Art of the Start : Week 3/24

Tips in choosing ideas

As we move into week three, 33 college teams are in the process of selecting their business ideas. Over the next six months, these ideas would be build into world class product prototypes and launched to early customers.

If you are a first time founder, choosing your first idea can be a really confusing affair. Here are some general tip while choosing ideas if your first idea.

Team and Idea

To start any startup business, the first thing you need is a team and then an idea to work on.

Students have almost zero exposure to the real world and thus,it is natural that they have doubts on choosing an idea.

What we have seen in Startup Village is that no student team gets it right on the first try to build a product, simply because they have never done it before. Students thus lack the many execution skills such as working in a team, choosing the most important feature to build first and actually building out the prototype that can be ready for a beta launch.

We help teams pick ideas from a list of professionally pre-researched ideas in the SV.CO idea library so that they can get started faster of the block to learn the fundementals of execution.

Lessons from the real world.

As we move from the theoretical world of college to the real world, two lessons from real world come to use

1. No one balanced a bicycle on their first try

2. No one became a professional cyclist overnight

Students should choose their first idea as a learning exercise to balance your team, your learning abilities and understanding what it feels like to sit on a startup.

While choosing ideas, teams are well positioned to learn these finer details of a startup, if the choose ideas that can be bootstrapped and launched without external funding.

This is because, for a first time founder with no track record, its super hard to get money/funding.

Professional investors will not fund amateur teams for just having ideas and thus it becomes very important to showcase your execution skills by building a prototype and then your sales/marketing skills by getting a few early customers.

This automatially means that by choosing ideas that need investment upfront, like building an commerce portal, it means that startup will have a tough time learning anything since there is lot of upfront financial investment required to setup the real backend for getting suppliers to give you products and getting warehouses to store them, having a logistics company to distribute for you etc.

Instead, the objective of selecting and idea to build the first product is to learn how to build a product, work as a team and launch to customers.

With the lessons learned and one iteration behind them, teams now have the background knowledge to choose to fight their own battles and pick any new idea theywant.

Arun Purushotaman, who learnt these valuable lessons from first batch of SV.CO digital Incubator has successfully raised 20lacs of funding for his second idea two week back.

The company would be valued at around 80lacs now. This was his second product.

Moral of the story: Learn to build one product, by taking an idea and building out a minium viable product. Go deep and understand design, engineering, product strategy and more importantly how to work together as a team.

Use the lessons to balance the bicycle second time.

If you learn to balance a bicycle once, you can do it any number of times. If you learn to execute and launch protype of one idea, then you can move up into the professional league of building real companies with your next set of ideas.