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MuckerLab was founded three years ago as one of the first incubators to launch in Los Angeles. With a shared workspace for a relatively small cohort of startups that participate, the accelerator takes a hands-on approach to helping companies that go through its program find product-market fit.
At the time he first started working on it, founding partner Erik Rannala says there wasn’t a whole lot of seed stage infrastructure available in Los Angeles. So he created MuckerLab in part to support what has been a budding ecosystem of new young entrepreneurs in that region.
MuckerLab doesn’t operate on the usual three-month schedule of some other accelerators. Instead, it takes a longer-range approach, with just one cohort a year of about ten companies participating. As a result, those startups tend to spend a much longer time working hand-in-hand with partners and mentors to refine their products.
Since MuckerLab has a very small number of spots for each cohort, it’s very selective about who comes on board. It generally looks for early-stage startups that either have a prototype or early version of their product already in the market. Its partners and mentors then work to help with prototyping, setting up Adwords campaigns, basically anything to help company founders to improve those products.
This is the seventh episode of a TechCrunch TV series called Incubated. Please join us each week to find out how different incubators and accelerators help out startups that participate in them. Check out previous episodes of Incubated here:
- Incubated: How The 500 Startups Accelerator Helps Startups Get Noticed
- Incubated: Capital Factory Uses The Austin Community To Lead Startups To Success
- Incubated: Inside Matter.VC’s Structured Approach To Helping Media Startups
- Incubated: How Amplify.LA Helps LA-Based Startups Grow
- Incubated: Y Combinator’s Approach To Finding And Helping Startups Become Big Winners
- Incubated: Media Camp Helps Startups Get Connected With Hollywood Decision-Makers
- Incubated: MuckerLab’s Hands-On Approach To Accelerating Startup Growth
- Incubated: How StartX Helps Stanford-Affiliated Founders Get Their Companies Off The Ground
