10 Questions for Student Startups
Note: This post was co-authored by Joe Kahn (Medium won’t let us add co-authors), definitely check out his profile!
Hi! We’re Tomas & Joe: student partners from two student-run venture capital firms, Rough Draft Ventures (RDV) and Dorm Room Fund (DRF). We spend a lot of time meeting with founders, learning about different markets, and listening to dozens of pitches.
After collectively meeting with hundreds of companies, we’ve found that there’s a pretty small set of simple questions we need ask to structure our thoughts. We wanted to post some of these questions online, with hopes that they might be helpful to current and aspiring founders.
- Who are you?
This should be no surprise. When we are looking at early stage student-run companies, typically the most important thing to us is the team, since it’s often hard to assess the market and product potential at such an early stage.
2. What is the pain point you’re addressing?
You’ve probably heard some version of Maslow’s law of the instrument before: “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Reinterpreted for startups: Don’t fit a product to a problem. Lead with a real problem faced by real people and show us how your company arises from that. Can you quantify how bad the problem is? How big is the market for your solution?
3. What are you building?
Having covered team and pain point, we’re going to want to hear about the solution. Having a concise description is important, and being able to explain what that will be now, and a little while into the future is also helpful.
4. Is this problem best solved as a company? And is this a feature or a product?
A friend of ours once opined that “doing a company should be the last option you pursue when solving a problem.” If the problem can be solved by shifting a habit or writing up a good tutorial online, do that instead; even if it can be better solved by writing a plugin to a popular piece of software, do that instead.
If, and only if, the problem will be best solved by creating a company to develop and sustain a solution, that is when you should pursue that.
5. What have you achieved in the last 3 months?
We want to hear about how hard you’re hustling. If you come to us and say you have a great idea, don’t really need capital, but aren’t going to start until you have it … that shows us a wild lack of conviction. Prove to us that you’re driven by this problem and that you will solve it with or without us.
6. Why are you the one to build it?
Building a company is hard. With few exceptions, you probably are not the first to either consider this space or build a company in it. Why do you believe you’ll be able to?
This is especially important for college students wanting to build companies in spaces most college students know little about it. If you’re trying to build a product for advertisers, why are you qualified? With that said, there are many examples of college students disrupting fields they had no formal experience in, but explain to us why you’re passionate or what is your unique insight or experience.
7. Can you build it yourself?
If you’re building a technical product, one of your cofounders better be technical. If you’re building a company that uses “machine learning”, we’re going to ask what algorithms you’re using, who your ML person is, how long they’ve been doing ML, and so on…
8. If you have a cofounder, how is your relationship?
So many great company ideas go up in flames because the co-founders started fighting when running the company became difficult (i.e. user acquisition struggles, hiring struggles, difference in leadership styles, difference in visions, etc). How long have you two known each other? How’d you meet? And have you successfully worked on any projects before? Most importantly, are you actively working on the health of your relationship? What steps have you taken to build a sustainable and trusting partnership?
Some quality reading: How to pick a co-founder.
9. What’s your go-to-market?
Getting someone to initially trust your company is hard. How are you going to get your first few users? This is orders of magnitude harder if you’re building a two sided marketplace. Think about how you can start with individuals or small groups of users and get usage to grow from there (and no, “all their friends will also join the service at the same time” is not a good answer).
10. Why is it defensible?
Assuming your company goes well, and you start to scale and gather users, and are making 100s of billions a year, what’s to stop a large competitor from rolling out the same product? How will you build defensibility in that time so that someone else can’t straight up copy you? Does your product benefit from network effects? Is there a regulatory moat?
If you are a student team: both DRF & RDV are made up of students and invest around $20,000 in student-led startups. We’d love to chat and talk about your company more.
P.S. The startup launch list by Panda is a great resource of blog posts and articles written by thought leaders in technology and venture capital.
