From Ideas to Action

I had the pleasure to take The Startup Studio’s Entrepreneurial Studies course at Windermere Prep during my sophomore year of high school. I was excited to be able to participate in this class because throughout my childhood I had always dreamed of being an entrepreneur and wanted to start my own company. This drive led me as the boy selling lemonade on the side of the road next to the neighborhood clubhouse, the boy getting in trouble for trying to sell duct tape wallets on school campus, the boy trying to pitch his duct tape wallet idea to Ace Hardware, and the teen knocking on all of his neighbor’s doors trying to powerwash their house. All of these ventures unsurprisingly ended up failing for many reasons, but I hoped this course would give me insight as how to correctly go about creating and managing a startup.

Even with all of this anticipation for the class, I somehow managed to get lost on my way the first day and showed up three minutes late. To my surprise instead of letting it slide since it was the first day of school, Mr. Conroy, The Startup Studio’s founder, made an example out of my tardiness and proceeded to lecture the class on the importance of character and your image. At first, I thought he was giving me a hard time, but later in the year, I realized the true importance of building your reputation and relationships.

We were all then put into groups of four at random and told that these were going to be our new startup partners for the rest of the semester. While it was hard at first, we slowly started to build our team brand and try to find our passion that would lead us to our base for our startup. After Mr. Conroy taught us about the ways to model a new business, he let each team start to try to create an idea for a company and then create a presentation of it to pitch to the class.

After each presentation, the rest of the class was able to give feedback, and as the trust and familiarity with the class was built up, the feedback became more and more brutally honest. Pride and ignorance caused me to reject any initial criticism of our group’s idea, but this program helped me to realize that it wasn’t personal, as criticism is critical to help improve your vision. Later on in the year, I started to find the true value of feedback and interacting with your customer base to identify possible improvements and pivots for the startup. When receiving feedback after a presentation, I always wanted them to be as harsh as they could to help me identify our shortcomings so that we can improve on them. Building a relationship with the class where we trusted each other and didn’t take criticism personally was a huge part in the development of our ideas. Through constant pitching I began to build real confidence and lose all the fear I initially had.

After three rounds of presenting and pivoting, The Startup Studio gave my class the opportunity to participate in a networking event and share our ideas with members of the community and receive their feedback. This greatly helped with my presenting skills and ability to communicate my vision with others. From the feedback that we received at the networking event, my group realized while our “Drinkless Activity” app was good in theory, it was going to be very difficult to build it into a scalable technology. More important, I realized that I really was not passionate about it.

At the end of the semester and after several different ideas and pivots, the group ended up dissolving. While none of these companies were actually able to be taken to the market, I learned an immense amount about what it takes to build a company and how failure and the ability to listen and pivot are crucial skills needed in entrepreneurship. I then went back to the drawing board with this newfound knowledge and began to look at my own story for a path to success.