How to Make the Most of Your HSC Journey
and stay on track to win Demo Day…
This past Saturday concluded the fourth bootcamp of The Spring 2021 Husky Startup Challenge. HSC is E-club’s semester-long venture incubator and pitch competition, supplemented with 8–9 weekly bootcamps and personalized mentorship, where students learn how to bring their business ideas to life.
The Husky Startup Challenge poses a unique opportunity for students of all majors and backgrounds to learn about entrepreneurship from speakers and directors that have valuable firsthand experience with early-stage startups (from ideation to business modeling to pitching to everything in between!). Attendees of the bootcamp on February 22 learned about startup strategy and positioning from Bob McCullough, a renowned D’Amore-McKim Business Professor who teaches innovation and strategy at Northeastern. Our Spring 2021 cohort will close off to registered ventures only this upcoming Wednesday, February 24th.
Being so closely involved with The Husky Startup Challenge for so long, I pride myself in understanding the ins and outs of the program’s operation. Are you looking to make the most of your HSC Journey? Follow these six pieces of advice (courtesy of a previous Demo Day participant, HSC Associate Director, and HSC Co-Director) if you want to secure your spot at Demo Day! 🚀
1) Find A Problem You Care About
Whether you’re new to the entrepreneurship community or you’ve pursued four ventures in your time as a student, the key to maintaining stamina and perseverance when working on a venture is choosing to work on something that matters to you. It’s not preferred, it is essential for you to succeed.
A common trap many first-time HSC participants will fall into is joining the team of someone who has found a problem they want to pursue and latching onto it rather than taking the time to consider whether they really want to devote a portion of their semester to advancing a project in the given area. Co-founders or larger groups that join the program whittle down their numbers as the semester goes on because working on their HSC venture turns into a job rather than a passion project.
Take the time to ideate and consider the problems you and those around you face. What are you interested in? What do you care about? Why? Chances are your problems are a concern for other people, too.
If you do your research and realize while validating that the problem you care about is actually not a large pain point for enough people, pivot! Pivoting is how early-stage businesses stay relevant in changing times. Pick another problem or find ones that are related and look into those. It doesn’t matter how late in the game you pivot — you can even pivot after you’ve been accepted into the cohort for a different venture idea.
Above all, don’t get discouraged and resort to something you won’t be excited to work on. If you don’t care about your own problem, then why should anyone else?
2) Schedule Time to Work on Your Venture
If you ever hope to apply the knowledge gained in bootcamps to your idea, test its viability, and flesh out the essential components enough to present it to an audience, then scheduling out time each week to work on your HSC venture is necessary. It’s important to check in with yourself (or your team, if you have one) to know what stage of development you’re currently at. This is not only to help in continuing to make progress, but it’s useful to recognize if you’ve hit any roadblocks: you may just require some guidance or clarification from the directors and/or your mentor.
When deciding how much time to block out, anywhere from 4–10 hours a week is a good estimate of how much work you should generally look to devote outside of HSC bootcamps. Based on the market you’re looking to break into, your other commitments for the semester, and how seriously you want to take your venture post-Demo Day, your weekly venture commitment can lie anywhere in that range or beyond.
Be honest with yourself and know what you’re joining the HSC program for. Is it to build a venture you can continue to take through the Mosaic ecosystem and do something with or are you in HSC for the invaluable learning experiences? Bottom line: you will get out of your venture what you put into it.
3) Attend Every Bootcamp
Taking the process of starting an early-stage business and condensing it into one semester is no small feat. Covering ideation, customer discovery, strategic positioning, business modeling, branding, and pitching means every minute of each HSC bootcamp contains important, relevant, useful information that will help you succeed. The only way for you to use any of it is by coming to bootcamps to absorb it all.
I’ve known past participants that have gone through HSC two or three times and end up coming much more consistently to bootcamps their second time around because they realize they missed out on a lot of necessary material.
Especially if you’re not a business or entrepreneurship major, most if not all of the content will be entirely new for you (as it was for me my first time around). I get the desire to sleep in a little extra after a Friday night, but I want to challenge you to make the effort to walk to Hayden 012 or hop on that 12 pm Zoom call with your camera on and bring curiosity and enthusiasm.
Participating in this program, directing the program, even being a speaker at a bootcamp is 100% voluntary. I have been a part of HSC content curation for two semesters, researching and learning so that we can relay advice and concepts back to all of you in a digestible format. We put these programs on every semester for your benefit, so if you hope to gain something from them, do it to the fullest.
4) Utilize the Directors’ Office Hours
Office hours are a great way to get real feedback on your venture from a “sample audience” (your directors). No matter what stage you’re at, the directors want to meet you! They want to hear about what you’re passionate about and provide you with as much support and guidance as possible.
Directors and a few other Entrepreneurs Club board members hold weekly office hours specifically for the participants of HSC. Office hours are the perfect low-stakes situation for you to hear some genuine feedback on the thing you’ve been devoting time towards. In that same vein, meeting with your mentor at least once a week is as, if not more, important since your mentor has a deeper understanding of your venture in particular and often has a background in a related area. It can be easy to get tunnel vision, especially with independent unstructured projects. Don’t let that happen to you! Check-ins will make sure you stay on a solid track throughout the semester.
Also, note that the directors are at every venture audition and decide (along with mentors besides your own) who ultimately pitches at Demo Day. The more exposure they’ve had to your project the better sense they’ll have of what you’re trying to accomplish and what the end goal of your business idea is. It can only help you to attend office hours.
5) Get To Know Your Cohort
As a participant of The Husky Startup Challenge, you are NOT a competitor in a cutthroat competition. The atmosphere we hope to cultivate is one of support and motivation. Healthy competition is a part of many good relationships and, at the end of the day, we’re all peers at the same school. Although winning is meant to reward students who took their ventures above and beyond, prizes are not the end all be all of HSC.
As an HSC participant, you are among some of the most driven and talented students at Northeastern. These are students who have chosen to learn beyond the classroom and genuinely value experiential learning.
I was lucky enough to cultivate close relationships with three other participants from my cohort. They were some of the first people I met and connected with at Northeastern, and we remain close friends to this day!
6) Audition for Demo Day
Last but certainly not least, if you want a shot at pitching during Demo Day, sign up for an audition slot! It seems ridiculous, but from experience with the program over several semesters (in-person and virtual) it’s always shocking to see how many members of the cohort decide not to even audition because they’re too nervous or they don’t think their venture is good enough in comparison to others. In fact, about half of the 46 venture cohort I went through HSC with during Fall 2019 never signed up for an audition slot whatsoever.
Best of luck on your HSC journey! I hope it will be as exciting, inspiring, and impactful for you as it was for me. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at lewis.ra@northeastern.edu.
To read more about past Demo Day participants that have taken their HSC venture far beyond the Entrepreneurs Club take a look at our Startup Spotlights on Medium, featuring two ventures led by current Northeastern students: Fluxxio Inc. and Cruz Control. Additionally, Slate, BusRight, Eat Your Coffee, and ScholarJet are among the most notable past HSC ventures that launched into the market and are continuing to build traction with consumers.
