Week 1

(6–13) April; Get more specific

What happened

Ah yes exam weeks started. Also, a LOT of procrastination unfortunately. Im trying out this format for updates but not sure if I like it yet. We shall see. Becoming a success-full startup seems really far away.

Strategy

Top 3 application areas were picked and we made short pitchdecks for each of them. We’ve honestly picked one already but it feels more satisfying to cling onto 3 until we come up with solid reasoning as to why we are pursuing one. A possible criteria to gauge these ‘projects’ could be whether we could start working on it easily in the Netherlands.

Had an appointment with a GURU who we showed the pitchdecks to. He applauded the work done so far but came back with some things we really needed to improve on — The general consensus is that after going through three phases and reducing 9 ideas to 3, we are still in the phase we defined as phase 2, or the conceptual study — We havent spoken to experts or people in the field, all our research has been through online means. We need to get validation that the problems we have identified actually exist, and we need to get very specific about our problem and value proposition. We also need to conduct in depth market studies, using concepts like TAM SAM and SOM.

learning

• Be more specific!about your value proposition, market, everything.
• Start talking to people to undertand the problem first hand. COLD CALL THEM as much as you can.
• Visualise the project-discovery process to the rest of the team to easily understand — So they they can easily and quickly figure out what the reasoning was that brought 9 ideas down to 1.

team came up with an idea to send out a google form to everyone on the team thinks of Syfly; Who we are as an organization. Might make it easier to build a cohesive vision for the team.

Development

Haven’t kept up too much with this sub team, put theyre making progress! work on thermal camera, intra drone comms and module bay for our current platform.

Research

These guys have been working on something quite cool that will not yet be revealed. Lets just say they edited an existing Matlab model which gave us very promising results. Now they are trying to get their edits verified by professors at the university. Exciting stuff.

General

A European startup accelerator reached out to us (No clue how they found us honestly, good on them), and that’s exciting.

We had applied to a intrauniversity startup(?) contest called the TU/e contest — Where we offically cleared the first round!!! So we’re in the top 40 teams. We are honestly not putting in too much effort or thought into this, we’re just going with the flow. Why are we even doing this? felt like a good low effort high possible reward situation. Also kind of forces us to fasttrack our business/strategy side of things.

Need to get in touch with our coach (?) for our honors program. Havent heard from each other in a while.

Aaaaaand thats a wrap.

What Next

• Make a plan of action for strategy. We’ve made a lot of assumptions while choosing our main ‘project’. time to start calling people up to validate them. Maybe a good idea to build a database of contacts and shoot some emails/call ASAP.
• Guru wants a copy of the POA as well as the visualisation
• Reach out to Syfly coach (?)
• Contact other Gurus? there was one who was very enthusiastic and he seemed really cool. Ive just been kind of Ghosting him for a while. Need
• Consolidate results of questionaire. What are we going to do with this? Might be nice to build a vision statment and pitchdeck but that depends on us verifying our chosen ‘projecty’. So maybe pause this for now and full steam ahead for verification
• Look at next steps for TU/e contest
• Apply for the startup accelerator!!!
• Need to find ways to boost motivation, ownership within team. Maybe a weekly brainstorm meetup where we meet up and discuss any problems anyone is having and try to brainstorm ideas?