Virtual Entrepreneurship Programmes amidst COVID-19
I’ve lost count of the number of emails I’ve opened with the phrase “unprecedented circumstances” neatly tucked into the body of text. As cliché as it may now sound, it expresses a sentiment which is no less true: since the quarantine measures in response to the pandemic were put in place, “normality” as we know it is on a hiatus.
The standard mode of operation has changed in most if not all industries. More people are working from home; have been furloughed, or for the less fortunate, out of work and seeing a substantial loss in their earning potential. Nevertheless, as is always the case, the show must go on.
At YSYS, we have now launched our third round of FoundersDoor, a pre-accelerator for young, aspiring tech founders from underrepresented backgrounds; following the success of two cohorts in June’ 19 and October ‘19.
Like others, we have had to adapt to this shift by developing a virtual offering of what was previously a 100% in-person programme. However, perhaps by a fortunate stroke of serendipity, we have had a head start since online delivery of some aspects of FoundersDoor has been something that we’ve been planning on implementing since early this year.
Are virtual programmes the future?
I certainly think so. That is not to say that virtual programmes should or will ever completely replace live programmes, and I do not doubt that a significant element of engagement and relationship building can be lost in lieu of face-to-face contact with cohorts. However, I do believe that as an additional resource or alternative to improve accessibility, the upside easily outweighs the down.
The main reason that I thought it was apt to curate an online version of FoundersDoor is because of scale. Programmes like FoundersDoor are designed to provide support to groups that typically may not have as much access to the insider knowledge, mentorship and structure which provides a foundation for setting your own path to startup success. However, only a small number of people can participate in these early stage programmes at any given time and the nature of their design means that scaling this requires time and resources directly proportional to the number of people you want to benefit. In contrast, online programmes enable the same upfront work and resource to potentially have a disproportionately higher impact in terms of scale than otherwise.
For my fellow programme managers and entrepreneur support workers, read on and I will give you the full breakdown of the process that I took to develop FoundersDoor Online!
So how did we go about it?
Design
Having ran two successful programmes already, I already had a pretty good idea of which key topics would need covering to meet our objective of helping the founders go from idea to validation. However, a good number of questions need to be considered with an online transition, such as:
- Are there some topics that need to be removed or added due to the online nature of the programme?
- How can you encourage a high level of engagement on the programme with everything being moved online vs. in-person?
- How do you facilitate team working virtually?
- How do you design the flow of the content to make sure each week builds on knowledge covered in previous week?
Focus Groups
With those questions in mind, one of the first things I did to start developing the design was to talk to people, as is often the case (or at least should be) before building something out. I reached out to mentors and workshop leaders from previous FoundersDoor cohorts to receive their perspective on whether a digital offering made sense conceptually, after which I spoke to founders that had actually taken part in the in-person programme to receive the “users’” point of view.
Insights from both groups were invaluable and helped to validate some of my thinking, whilst also prompting me to take a step back and rethink some of the assumptions I had made. This enabled me to finalise the modules to cover, the order of which they follow, the homework tasks, and many other smaller, but nonetheless important considerations.
Significantly, it also helped me come to the decision of creating a course of pre-recorded lectures rather than a series of live classes — the rationale being that participants could learn at their own pace and have a longer time to digest the information over the week, and refer back to it whenever they wanted. It also meant that they had more time to get a head start on the practical activities with their teams on Saturdays, where the bulk of focused work takes place.
Building
As you continue to read, it is perhaps becoming clearer how much buy-in from multiple stakeholders is required to design and manage an accelerator programme successfully!
YSYS is privileged in that we have a very engaged community of people from the startup ecosystem, with a broad skillset and domain expertise covered. However, the task of convincing individuals to contribute and explaining how to go about actually recording their presentations with the tech available in the market (e.g Loom, Quickplayer, built-in Macbook function) still remains. This meant having multiple back and forth emails, phone calls and suggestions on how to replicate the interactiveness of an in-person workshop in a video format.
