Startup School: Week 0

I have been presented with a great opportunity to be apart of Startup School sponsored by Investec.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

— Albert Schweitzer

Startup School is a 12 week online program aimed at supporting and encouraging the growth of the entrepreneurial ecosystem within South Africa. The topics covered range from building the entrepreneurial mindset, through to problem identification, marketing, sales and small business finance.

I have been a Software Engineer for over 6 years now and have been extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn many different skills. These include full stack software development, operations and architecture. (To name just a few)

I am excited to be apart of Startup School and learn the intricacies of starting and running a startup. This is knowledge and mentorship that I feel will be extremely valuable in my future and in my current day job.

As part of the Orientation week, starting yesterday (9th April) we have to work through some modules that help us get used to the platform we have been given access to. This week we have setup our profiles, messaged the community introducing ourselves and setting goals we hope to achieve.

All the goals I have set will be measured on a weekly basis. Out the gate, I have set 6 goals that I feel should be easily attainable in my free time in the evenings after work and on weekends and the odd public holiday we have coming up later this month.

My goals are as follows:

1. 10 Hours of Startup School — For this goal I aim to spend 10 hours working through the content and completing all the assignments in a timely manner. The intent is to not fall behind on the content and maximise the amount of knowledge I gain during the course.
2. Additional resources — This goal is to ensure I read through the additional resources Startup School provides us each week. These are articles that add some extra information on the weekly topics.
3. Product development — I want to apply the knowledge I learn and spend time building out the idea outlined in my profile. I will attempt to spend at least 2 hours writing code and building out the product and device. More on the idea shortly.
4. Exercise — Staying healthy is extremely important. Even more so when my work and my hobbies involve a lot of time spent sitting behind a laptop screen. I will ensure that I get to the gym at least twice a week for at least a light workout to stretch out my muscles and get my heart rate up for a bit.
5. Community support — Startup School provides a discussion area where everyone involved in the program can chat about the content and get some assistance if need be. I want to assist as much as I can and help others when they are struggling with content or other aspects of their business. I enjoy helping and find it really rewarding.
6. Document my journey — Exactly what I am doing right now. I will write a short retrospective each week highlighting what I learnt while completing the weeks assignments and reading materials. I will also mention any thoughts I have during that time and any problems I faced or am currently facing.

Achieving these goals and keeping track of them through out the course provides a great way to track progress and validate my learnings.

The idea I will use to apply the knowledge is a project I call SeeThru. It is an idea that my brother, a good friend and I have been playing around with for a while now. The aim is to create a smart device that can be dropped into a swimming pool that measures the current state of the water. The data will be packaged and provided to the user in a readable and understandable format to help reduce the effort of maintaining a pool. Data points can include pH of the water and the temperature. Users can be reminded and prompted to add chlorine and other chemicals to their pool in order to keep it nice and clear.

The idea will require me to learn more about microcontrollers and the IoT world and apply skills I already poses to create a web application and secure messaging channels. It also opens up future possibilities of predictive analytics via machine learning, automated dosing with chemicals and a community sharing insights into how they maintain their own pools.

I am so excited to learn. Learning is extremely important to me and I am very fortunate to be apart of this program.

Until next week!