Lesson Learned

Before this class, I know nothing about the start-up. And I thought starting a company is all about the idea that the designer has. Through learning from the class, I am very wrong about it. This time, I finally had the opportunity to experience the feelings of entrepreneurs, learned a lot of useful things and experienced the difficulties of being a co-founder. Experiencing the whole semester, just for 7 min that we can present in front of VC, it is really hard. In the pitch day, we actually got really nervous and frozen when panels asking questions to us. Indeed, those are the hard questions but we already think about the questions and answers before. We actually did a lot of experiments and research before pitch day, but we did not actually present 100% of our work because we were really nervous.

From this class, I also learn that starting a company we should focus on the customer, respect the customer value, prevent underserviced and overservice, eliminate worthless economic activities, and commit to continuous improvement, the pursuit of excellence, perfection, constantly optimize the input and output. It can be seen that a lean start-up is a way to eliminate waste and improve speed and efficiency. Therefore, entrepreneurs must establish lean thinking.

If I have the opportunity to start a business in the future, I will apply what I have learned in this class to my business, and I will continue to ask myself these questions: who will feel valuable about this product? What is this value? What are the channels through which to find people who might be interested? How do we get them to decide to use our product, how do we maintain a lasting relationship with them, and how do we increase the amount of cash they’re willing to pay? And how do we charge? What resources do we need to invest in order to create value? What do we have to do to create value? Who do we need to work with to deliver our products or services to our customers? And how much does it cost?