The Roadmap to Success

Yesterday, I attended the open house event at Student Inc with Raquel, Lenny and Peter from the awesome team Dreamgineering. My Klint, the at Student Inc. manager, gave us a very informative and  insightful tour of Studen Inc and the startups that they have helped and are helping along the way.

As Raquel and Lenny probably has informed you in their posts http://intopreneur.com/?post_format=link and http://intopreneur.com/?p=173, Student Inc is a KTH organziation that supports Technical startups by KTH students, not through investing in them but helping them find investors.

To sumarize and not to repeat too much of what my aweosme teammates have already told you: around approximately 10 am My gave us a tour/introduction of the timeline for startups that Student Inc helps and it includes 3 phases: Initiation, Development and Phase Out with the third phase being that you can pretty much stand completely on your own (see picture below). We were also introduced of all the very exicitng business ideas that were happening. The creativity on that timeline seemed endless! 🙂

Some interesting things that My reminded us about Entrepreneurship were that as a startup, you have to earn your investors (i.e. laying a good groundwork and building a solid business model etc.), and also that passion for what it is that you do is very important (some thing I talked about in my previous post).  As there will be ups and downs,  only a passion for what you do will “get you through” it ( as well as positive customer feedbacks – getting recognition and appreciation for your work in any area is always a fantastic feeling that fuels you up with energ).  So basically, you have to be very into your idea, what you do and what value it brings to your surroundings to get through the downs and also keep on getting yourself through the many challenges and the huge amount of hard work (especially finding investors) that startups embody. But ups are obviously very easy to sail by in whatever you choose to do, but the downs? Trickier. Much trickier.

On top of this, My also pointed out that Persistence is crucial as well. And seeing the 3 phases the startups on Student Inc’s timeline have to go through, it surely is. However, all successful startups such as Spotify, Apple, Facebook started out being small. It is through hard work and being tenacious that got them to where they are. It sounds obvious but I can really imagine that when you have a business idea that is new to the world and without any funding and with the insecurity around it all, letting it go does seem tempting.

Anyways, I am excited to start working on Phase 1 of my idea for the course and trying out all the things that I have learned to far. My will also come with some useful feedback to the whole team, and who knows, maybe my idea (or another one) will be launched into the real world one day 😀

/Yuwei, team Dreamgineering