In this article, we explore the best ways and tools to 1) Receive and Manage Applications, 2) Develop your Community and 3) Build your Website.

Receive and Manage Applications

• Create a custom Application Form, with all the questions needed to join your program.
• Short-list them, and invite the most promising ones to an online or physical 10-min superfast paced interview.
• Email the rejected ones, encouraging them to prove you wrong, and to apply again to the next round of the program.
• Airtable is really the best tool, creating forms, managing lists (from where you can manage the applications) and automations such as automatically sending emails to the ones marked as rejected. Tally and Typeform are also some more beautiful forms that integrate with Airtable too.
• Univation Platform provides the form features, but we see that our clients need more custom forms. Thus, we encourage you to build a custom application form on Airtable or whatever and then invite the short-listed founders to our platform.

Develop your Community via Virtual Calls & live Events

• Plan weekly founders' dinners, remote or physical, to get them to meet each other.
• Schedule daily or weekly Startup Progress Updates, via video message in Slack.
• Throw a "Prototype Day", for founders to show off progress to each other after 2 weeks in the program.
• Run Investors/ Demo Day online, break it up to industries/ categories and invite even more investors.
• We use Loom, to record and share video updates or demos, Gather Town or Wonder to run online community meetings and Restream to stream (live or prerecorded) beautiful and polished events online.

Building a Landing Page (Website)

• Throw up a landing page with a sign-up form, so you have a page you can share with others.
• Start collecting emails of people who are interested in participating in your program.
• We love Webflow, but Typedream or umso are some other simpler options.

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Other Operations

Creating Demo, Pitch or Message Videos with Loom

• We use Loom, the single tool you need to take video records of your app in screen + camera, for pitches and video demos, and trim them and share them really fast.

Knowledge Base and Note keeping with Notion

• Notion is the best tool for writing notes fast, and can be your app's Changelog, Feature List, Bug Board, Knowledge center and CRM.

Running Whiteboard Workshops with Miro & Figma

• Miro is a great tool for workshops and brainstorms with built-in voice & video calling, while Figma Jam is a free, with great templates for every occasion, alternative.