An accelerator for New York media founders

Imagine New York City without small businesses and entrepreneurial upstarts.

Bet you can't.

The challenge

We've all heard the old adage: if you can make it in New York City, you can make it anywhere. But "making it" in this city today is more brutal than ever, and comes with its own challenges. Oversaturated neighborhoods, the advent of digital marketing, disruption in every corner of every industry, diverted attention spans, fleeting brand loyalty … to name a few.

The city government was hearing scores of media and entertainment entrepreneurs voicing the same frustrations: stalling growth and an overwhelming need for support. For an industry responsible for 400,000 jobs in the city and worth upward of $10 billion, this was dire.

So how could the city help its media and entertainment landscape keep thriving?

Who it had to work for

Any public sector project comes with its own rigorous standards. Here, there was a wide spread of stakeholders we had to guarantee mutual benefit to:

• The City: Elected public officials, including the Mayor's Office of Media & Entertainment and NYC.gov Small Business Services, who needed to show their value and deliver tangible results to taxpayers
• The Entrepreneurs: New Yorkers competing in a world that favors Big Media, whose frustrations we were asked to hear, validate, ease and reverse
• The Locals: The New Yorkers these entrepreneurs served daily, who would ultimately feel any business impact, good or bad

We also understood what these founders were up against. Balancing day jobs, side hustles, families, what little remained of personal lives, budgets, employees, investors and customer needs: it's not for the faint of heart, and it doesn't leave much time or energy to waste. So the program we designed had to be:

• Hyper-functional: Every word, minute and dollar worth their investment
• Business atypical: Not your run-of-the-mill, 30-slide-deck-and-call-it-a-day workshop
• Nimble by nature: Easy to fit across schedules, environments, technologies, business models and working styles
• True to industry: Access to key industry players, advocates and mentors who to this day remain largely gatekept, particularly from minority or underrepresented founders
• Personal at scale: A curriculum that was systematically iterative and could mold to a person's needs
• Community-centered: A program that would leave entrepreneurs in each other's good hands, to support one another and build real camaraderie

No pressure.

What we built

After 3x3 Design, our project counterpart, handed over their 12-month research intensive, we immersed ourselves in every corner of New York's small business world: an all-hands-on-deck exploration to incubate the incubator, if you will.

It was comprehensive. Candid. Exposed. And exactly what was needed to diagnose each entrepreneurial roadblock and refine the tools that would sustain founders' growth beyond our involvement. It pointed to three things every founder needed.

Together, they add up to the hard-headed resiliency no one pulls off better than New Yorkers.

How it ran

After a 3-month design sprint, the program piloted with an inaugural cohort of 20 diverse founders from across New York's media and entertainment landscape: production companies, community marketplaces, creative studios, the gamut. All five boroughs were represented.

Each module was a full day of active learning, with mentor meetings, office hours and assignments alongside. Over three months of interactive, in-person and digital sessions, founders worked down to their businesses' core and built back up from there, with industry mentors, on the tools they'd need for sustained, scalable, high-impact growth. On their own terms.

What shifted

We'll let the founders do the talking.

"AMP was like a Swiss Army Knife - extensive, comprehensive and resourceful. It helped me find my own voice."
Gwen Waldron, 345 Design

"With AMP we found our secret sauce."
Rachel Doyon, Collabarét

"Through the program we discovered the essence of who we are, and rebuilt our story from there."
Ian Busching, Dig Down Media

"I came in with an MVP and walked out with a business ready to be a very big company."
José Francisco Avila, GALENT

"Through AMP I built my company culture. I transformed myself from manager to leader, now the business is ready to take off."
Lucien Harriot, Mechanism Digital

"This program made me feel like I belong in the ecosystem. I found my purpose."
Cavaughn J. Noel, Fabric

After a resoundingly successful first cohort, the city green-lit two more editions and doubled the remit of the curriculum itself. During its run (before a certain global pandemic paused it), the AMP NYC Accelerator Program served over 60 of the city's most exciting creative businesses.

What we took away

• Acceleration without sustainability is more harm than good
• A carefully curated toolkit will outperform a Mary Poppins bag any day
• Power lies in the network: those who act as guides, not gurus, are primed to deliver real impact
• The sheer talent in New York City is so great it'd be upsetting if we weren't lucky enough to be a part of it

Running an accelerator and want the curriculum to earn its place? Book a 20-minute call →