A week-long training course helped hone startup ideas ranging from advertising-free social media platforms to online apps connecting travelers and small businesses.
LONDON — In only five days, blank sheets of paper turned into fully fledged business ideas with seed funding secured. Welcome to the entrepreneurship boot camp at Northeastern University in London.
Students signed up for a week of coaching and tutorials on how to start a business from scratch, with the chance at the end of the five days to pitch their proposals to business coaches and university career staff.
Dawid Szczur, a second-year computer science and business student, freely admits that he came into the week not really knowing what he wanted to get out of the experience.
“Not in the slightest,” he replies when asked whether he had an idea for a startup before the week began. “It was very explorative and way out of my comfort zone.
“I came in with zero expectations. But they led us through building a business model really quickly and I realized halfway through that, ‘OK, I have a canvas with an idea, and I potentially know what to do now if I want to go and start it off,’ which was unexpected.”
Szczur was able to walk into the pitching room on the final day to present his intention to create an educational tool to help people understand the resources they would need to take their learning to the next level on any given topic.
It was one of a host of creative business endeavors that the judges considered on the final day of the boot camp.
After deliberation, it was Tommy Scanlon, studying for a master’s degree in philosophy and AI, who was announced as the winner. His proposal for creating a social media platform that does not depend on advertising was given £2,000 ($2,700) of seed funding after coming in first place.
“I found the idea difficult to describe, which is part of the reason why I wanted to work on creating an elevator pitch at the boot camp,” says Scanlon, who hails from upstate New York.
“It is essentially a social networking site that isn’t advertising-based — a healthier version of Facebook, as it were.
“I study social media ethics as part of my course here and it is something I’m very interested in from an academic point of view — understanding the kind of problems that have emerged from online and digital technologies. The boot camp was an interesting way to think about a market-based approach to correct some of those problems.”
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Scanlon says the boot camp helped him “flesh out” what his, as yet unnamed, social media platform might look like for users.
“Going through the boot camp helped me figure out how to describe it, who the customer segments might be, who would use such a platform and how to go about selling it to investors,” he continues. “It was about taking the time to flesh out the actual practical aspects of what such a venture would entail.”
With his mind on completing his year-long studies in the U.K. capital, thinking about how to invest his winnings is on the back burner until after September, but Scanlon says he is excited to start realizing his ambitions.
“I came in with zero expectations. But they led us through building a business model really quickly and I realized halfway through that, ‘OK, I have a canvas with an idea, and I potentially know what to do now if I want to go and start it off.’”Dawid Szczur, a second-year computer science and business student
“I came in with zero expectations. But they led us through building a business model really quickly and I realized halfway through that, ‘OK, I have a canvas with an idea, and I potentially know what to do now if I want to go and start it off.’”
Paul Sturrock was one of the business coaches working with students during the boot camp, which was co-run by Aspire, a training and upskilling platform. An entrepreneur himself, Sturrock has run his own businesses for almost 25 years.
He called the Northeastern students “a great group to work with” and praised their motivation level. Sturrock says the week was about installing a self-drive in the students that they can utilize even if they do not end up working for themselves.
“The boot camp is basically helping them to have a skill set and a mindset regardless of whether they go for a job or whether they start their own business,” Sturrock says.
“It is this idea of, ‘I don’t need to wait for somebody else to tell me — This is the mission.’ It is about saying, ‘I can create my own brief, my own mission, and I’ve got enough confidence and knowledge of best practices to make it happen.’”
Others to impress the judges included Priyanshu Pareta, with his “Match Mate AI” business proposal, and Andrea Larsen, with her “Local City” pitch. Both received £1,500 ($2,025) to invest in their startup business concepts.
Larsen, a recent law and psychology graduate from Denmark, wants to connect travelers and small businesses via an online app to offer visitors a more authentic experience when they land in a new location.
“It’s a network that is created for small businesses in cities,” she explains. “It is supposed to help them get customers by creating these free tourist routes that you can download online. Tourists can drop in at random on one of the businesses and then they send you on your way to the next business that’s similar, so you get this more local experience.
“The idea is you get to support small businesses while you’re traveling. You meet people who live and work there.
“I think a lot of people now, especially when they travel, they don’t want to just see Big Ben — they want to see the local artist and the local person who plays music down at the pub. But when you’re just coming for the weekend, trying to research all that — it takes time. I thought it would be handy to have one place to do it all, while also helping businesses to support each other when the high street is failing in many countries.”
Pareta, who is studying for a master’s degree in AI and computer science, says he had the notion of “Match Mate AI” before coming to London from his native India to study at Northeastern.
But it was the prospect, he adds, of being able to be trained on how to pitch a business idea and write a road map for taking that concept from blueprint to reality that encouraged him to enroll in the entrepreneurial course.
Pareta credits the advisers on the boot camp with helping him to hone his objectives for “Match Mate AI” by first asking him to put together a “problem statement” for his vision and then recommending that he focus on targeting his product at a smaller target audience.
“This is what I’m trying to do now,” says Pareta, “and that made things clearer for me and to explain to anyone else.”