With a decade of expertise in designing entrepreneurship programs and fostering innovation ecosystems across Francophone Africa, Hermès focuses on empowering early-stage African founders to construct sustainable ventures and secure the essential support structures required for scalable growth.

Enovation Factory is a tech-focused incubator and accelerator based in Yaoundé, Cameroon, supporting early-stage startups through structured six-month cohort programs. After running their first cohort using fragmented tools: Google Sheets, Airtable, Google Forms, and Gmail, the team experienced severe operational bottlenecks that threatened their ability to scale. By adopting AcceleratorApp, Enovation Factory digitalized their entire program lifecycle, from application intake to alumni management, transforming a process that once consumed entire work days into one that takes minutes.

Key Results at a Glance

The Challenge

Before AcceleratorApp, Enovation Factory’s team operated across a patchwork of disconnected tools. Airtable collected applications, Google Forms gathered program data, Gmail handled communications, and Microsoft Excel served as the intermediary for data cleaning. The result was an operational nightmare that grew worse with each cohort.

Application Chaos

With nearly 590 applications pouring in for their second cohort, the team struggled to filter, categorize, and evaluate startups across sectors: fintech, green energy, fashion, and more. Over 80% of applications were partially completed, with many containing only a third of the required information. Fewer than 40% had enough data to evaluate meaningfully.

Communication Overload

Each rejection email had to be personalized, matching the applicant’s name to their email address, exporting from Airtable through Excel, cleaning data to handle French-character encoding issues, and sending individually through Gmail. Hermès recalls starting this process at 2 PM one afternoon and not leaving the office until 8 or 9 PM, three hours past his usual departure time, and that was just for scheduling the emails, not even sending them.

Scaling Pressure

As the team prepared to expand from 12 to 16 startups per cohort and double the depth of data collection, it became clear that their existing workflow could not sustain the load. One person alone simply could not handle the volume of work required.

The Solution

Enovation Factory discovered AcceleratorApp through a combination of ChatGPT recommendations and Google search. After evaluating the feature set against their program’s structure and objectives, the team found AcceleratorApp offered the most complete package available. A product demo confirmed the platform could serve their end-to-end needs, and they moved forward with adoption.

AcceleratorApp now powers Enovation Factory’s entire program lifecycle across several key areas:

• Application Management: Structured multi-form applications with mandatory fields ensure 100% completion rates. Built-in filtering, tagging, and automated email workflows replaced the manual Airtable-to-Excel-to-Gmail pipeline.
• Program Delivery: Milestones, courses, and community features keep entrepreneurs engaged on the platform throughout the six-month program cycle.
• Communication Automation: Templated emails and scheduled reminders replaced hours of manual correspondence with a process that takes minutes.
• Community Digitalization: Alumni, active cohort members, and prospective entrepreneurs are all managed within a single unified ecosystem.
• Data & Analytics: Clean, export-ready data without the encoding and formatting headaches of the previous multi-tool workflow.

Numerical Impact

From 6 Hours to 15 Minutes

The most dramatic improvement came in application communications. What previously consumed an entire afternoon, manually matching names to emails, cleaning exported data, and sending personalised rejections one by one, now takes under 15 minutes. Hermès simply tags applicants by status, selects the appropriate email template, and the platform handles the rest. Over 600 applicants received responses within an hour of the server processing the batch.

100% Application Completeness

By structuring applications with mandatory fields, AcceleratorApp eliminated the problem of incomplete submissions entirely. Every one of the 600+ submitted applications contained all required information, compared to fewer than 40% in the previous cycle. This alone saved weeks of follow-up and guesswork during evaluation.

Proactive Applicant Recovery

The platform’s visibility into application progress allowed Hermès to identify applicants who were 80% complete but hadn’t submitted. Scheduled reminder emails and personal follow-up calls recovered numerous applications that would have otherwise been lost. Many applicants responded with gratitude, saying they had simply forgotten to complete the final steps.

Seamless Startup Onboarding

By introducing AcceleratorApp at the application stage, startups entering the program were already familiar with the platform. Accounts created during the application are transferred directly into the program environment, creating a natural onboarding flow. This led to a 30–40% increase in platform engagement compared to the previous cohort, where adoption had to be driven manually.

Cleaner Data, Faster Analysis

Data analysis that previously required exporting, cleaning French-character encoding issues in Excel, and manual formatting now happens natively within the platform. The team spends less time wrestling with data and more time making decisions based on it.

Looking Ahead

Having completed one full cohort and one complete application cycle on AcceleratorApp, Enovation Factory is now renewing its subscription, a direct reflection of its satisfaction with AcceleratorApp. With each cohort, the team explores deeper functionality: milestones, courses, and community features are becoming increasingly central to their program delivery.

Hermès projects that as the team continues to integrate more features, AcceleratorApp will become an everyday tool for the entire organization, not just the program team. The trajectory is clear: from fragmented manual processes to a fully digitalised accelerator ecosystem.

Amongst all of the tools that I use, AcceleratorApp is probably my third favourite, and that’s only because ChatGPT is first. During the last application cycle, I sent out rejection emails in a minute. I mean, it was just a matter of validating the email, and the platform did the rest.”

— Hermès Nziko, Startup & Program Coordinator, Enovation Factory