Jack Fraser and Anzac Gallate from The Gro⚬Up Group, who shared their experience of week four.
I have an exciting venture, but how do I share this with potential customers and investors?’
Week four of the Summer Startup Programme was all about answering this important question, and we were lucky to have two experts and long-time UCE supporters in to help. First up was Geoff Cranko from Strategy Creative, who spoke to the students on strategic marketing. Erin Jackson from Narrative visited on Friday to share her tips on effective social media for startups. The students were also treated to pitches by Matthew Jones from CertusBio and Matt Scott from Hivemind, which provided inspiration for the pitches that the students will present at the end of the Summer.
As well as these speakers, one-on-one mentoring continued throughout the week, including a special Skype session with UC alumna Julia Arnott-Neenee, who is now working at HP in San Diego.
We asked Anzac Gallate and Jack Fraser, from The Gro⚬Up Group, an environmental education venture, to share their perspectives on the week:
Week four of the programme featured another set of excellent speakers and business pitches, offering us the opportunity to ask questions and engage with people who could provide some personalised advice on our business.
We worked hard to decorate the UCE space for Christmas, including creating 3D-printed decorations out of UCE’s Makerspace. We completed our applications for the Dream, Believe, Succeed Big Break competition and the Callaghan Innovation C-Prize, which both featured a very windy pitch video.
Our mentoring sessions also continued during the week. We found our video call with Julia Arnott-Neenee especially valuable. Julia helped us think about some core principles we can apply to our venture and made us aware of the challenges we should expect to face. We also had a particularly productive meeting with Geoff Brash, where our long-term model was flipped on its head, in a good way! We can now move forwards with the core aspects of our education programme in a much more efficient way.
The most valuable thing we did last week was taking a step back to look at the fundamentals; finding the value of our product, assessing the most efficient way to deliver that core aspect, and figuring out the infrastructure we need for this delivery.
With only two more weeks of the programme left until our summer break, week five will again be busy with the students putting what they’ve learnt over the last month into practice.
The UCE Summer Startup Programme is a chance for students to work on fast-tracking the development of their ideas into realistic business ventures for 10 weeks over the summer. To find out more about the UCE Summer Startup Programme, click here.
For further information please contact:
UC Centre for Entrepreneurship (UCE) by emailing uce@canterbury.ac.nz