« BigContacts.com - Atlanta, GA | Home | Working Less is Giving Me More »
Starting a Business in College - Part 3 (final part)
By Dan | April 24, 2007
In part 1 of the starting a business in college series, I discussed taking initiative. Part 2 was about creating your company - building a team, advisors, and resources.
This final part will give pointers on launching and what advantages you have as a college student that you may not realize. Assuming you are able to build your team, find the resources, and get a product together, you will inevitably have to launch the business soon after.
1. Don’t be afraid to launch!
It’s easy to keep building out a cool product, keep developing a website, and planning your business. It’s hard to launch and take the dive into the open market, allowing users into your business and interaction with customers. It can also be alot more stressful and a lot less fun than just designing a product. But remember that you don’t have a business until you launch something, and there is more to a startup than just creating a product. So launch when you have something ready to show, get it out in front of users, and start getting feedback.
2. Align your interests with your college
This is the greatest advantage that you have as a college student. You don’t need a PR firm to get your name out to the press. All you need to do is make sure that everytime your company is mentioned in the press, so is your college or university. Make a story out of the fact that you are a student at X school doing Y company, and your college PR department will be all over it. And they will continue to seek press opportunities for your company, knowing that the farther your company goes while in school, the better the college looks. Treat the college well, and they will do the same in return for your company.
3. Stay focused.
Once you have a business going, and even more so if you have a successful one, other students are going to approach you with their new business ideas and opportunities. You will also have some of your own. Certain ideas may seem attractive to jump on board at the spur of the moment, and sometimes you just get the itch to start a bunch of companies. But there is value on focusing on the company that you have already created, driving your one mission forward without being distracted by other business ideas. Its easy to build a product, pretty easy to launch it, but to develop and grow a business is the true challenge to any entrepreneur. And if you are willing to put in the focus and determination to see to the success of the one business, you will see much better results.
Ideally, the above three points will make sense to any student entrepreneur thats getting their feet wet in the startup community. Launching is a milestone, but you have an advantage as a college student with the college PR behind you. And staying focused is difficult as a student, but essential to the success of the company.
Topics: Startups, Management |
April 24th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
This is a great series of posts Dan.
April 25th, 2007 at 4:19 am
Thanks for the article. The PR idea makes a lot of sense. I’ll use it.
May 3rd, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Awh “staying focused” … thats not easy and requires repeating
“staying focused”
Lal