Startup & Founders Network

Yes. This template ships invite-only with approval required and a two-question application — what stage is your startup at, and what do you most need help with right now. Spaces can be public, private, or secret, so the Lounge, Pitch Feedback, and Founder Chat are private out of the box. If you want a private space per cohort, you create one and control access — the template's seven spaces are a starting structure, not a ceiling.

Honestly, not for everything. Mateflow has chat spaces and direct messages, but it is a community platform, not a work-chat tool — no dev integrations, no incident threads, none of the things a team uses Slack for hour to hour. What it replaces is the accelerator Slack: the one that was supposed to be a network and became noise. Some programs keep a small team Slack and move the community here. That's a reasonable outcome.

Yes, by putting them in spaces rather than in the whole community. Office Hours, Program Announcements, Wins & Raises, and Playbooks are public within the community; Founders Lounge, Pitch Feedback, and Founder Chat are private. So a mentor can be present where they're useful without ever seeing the space where a founder is talking about running out of runway.

The platform supports it — subscription plans on your own Stripe account, with spaces gated by access group. But this template ships configured for a free, invite-only program, because that's how most accelerators run. If you're running a paid founder circle rather than a cohort program, you'd turn on paid memberships and add your plans; it's a setup step, not a different product.

No. There is no deal pipeline, no cap-table tooling, no investor CRM, and no application-scoring workflow for your intake. The join questionnaire captures two answers at signup, and that's the extent of it. Programs run Mateflow as the community and keep Airtable, Affinity, or whatever they use for the program-management side. We'd rather say that up front than have you discover it in month two.

Starter, at $49/month — all seven spaces work there, including the private ones and the invite-only membership model. A first cohort can start on Free, which runs the same spaces for up to 100 members, with two access groups and one admin. Events are unlimited on every plan, so office hours and demo days aren't metered. Alumni-only or mentor-only sessions work by putting the event in a space gated to an alumni or mentor access group — two such groups fit on Free, five on Starter.