On March 12th, 31 students brought their ideas and their passion to the Startup Open event at the Wisconsin School of Business. This 54-hour long event was designed for students to accomplish three-months worth of work in a single weekend.
Facilitated by Maia Donohue, Director of Student Engagement – Entrepreneurial Mindset, the event was an extreme, hands-on journey through the exhilarating early days of a startup. Students kicked off Friday evening by generating startup ideas, delivering elevator pitches, and putting their fledgling ideas through the lean canvas.
Saturday was largely dedicated to customer discovery. While many students are aware of the value of customer discovery, few of them will ever do this critical primary market research unless prompted through an event, such as Startup Open. Moreover, many students, without proper guidance, will conduct bad customer discovery by asking questions such as “would you buy this product?” or “how much would you pay to never have to do that again?” Donohue sent students out only after guiding them through the proper way to conduct customer research.
Upon returning from customer research, students met with a host of experienced mentors Sean Nelson, Ashley Storck, Sam Leary, Sarah Buszka, Grant Watkins, Michael Szewczyk, and Adhira Sunkara.
After meeting with mentors, students immediately began working on their intermediate pitch, which they delivered a rough draft of that evening before their peers, as well as before James O’Toole of StratoVC, and Dan Olszewski, Director of the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship.
Day 3 of the event was postponed due to extreme weather. However, students and panelists were all able to reconvene two weeks later to deliver final pitches. Our final pitches were led by students Marilyn O’Day, Grace Dykstra, Cullan Wikramasuriya, Armaan Jain, and James Grosspietsch. Panelists for the event were Lewis Sheats, Becky Splitt, James O’Toole, and Carter Chojnacki.
Categories: