One Month Until LaunchX Summer
It is just one month until LaunchX Summer 2020!
Soon this summer’s students will be coming together to form startup teams and launch real companies in a variety of online forums such as our course platform, Zoom classroom sessions, and video sessions with mentors and teammates. We’re excited about the new opportunities that working remotely presents to allow more customized learning experiences and access to awesome resources.
In addition to the excitement of the learning environment, the changing world landscape is presenting exciting opportunities for our aspiring entrepreneurs. So many industries are facing a lot of challenges as they adapt to how coronavirus has hit them, and this means opportunity for startups. We love this article that was posted in Forbes that references an image that has been floating around LinkedIn and Twitter asking people what has inspired their digital transformation. Was it 1. CEO 2. CTO or 3. COVID-19? You don’t need to see the image to know the answer!
It will be the ambitious dreamers like our students, in fact, that help bring us into the future. It has been shown that innovation is highly correlated to a country’s GDP per capita (see chart from The Economist that leverages data from the Global Innovation Index). So as countries around the world face recessions, entrepreneurs will bring us back to economic health.
We’re excited to see what our students come up with this summer!
Here’s a preview of the entrepreneurial process that our students will go through during the six weeks of LaunchX Summer to launch their startups:
Week 1 – Building the Foundation
During this first week, students are introduced to the foundations of entrepreneurship. Together, startup teams identify their ‘why’, do lots of market research, and build an understanding of their customer and the underlying need for their offering.
Week 2 – Formalizing an Idea
Startup teams formalize their ideas by assessing the customer desirability, market landscape, and financial feasibility. At this stage, startup teams start developing mockups and initial prototypes for their product.
Week 3 – Testing
During week three, startup teams focus on testing multiple iterations of their prototype. They also start to develop their marketing strategy.
Week 4 – Iterating
Startup teams make additional prototype iterations and perform more testing, plus develop their sales strategy.
Week 5 – Selling
By week five, most startups will be ready to sell their offering. That means developing financials, considering legal aspects, and setting initial traction goals. They may choose to define these through sales, pre-orders, or letters of intent, though regardless of the specific type of goal, the team hustles to get real customer commitments
Week 6 – Pitching
In the week leading up to Demo Day, startup teams bring the insights together by learning to prepare for their future needs as a company, and finally pitch to a panel of experts on Demo Day to celebrate the launch of their startups.
We’re excited to share more about this year’s startups as LaunchX Virtual gets underway. Make sure to stay up to date on the latest action by following us on Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin, Twitter, and sign up for our newsletter to follow along as our LaunchX students hone their skills and launch real startups.