Starting up as a student Entrepreneur
How manage and build a startup in college along with academics.
Hello folks,
Today I will talk about how you can program your time to build a startup in college while pursuing your education. I have done this so I believe I have some foresight on what it takes and how you can navigate through the challenges of starting up as a student entrepreneur.
But before that a bit of background. I am Niket, 25 years old, based out of Bangalore India. I built a tech-enabled self-publishing startup when I was in my second year of college at the age of 18 and then ended up raising some capital, scaling the business and eventually sold it to India’s largest digital literature and IP ecosystem startup- Pratilipi. I spent two years scaling the venture post-acquisition and then moved on to create Medial which is the next-gen professional social media platform. More on that later.
Back to the topic of starting as a student entrepreneur, here’s my take on how to effectively manage the entire journey, what to do and what not to do. I am covering four major questions in this blog.
The first and major question I get from students in college is -
“How do I get investment to start testing my idea and building my startup?”
You don’t need money to test your idea. For most tech and even ops businesses, you can test and find PMF organically without investing a lot of money. There’s this absurd idea in most people’s minds that if someone gives them enough money then they could build something amazing. And even I thought so at some point in time- that money can solve a lot of problems. But you see, the world isn’t a fairytale and it’s not so easy. No one would trust you or give you their money without you having any significant track record. Sure, if you have already built a great venture and proved yourself, next time you might get pre-seed capital based on your previous “pedigree (track record of doing something worthwhile, proof of you creating value previously)”. But if you are a student entrepreneur, chances are that this is your first time and it’s not going to happen easily. Anyway, in most tech/product businesses that are purely on the internet, you should assemble a bunch of great coders you know and sell the idea to them, ask them to probably be your co-founder so that they feel excited and incentivised about building your app. Then reach out to folks in college or around in your circle who can probably be your first beta users and see if people actually like the app and are coming back to it. It’s very easy to test this without much monetary resources. Be hacky, street-smart and get shit done instead of waiting for some golden angel who will come and give you money. And even if you do require a small amount of money, you and your co-founders can pool it in, ask your parents and heck, work for a paid project for a few months, save the money and then start. If you have enough hunger and determination you will find your way. If you are stubborn enough and don’t give up and start building, you will see how things fall into place, how people become interested in your startup and how the doors start opening for you. If you have to want it bad enough. In a tech venture, your costly part probably might be AWS/Cloud costs. AWS and Google Cloud give free credits to start with in amounts which is usually more than enough to deploy and test your app/product for a few months and to see traction. And if your traction blows up, you can either head towards profitability if you want to bootstrap or you can in most cases find an initial angel investor or pre-seed capital from a VC (Venture Capital firm). In India, communities like Razorpay Rize provide $5000 in AWS and Google Cloud credits for free in their program. That’s how we ran Medial initially. Our major cloud costs were shared by the amazing community at Razorpay Rize. You can check them out HERE. The next big question for student entrepreneurs is-
“How do you know which idea to work on?”
Now this is a tricky question with no straight answer. Some founders are visionary but no one is perfect. Even a great idea needs testing and PMF (product market fit) finding. Some founders are sheer machines who keep testing the waters until they find a sign of light at the end of the tunnel. Imagine that you have a SaaS (Software as a service) startup Idea. So you created your tool. Now find 5 companies that might use it, chase someone inside who is relevant to your tools domain in the company and demo it to them. Explain to them how they can use your tool and improve something for their use case. Chances are 1 out of 5 or 1 out of 50 will say yes. Once you have 1 then you can tell others how that client of theirs saw improvements and sell to others. If the tool is actually solving anything, people will not hesitate to try it out or pay for it. That’s your PMF. Then you need to find more and more clients and start building your revenue pipeline. For a social app, you can bring some users organically or through paid ads and see if they are doing what you expected them to do on the app, talk to your users about what features they’d like, how their experience is and keep building on the feedback. For a physical product, you just need 5-10 customers to test the waters. You can even give it at discounts initially to test if they actually like the product and if they do, they’ll probably buy again or recommend it to their peers. For an ed-tech/course product, it follows the same pattern. If the reviews are good and your course is appreciated then you need to sell and gather reviews and keep hustling. The problem is that you need to be honest with yourself and not fall too much in love with your idea/product. If something doesn’t work, move on. You don’t need to register a company and get a trademark before starting your journey. test and move on ASAP. Don’t spend too much time on useless things. Your chief objective is to find that winning idea. And 1 out of 10 ideas tested might just be it. How fast you execute and how honest you are with yourself is what will get you closer to your final idea to which you can dedicate the next 3-10 years of your life. So don’t settle and move fast with your execution until you find your “aha/voila” moment/product.
“How do you manage studies along with your startup"?”
If you want to build a startup, you need to be ready to be really good at “time management”. I wouldn’t recommend dropping out or not caring about your grades. They are important contrary to popular beliefs in the ecosystem. Yes, your degree per se might not matter a lot but the process, the journey, the friendships and learnings while acquiring that degree are invaluable. You will have to put in more time. Sleep for 7 hours, study and attend classes and find 3-4 hours to spend on your startup. Then you have the weekends when you can spend more time. Honestly, engineering colleges in India are the best space to startup because students study seriously anyway in the last week (some even just the night before) the exams. And it doesn’t matter which degree you are pursuing, you can definitely find enough time to build your MVP. All your answers lie within yourself. Work to find it.
“Should I bootstrap or raise funding?”
Honestly, venture funding is only for startups that have the potential of enough scale. We can talk about Funding vs. Bootstrapping in another blog but for today, bootstrap until you have proven initial metrics/traction, then keep bootstrapping as much as you can, the more you grow without external capital, the better it gets when you finally raise. And if you think your startup absolutely needs funding to operate and reach a point of scale after which you can monetise then go for it earlier. Remember funding can give you a breather but isn’t a sign of success. It is just a means to accelerate or get bigger. If your basics aren’t sorted whatever money you have raised will slip away quickly. It’s a myth that funding = success.
On a final note- Keep working hard, be honest with yourself and keep moving somewhere. Being stagnant is what kills most entrepreneurs. I have come across many students who want to do their own startup but never start anything and keep saying if they had funding they could build the next big thing. The best day to start was yesterday and the next best day is today. If you have more questions as a student entrepreneur or if you have a suggestion on what I should write next, please let me know below in the comments. Share this blog with your fellow entrepreneurs. I will write about my journey of building “The Write Order” in college in detail in another blog and also about what’s going on with my new startup “Medial” in another blog. You can install Medial on your Android phone through this LINK. iOS app is coming soon.
Our website- https://medial.app
Our Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/medial.app/
Our LinekdIN- https://www.linkedin.com/company/medial_app/
Our Twitter- https://twitter.com/medialapp
Our android app link - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.medial.android
iOS app is coming soon.
(To connect with me directly email me at- niket@medial.app)
Cheers,
Niket.