SUMMIT/Fall 2022

We help innovative founders harness AI to create technology and build ventures faster than ever. No investors required.

SUMMIT/Fall 2022 is a startup studio and venture building program for startups that are post-product and now struggling to generate revenue. We have just opened up applications for this new program and startups at this stage can receive up to $25k in investment or work-in-kind plus hands-on 1:1 support over the course of a year.

More about SUMMIT from its founder, Edward Cruz:

In our unique, 12-month immersive SUMMIT program, we partner with you and work hand-in-hand to prepare your venture for growth, and then provide the technical, marketing, and sales capabilities your startup needs to scale.

We kick things off with a deep discovery, planning, and infrastructure development sprint that lasts from 4-6 weeks. We provide $25k to cover these costs on your behalf, either in the form of investment or work-in-kind. So it costs you no cash up front to build out your startup’s sales and marketing infrastructure.

From there, it’s an extensive two-way commitment that we expect to last at least one year. Because of the long-term engagement, we work with you in exchange for a combination of equity, a percentage of the top-line revenue that our marketing and sales systems produce, and a recurring monthly baseline fee to cover our overhead.

Each startup is different, and so the amounts of each will vary. But in general, we benchmark a 5%-10% equity stake, 10%-15% in commissions on top-line sales revenue, and $2.5k-$10k per month in baseline fees.

Since our goal is to get you to $1M - $3M in revenue, these baseline costs align with that objective and are based on the revenue you are producing each month.

We look forward to receiving your application.

What to expect:

The Application Process.

Once we review the Gust application and it looks promising, we will ask you to submit a follow-on video interview on VideoAsk, our virtual interview platform. If that looks promising, then we’ll set up a time to meet with SUMMIT program director Edward Cruz to establish a good two-way fit. If all looks good, we’ll go to the next step, which is discovery (and not an offer of admission — yet).

The Discovery Process.

Next we schedule a series of deep-dive discovery calls so we can understand exactly where things stand with your startups technology, marketing, and sales. It’s a full audit of your startup’s main activities so we can understand precisely what your startup is doing, and what is working well and what is not. In the end, we will have the scope of what we would need to help you address before we can admit you to SUMMIT. There is no cost or obligation for these meetings. So if you don’t want to proceed for any reason, that’s OK. Either way, you get some useful feedback and advice on the current state of your startup and its readiness for scale and growth.

The Admission Process.

If it still looks like a solid two-way fit and you agree that you want to work with us to address these issues, we bring you into our Pre-SUMMIT pre-accelerator program with a customized plan for you to follow. The program has a monthly subscription model that costs $500-$1000 per month, depending on what needs to be addressed. The goal is to resolve these issues as quickly as possible and not to linger in this program. So your startups could stay in Pre-SUMMIT for as little as one month. But if there are more challenging issues, it could be three months or longer. Whatever the case, the goal is to get you through the program successfully, and ready for scale and growth.

Joining SUMMIT.

When we’ve helped you get your business unit case working well (tech, marketing, sales), we can bring you into SUMMIT. Again, there’s no obligation to do this. Some startups may opt to just focus on their new optimized business process and scale to $100k-$150k in the next year instead of $1-$3M. But when you join, that’s where we join forces and partner with you to make it happen.