Thousands of founders apply to Techstars every year. Two managing directors recently sat down to walk through exactly what they look for, question by question, and where most applicants go wrong.

In our Inside a Techstars Accelerator session, How to Make Your Application Stand Out, Andres Barreto, Managing Director of Techstars New York City Accelerator, and Matthew Jaeh, Managing Director of Techstars Alabama EnergyTech Accelerator, opened up the rubric.

Or as Andres put it: "You're getting a hack. You're getting the answers at the back of the textbook."

"What Problem Are You Solving?" (And Why 80% of Founders Blow It)

The first question on the application sounds simple, but Andres said most applicants miss it. "80% of founders get it wrong, for sure."

The single biggest mistake: smuggling the solution into the problem. "It's putting the solution in the problem... no need to do that. Because guess what the next question is?"

Instead, Andres said, focus on three things: "What is the problem? Who has it, and why is it painful?" His example: "New York City restaurant owners... risk 80% of revenue loss if mice droppings trigger a C health grade and most shut down within 30 days."

Notice the structure. Specific customer. Specific consequence. Real stakes. As Andres said with a laugh, "I twist the knife there at the end."

Matthew built on that point. Quantify the pain wherever you can. "If you can quantify that even a little further by putting a dollar value to that... we as a people or anyone reviewing an application for that matter can be like, oh yeah, that is a ton of money... I see this is a serious problem."

His advice in one line: "Throw some data, throw some stats in there. First, little nuggets that really can make me or anyone who's reading an application really understand that this is a serious problem."

"What Are You Building?" Skip the Buzzwords

The next question asks what you're building to solve the problem. The fastest way to lose a reviewer is to lean on buzzwords.

Andres put it bluntly: "Instead of saying our solution is an AI-powered IoT mousetrap on the blockchain, here, what you're describing is what your solution is, not what you do. Prioritize describing what you do, and you write a bunch of buzzwords instead."

His clean version: "Our product uses sensors to detect a mouse, trigger a beat, alert the owner, and dispatch a technician to clean it up."

He had a sharp reminder for AI founders in particular. "Don't say we are an AI-powered platform. Yes, you and everybody else. But what do you do, and who do you do it for?"

Matthew added that proof matters. "We want to know that you have built something... Plus points if you can put in some of the results that have been derived from what you built in so far." He's looking for "a clear bridge between what you've built and the solution that you're trying to solve."

And on review behavior, he was direct: "When I'm looking at the applications, problem, solution, those are the first things that we see. If those look good, I'm reading more."

"Why Is Your Team the Right One?" The Single Most Important Question

When asked which question carries the most weight in offer decisions, Andres did not hesitate. "It's always team, team, team."

He reframed the question as one about unfair advantage. "Do you have a unique customer insight? Do you have specialized skills and experience? Do you have market access that others don't have?"

What does not work: "I am the right team because I work really hard, or because I finally have my MBA in innovation."

Matthew's filter starts with self-awareness. "I really want to know that you really have a strong grasp of what your strengths and your weaknesses are." He's looking for founders who can say, "Yeah, I'm not so good at that. So as soon as I get some cash, I'm going to spend some money in that area."

He also wants real chemistry, not LinkedIn matchmaking. "It's not just like, oh yeah, I went on the other competitive accelerator's match thing, and I found you like two days ago, and we're together... You spend more time with your co-founders than you do with your family. That's the way it is."

A sobering data point from Matthew: "When we go into a program, there is usually at least one company that has a co-founder breakup. Like without fail, it happens."

Solo Founders Versus Misaligned Co-Founders

A live audience question asked about Techstars' view on solo founders. Andres' answer surprised some.

"We would rather have a solo founder than a team of co-founders that we can tell are not getting along, or they're speaking one over the other, or they're not really agreeing. Because it is more likely that that founder disagreement is the one that destroys the company."

He still recommends building a team around you, even as a solo founder, because the program is intense: "It is 18 to 24 months' worth of work in three months."

He ended with a Spanish proverb: "Mejor solo que mal acompañado, which is better alone than poorly accompanied."

"How Do You Make Money?" Is a Two-Part Question

This one trips people up because they only answer half of it.

Andres: "People get the first half right. And the second part is, how much money can you make? That is another way of asking, what is your bottom-up TAM... how big is your ambition? Is this a venture-scale company?"

Matthew said the TAM/SAM/SOM question is partly diagnostic. "It really just gets us into the mind space of understanding where your mind space is in relation to the opportunity of your business... If you're super creative and you put in like, oh, we got this massive SOM out of this massive TAM... that's going to cause me to challenge you."

What he wants from the application itself: "Me looking at your application, I want to be like, okay, this seems realistic. This doesn't seem realistic."

Competition and Moat in the AI Era

Differentiation has gotten harder, especially for software companies. Andres offered a forward-looking framing.

"You want to say that we're the only company in the world that blank for our customers, and that's getting harder and harder to do if it's just software."

Matthew sees two recurring failure modes when founders write the competition slide. The first is comparing apples to whole grocery stores. "I see your startup company, which is small and growing, and then I see a bunch of big names. And if you go to those big names, you're like, well, they have suites of products and solutions and everything, and you're trying to compare yourself to this massive company and not the suite of solutions."

The second is not having a real moat in an age of fast iteration. "We want to think about, can somebody vibe code this thing within a couple of days or weeks? ...Have you actually created a method, or you have intellectual property, or you have integrations, or you have something that just takes time and effort... and it's not something that can be automated away."

Andres added a note on data moats. Data only counts if it's truly proprietary. "Make sure it's data that only you can generate, or only you can have access to. Otherwise, somebody bigger will have more data."

"Why Now?" Timing Is Everything

Andres said the worst answers to "why now?" are personal rather than market-based. "I finally saved enough money to start a company. Well, that's not what we mean."

The real question: "What makes this company an opportunity now and not a year ago or two years ago?"

Matthew evaluates timing across the whole stack, from macro trends to category-specific dynamics. "I'm looking to see like the macro to the micro type things that are going on all around like this particular space... I'm going to formulate in my mind whether or not this is a flash in the pan kind of thing, or is this a sustainable kind of like longevity type thing."

For his EnergyTech program, the tailwinds are obvious to him right now. "There is so much in energy tech right now, climate tech and sustainability, especially with the creation of data centers... lots of use of energy, lots of use of power."

Andres shared a vivid timing example from his own pipeline. "They're a drone defense company. So what's happening timing-wise is adversaries are using very cheap drones. And the governments that are defending against those very cheap drones are spending $10 million per missile to take down a drone that is a $500 drone."

His takeaway: "There's a need now that did not exist two years ago or three years ago." But he warned against pure trend chasing. "You also don't want to be the flash in the pan where it's like, this is a one-time thing... It's very hard to time the market, but there's usually an earned insight that a founder has, having lived the market."

The Cheat Code

Andres closed with a tool the team built specifically for applicants. "All of this advice, we put it in a custom GPT that you can access right now... where you can drop in your Techstars application, and it will give you feedback on how to improve it."

His final pitch: "If you follow this advice, you're going to beat 80% of applicants that were not at this workshop. So you're already ahead for sure."

If you've been sitting on an application, now is the time to refine it. Skip the buzzwords. Quantify the pain. Make your team's edge unmistakable. And tell us, in plain words, why this opportunity is happening right now.

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