Some of you have been asking for feedback on the 2nd assignment.
Overall, I was very happy with the creativity and energy people showed in creating these! I'll be highlighting some of the most viewed and up-voted ones here soon.
Here are three of the videos that have received the most views and upvotes thus far:
The 2nd assignment was intended to help you practice see the flaws in a business model and then changing that business model or idea in some way to improve it. This is one part of what you will be doing during the rest of the course. These "worst" ideas all had some fairly obvious flaw in one or more aspects of the business model. Some of you attempted to fix them by changing the target customer while others kept the target customer the same, but then changed what the "solution" being offered to them would be.
These were called "commercials" rather than pitches. What you all did was not what an investor would want to see in a presentation for fundraising. We'll go over that in a later part of the course and how to do those effectively.
Now that you've practiced "pivoting" or changing the business model in response to part of it not working, we're ready for the next step. In the next assignment you will take the best idea you can come up with as a team and start testing it to find out if customers really have that problem or are interested in your solution. Often you will get some negative feedback and have to pivot or change the business model in response to this feedback. That might require changing the market or changing the solution or the value proposition you're offering to customers. This will be much harder with your own ideas than it was with someone else's idea. So this exercise was meant to help get you ready for working on your own startup projects in the next phase. In the next projects we will help you to crowd source feedback from your peers and mentors along the way. This will be a key aspect of the next project.
If you're still looking for a team, there's still time to sign up and join, it's not too late to get involved and get started even if you've missed the first assignments.
Some people have asked how to switch to a different team after they have committed to one team. Eventually we should have this feature. One workaround in the meantime is to sign up again under a new email address and join a different team.
Overall, I was very happy with the creativity and energy people showed in creating these! I'll be highlighting some of the most viewed and up-voted ones here soon.
Here are three of the videos that have received the most views and upvotes thus far:
The 2nd assignment was intended to help you practice see the flaws in a business model and then changing that business model or idea in some way to improve it. This is one part of what you will be doing during the rest of the course. These "worst" ideas all had some fairly obvious flaw in one or more aspects of the business model. Some of you attempted to fix them by changing the target customer while others kept the target customer the same, but then changed what the "solution" being offered to them would be.
These were called "commercials" rather than pitches. What you all did was not what an investor would want to see in a presentation for fundraising. We'll go over that in a later part of the course and how to do those effectively.
Now that you've practiced "pivoting" or changing the business model in response to part of it not working, we're ready for the next step. In the next assignment you will take the best idea you can come up with as a team and start testing it to find out if customers really have that problem or are interested in your solution. Often you will get some negative feedback and have to pivot or change the business model in response to this feedback. That might require changing the market or changing the solution or the value proposition you're offering to customers. This will be much harder with your own ideas than it was with someone else's idea. So this exercise was meant to help get you ready for working on your own startup projects in the next phase. In the next projects we will help you to crowd source feedback from your peers and mentors along the way. This will be a key aspect of the next project.
If you're still looking for a team, there's still time to sign up and join, it's not too late to get involved and get started even if you've missed the first assignments.
Some people have asked how to switch to a different team after they have committed to one team. Eventually we should have this feature. One workaround in the meantime is to sign up again under a new email address and join a different team.