5 people, running everything from marketing, game development, to business operations, so having the Desai interns help us over the summer was critical as we don’t have the manpower / hours to do everything we would like to do.

In the startup accelerator life, below is a sample of some regular activities for Nochi that happened over the summer - and this is on-top of our team’s daily work for Sifting Thyme! (For reference, occasionally some team members pull 50-70+ hour weeks to push content out and hit deadlines.)

• [Desai] Daily standups with Desai Cohort

• [Desai] Meeting various Desai leaders & stakeholders about Nochi’s business operations

• [Desai] Intern Project meetings

• [Nochi only] Daily SCRUMs with dev team

• [Nochi only] Daily standups with team members

• [Nochi only] Marketing Meetings

• [Nochi only] Creative game dev meetings

It’s been a bit crazy but we are so incredibly thankful for Desai because all of the resources and mentorship they’ve provided us has really helped Nochi step up our game in terms of processes, structure, and driving some brand recognition to Nochi & Sifting Thyme. We have about 7 more months in the program so there’s still a lot for our team to soak up :)