How we leveraged our startup to build college final year project
All of us know the excitement of doing the final year project in the first few weeks of the 6th semester and painfully see it ebbing away.
Missing deadlines to not updating the project guide and rushing in the last week, manipulating results, to submit a half baked project, that is a fraction of what we imagined in the beginning, is I am sure, a common phenomena among most of us engineers :P
Looking back from there, it sure feels like a waste of a good one year that could have been spent well on building something useful , as a final year project!
I didn’t want to take that route. Meanwhile, we had been doing some interesting things in our pre-final year. I embarked on my very own entrepreneurial journey to build the startup, insi8 with two of my college friends. Doing this while also being active in college started to look like a tedious task at first, but driven by motivation, we led the way , working on the evenings after returning from college.
It was midway that we realized that it was possible to work even in college (without bunking which is what we used to do to speed things up) by taking a subset of the product we were building as a startup and converting it to our final year project at college !
Our main project is called — Temporal and Aspect-Based Opinion Summarization. This is a subset of the product insi8 that we are working on, as a startup and covers the back-end related tasks under one banner.
Why did we turn our startup into the final year project ?
We thought of doing a part of our startup product as our final year project because
- It would help us focus on our product during the time allotted for the project so it allows us to remain motivated and make sure that the work is completed on time.
- We figured out that what we were building is relevant and it would more than easily qualify as the main project topic.
- We could also leverage the staff members to get support in making our product as the project
How did we convince our teachers?
It was quite easy getting teachers to allow us to do that since they realized that we are really passionate and are trying to solve a real world problem. The experience we gained through validating, researching, reverse engineering existing Software companies, talking to customers allowed us to explain our vision at a great depth and clarity. The only advice we received is that we should probably cut down on the number of things we were trying to tackle with the project. We addressed this by giving them a proper product vision and strategy.
It is wonderful how all the pitching done as a part of building the product has given us more confidence to presenting our ideas and have enough backing as far as knowledge is concerned, that we acquired from the sessions and completing tasks set by the SV.CO platform.
How do we plan to execute ?
As we progress in our final year project, we will release the product too, updating changes after each iteration because the best way to get a product into the market is by — thinking big, starting small and scaling fast. We will release it, collect feedback and implement changes in the product as and when we go.
The final project exam will mark the launch of Insi8 to the market with the complete features that we envisioned. There will surely be changes as a result of the feedback loops and hence, getting a stable v1 release of the product is the aim of the final year project.
What are the advantages of taking this approach?
One of the most difficult things with final year projects is getting the idea approved. By clubbing the startup product with the project idea, one can be sure that it will get approved since what you are building is a useful thing.
It is only through proper validation that a product can get into the engineering phase as far as a startup is concerned. Also, with this approach,
- You can make sure that work completes on time
- You can take advantage of the facilities and the staff in the college to help with their product
- You can be sure that your product will be ready to be released with the completion/ examination phase of the product
4 Key takeaways from this approach
1. When we move out of college seeking a job (if we do), the first thing that you care about is your employability and your skillset, both of which you cannot hone without having worked on something that pushes you to improve yourself constantly.
2. Working on a startup that you found allows you to gain self-awareness, understand what building something that people love to use is all about and learning to crack the money engine (when people pay for your product, example: UBER)
3. The above qualities do not come with simply doing a project that may be eventually shelved because of not having prospects as a viable product/technology. Not only does it allow you to grow, it also gets you ready for the job that you fit yourself into by doing those tasks while making your product, if you choose not to continue with your product.
4. It opens up so many paths after graduation. It will create a good impression during interviews, will make for a great motivation factor in making your Statement of Purpose (SOP).
After embarking on the entrepreneurial journey, we realized that we wouldn’t like it any other way and recommend it to every passionate, self-motivated person with a vision for a better future that they wish to be a part of creating!
