Future Entrepreneur Challenge Summer Program
Over summer, I entered a program called the Future Entrepreneur Challenge. In this program, I learned about entrepreneurship, business, and how to pitch your ideas. Throughout this program, my group came up with an entrepreneur idea and at the end, we pitched it to a board of investors. Amazingly, our group won! I will be expanding on our project further on.
In this program, I learned about finding a suitable problem to work towards and brainstorming possible solutions. Then, we learned customers: customer discovery, customer segmentation, customer personas, customer validations, and customer lifetime value. We also learned about ux design, lean product process, minimum viable product (MVP) design, value proposition design, sales funnel, and business models (pricing strategies, TAM, SAM, and SOM). Last but not least, we learned about pitching and analyzed successful pitches.
I also did a handful of customer interviews to help establish our customer personas and who we are targeting.
“My Internship” Project
The entrepreneur project that my group worked on was called “My Internships”. The reason I proposed this idea to our group was because it’s a personal problem to me; it’s tough for high school students to find internships. High school students are not typically considered the target audience for internships. I can speak from my own experience that we have to dig for internships, ask a lot of people, and oftentimes, the sites that we find are not considered to be really reliable.
The solution that we came up with was creating a “My Internships” website where we can offer project-based internship opportunities just to high school students. I was in charge of creating our website. I looked at successful websites and their design, and overall, Wix was pretty easy to understand for me since I have experience with creating websites using Wix (for example, I created yapadvocates.org). Here is the website we created:
On our website, we have a projects page; here, the projects would be displayed and our users will be able to choose a project-based internship to work on. They will also be able to choose a group to work with for this particular project; thus, each member will have a public page of their skill sets, interests, projects, and who they are looking for in a group. My team and I will be working on getting projects from tech companies, and we will display them using categories such as level of difficulty, commitment, date of deadline, and public groups.
Since we are a B2B2C company, we will have two ways to raise money. We will raise revenue from high schoolers through a freemium/membership revenue model, and we will get money from companies by offering packages; for every 1 project, they will pay $150, for every 10 projects, they will pay $1000, and so on. The amount for every project will decrease as number of projects increase to encourage companies to buy the larger packages.
Previous to creating our website, we also created a prototype using Balsamiq and Marvel. I understood Balsamiq right away since you could easily create wireframes, and it was very user friendly. At first, Marvel was a bit difficult to understand, but as I put together all the pages, I quickly began to grasp how it worked. Here is our prototype:
Reflection
Throughout this program, not only did I learn a lot about business and entrepreneurship, I learned a lot about myself. I learned about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, and I realized that I too, have those skillsets. I’m not afraid to take risks, if I believe that the benefits will eventually outweigh the risks. By making the prototypes and making the websites, I pushed myself to create projects that I never thought I could.
We came a long way. At first, we started with an idea. Then, it became a solution. And then all of a sudden, we were coming up with revenue models and business models. All of this extensive knowledge helped me realize that I can learn more than I thought, and that anyone can become an entrepreneur as long as you work towards what you believe in and don’t give up. There were several times where we had to refocus our solution; first, we were just focusing on internships for high schoolers, then we targeted our site towards tech companies, then we focused on project-based internships, and we also changed our public groups option several times. Overall, we didn’t give up. I know that this is just the first step in starting a successful company, but now that I’ve learned of what it takes to be an entrepreneur and been in that environment, I believe that I can accomplish finishing anything I begin.
This program opened my eyes to the vast world of entrepreneurship. Not just in the business world, but also for taking baby steps and being committed to what you begin in the real world. To me, it means creating something meaningful to yourself and your community. In this way, it could be part of a career path I could get involved in. Although I would like to focus on the house of engineering, understanding how the business world works will aid me when I begin work, or maybe even one day start my own company.
