How South Bend Code School Teens Are Building Companies That Matter with the Help of INVANTI, a Startup Generator
In Part 2 of our Hello World Pitch Competition series, Dustin and Maria help students focus on problems to find solutions.
— This is the second story in our series documenting Hello World: A Pitch Competition From Nowhere, USA
Over two months this fall, high school students at South Bend Code School are working individually and in teams to come up with business ideas centered around tech and build a prototype of that idea.
This process will culminate in Hello World: A Pitch Competition From Nowhere, USA, where each student will present their idea to a panel of judges. The panel includes Cyan Banister, a venture capitalist and partner at Founders Fund, who is offering $5,000 in prize money split between the top three teams to help fund and motivate ongoing work on the student’s company.
Problem Hunting 🔍
To start the process of developing ideas, our friends Maria Gibbs and Dustin Mix, the co-founders of INVANTI, visited class to do some “problem hunting” with our students.
INVANTI is a startup generator based here in South Bend that passionately disagrees with the myth that you must have an idea to be an entrepreneur. They have channeled that passion into a process that starts with problem hunting, and ends with a company.
Dustin and Maria kicked off the problem hunting session by asking the students to brainstorm things that they experience or see in their everyday lives that annoys them or someone close to them. Dustin prompted them to be specific by asking: “what annoyed you in the last week? last month? last year?”
After brainstorming, the group started to discuss what the problems behind their annoyances might be and who you could interview to see if your problem is felt by others and might be a business opportunity. Class ended with a call to action — go talk to those people.
Superhero Storyboards 🚀
Later that week Dustin returned to work with a few of the students on problem storyboarding, brainstorming solutions, and solution storyboarding. Dustin explained how they use storyboards to think through business problems and solutions:
With the storyboards, we try to treat them like a comic book. In the problem storyboard you show the character having the problem and then all the effects of that happening. Then after brainstorming solutions for each person’s problem, we build another storyboard but this time their solution was like the superhero of the story — it showed up in the problem storyboard and fixed the problem.
After drawing out both storyboards, each student worked to find the easiest way to build a first version of the solution so that it could be tested with early customers or users.
Today we have 8 individuals or teams working on ideas for Hello World: A Pitch Competition From Nowhere, USA! Right now, some are interviewing potential customers and others are coding a software component to their idea — we’re thrilled to see them engaged and outside of their comfort zone.
Up Next on the blog:
During these two months leading up to the pitch competition, we are documenting the students’ process in blogs. Up next captures one night a week after Dustin and Maria’s original visit when an all-female group of INVANTI Cohort 2 members listened to each idea and helped the students refine pieces such as their business model.
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