This is something to bear in mind! You need to do your research and map out a vision of how your programme will run virtually before you actually reach out to contributors. The idea of pre-recording a workshop that they usually do in-person might be new to them — it is your job to de-mystify the process so it is easy as possible. This might mean getting them to come into your office and setting them up in a meeting room with a laptop and a USB plug-in microphone. For others, it may just mean providing some general guidance in a few bulletpoints.
Hosting
Next, you need to think about where to host your programme. Since I was taking the route of a self-directed online course, I researched what the best platforms were for this. I initially considered uploading video lectures on YouTube and sharing them with FoundersDoor participants on a weekly basis, but realised two problems:
- It didn’t allow access to the breadth of resources typically included in the in-person programme e.g. homework, handouts, reading material etc..
- In addition, YouTube doesn’t allow the tracking of progress of the cohorts, therefore making it unknown who has actually engaged with the content.
I came across Teachable because I have done online courses hosted on it in the past and therefore had a pretty decent understanding of how the platform worked. This worked well for us, but you need to assess which platform best serves your purpose. If your programme is literally a series of live webinars then finding a good video conferencing application is a more primary concern.
Webinars
Although, I chose to make the online course pre-recorded and self-directed, I also wanted to ensure that the founders would also get personalised support for their specific startup needs which is impossible to replicate in a pre-recorded video. This is where activities like webinars come in.
Personally, I recommend getting the paid version of Zoom. One of the key features that sold me is that during calls, the meeting host (presumably you), can create breakout rooms and allocate participants in them to work together. This is great if your participants are working in teams or if you want to facilitate mentoring sessions or group activities.
For FoundersDoor we used Zoom so that our domain experts could host Q&A sessions covering the theory and concepts taught in their lectures and providing feedback to startup teams on their homework and general advice they required.
Office Hours
We also asked mentors to provide time slots for teams to book into for focused support. This is easy to facilitate using Calendly and with an initial introduction session on Zoom. Alternatively, or in addition, you can also create a one-pager with the profile/bios of the mentor and the areas of support that they can provide.
I personally saw it fit to allow mentors to volunteer their time based on their schedules, allowing our cohort to independently reach out on an ad-hoc basis. Enforcing mentoring sessions at specific times can be unproductive if the demand isn’t there and mentors want to know that they are genuinely adding value. Also, it lightens your workload as a programme manager quite a lot.
Testing
The final stage is to test that everything actually works. The best way to go about this is to do a live demonstration with your team, followed by an external person. My advice it to actually enrol yourself onto the programme to experience the user journey for yourself. This is not a step to be missed! I ended up making some significant additions based on what I learnt from testing.
Communication
Now that you’ve created and tested the programme, you may know the ins and outs of how everything works but your cohort will not! Communicating how to navigate the online course and/or programme is essential in ensuring that your cohort can hit the ground running early on.
The way I went about it was by creating my own tutorial videos. Again, free software like Loom allows you to record your screen and literally do a walk-through of anything. For instance, I created a tutorial video on how to use Slack whilst onboarding into the community channel.
Conclusion
There are amazing tools that can make transitioning from in-person to virtual programme design/management relatively pain-free. It is not necessarily straightforward but it doesn’t need to anxiety-inducing either.
Why I Love Online Education
Online platforms such as YouTube, Teachable and Podia have opened up the opportunity to vastly increase the number of people that can access educational content. This is a MASSIVE gamechanger when it comes to allowing people, particularly those less-privileged to take their personal and profressional growth into their own hands. Granted, having access to the internet is a pre-requisite but at least in the context of the UK, the vast majority of people of all social strata have access either at home or at school.
Before co-founding my chocolate brand, Dapaah Chocolates, we had no idea of how to make chocolate. Why would we? Very few, if any 20-something year old black guys from South London would ever find the need to possess this skill-set. Nonetheless, when we wanted to, we were able to find the information needed on the internet (blogs and YouTube) to learn the process. A couple of years down the line, we have won awards at the Young British Foodie Awards and been featured in VICE , Mr Porter and British Vogue.
Online education is not just the future, it is the present and it’s time to seriously consider gearing up your online offering!
