Tag Archives: Entrepreneurship

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Engineers in Business Prize for Imperial College London’s Pioneering Women

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Engineers in Business Fellowship recently became a proud supporter of We Innovate, a women’s entrepreneurship programme run by Imperial Enterprise Lab which inspires and accelerates the progress of women entrepreneurs.  At the final held during Enterprise Month 2019, five finalists battled it out to win a share of a £30,000 prize pot, sponsored by BP.

For the first time, the Imperial Enterprise Lab incorporated an Engineers in Business Prize of £3,000 into We Innovate, enabling it to make additional awards.  Two prizes, funded by Engineers in Business Fellowship, were awarded to outstanding engineering projects from the WE Innovate cohort.

Sophie Paisley-Marshall (PhD Student Sustainable Civil Engineering) of Orbit Materials received £1,500 prize for the development of carbon-negative construction materials from waste residues. Orbit Materials promotes a circular economy through the development of a treatment which successfully improves the quality of a waste product so that it can be repurposed within construction applications.  Sophie said, “Our technology reduces the strain on virgin raw materials whilst capturing carbon, thus making our residues carbon negative.”

The second £1,500 prize was awarded to semi-finalist Lauren Dowling (Undergraduate Design Engineering) of Rock N Roll which is developing a collapsible log-fence to prevent rotational falls in equestrian cross-country competitions.

Professor Maggie Dallman, Vice President (International) and Associate Provost (Academic Partnerships), said: “The lack of gender equality in the startup world is well documented. In the UK, only 1% of venture capital invested goes to all women-founded teams, with 89% going to teams founded entirely by men. Clearly, we still have a big problem.

“Since 2014, WE Innovate has supported more than 250 women, equipping them with the skills and confidence they need to develop into successful entrepreneurs. It is wonderful to see this community of female student entrepreneurs grow and the fantastically diverse nature of their inventions.”

SMF James Diaz-Sokoloff, Portfolio Advisor (Intern) at BP who is pictured with Sophie and Lauren said: “It’s exciting to see the dynamism and creativity of the We Innovate competitors and it was a privilege to be at the final.  We are delighted to be part of We Innovate which is doing such an important job in encouraging women’s role in innovation.”

You can learn more about the Engineers in Business prize fund for university enterprise competitions here.

Press Releases

£70,000 Awarded to Universities for Enterprise Competitions  

Engineers in Business Fellowship (EIBF) inspires engineering students, graduates and postgraduates to engage with their entrepreneurial instincts.

EIBF works with universities that run enterprise competitions, providing them with a £3,000 prize fund so that they can encourage more engineers to participate in their business competitions and to reward those who develop the most imaginative and viable solutions to real problems.

The EIB prize fund was successfully piloted at the University of Nottingham and then rolled out to the University of Bristol, Kingston University and City, University of London with great success.  These early successes led to Lord Sainsbury’s charitable trust, The Gatsby Foundation, granting Engineers in Business Fellowship £700,000 to fund more HEI/FEI  competitions over a three-year period.

The expanded prize fund got off to a flying start with 23 universities awarded a £3,000 prize fund – more than £70,000 awarded and there is more to come.

“The expansion from four to 23 universities integrating EIB prizes within their enterprise competitions shows the appetite for the fund and its value to the universities.  In 2019, we want to award a further 25 universities and FE colleges a share of  £75,000,” said EIBF President, David Falzani MBE.

Paula Gouldthorpe, Entrepreneurship Manager at the University of Hull which recently received a prize fund said: “Our Global Challenge is a module dedicated to all our 2nd year engineering students. This year, 300 students, creating 50 interdisciplinary groups of engineers, will solve current real-world problems.  The Engineers in Business competition prize crucially helps highlight the importance of enterprise, entrepreneurial thinking and business acumen of our future engineers – encouraging them to look beyond their technical capabilities.  The prize fund provides students with the additional inspiration; for the University it builds upon the careers and entrepreneurship links with our Science and Engineering Faculty and I am hopeful too of some fresh, innovative solutions for social, economic and environmental change.”

Kate Beresford, Head of Membership and Operation, Enterprise Educators UK commented on the EIBF funding: “Our member universities find enterprise competitions to be a really effective way to inspire students, graduate and postgraduates to consider enterprise and entrepreneurship. But funding can be a massive challenge, so we welcome the Engineers in Business Prize Fund and look forward to seeing a wealth of innovative engineering solutions come forward.”

A TASTE OF ENGINEERING INNOVATION 

The Engineers in Business Prize Fund has already generated fascinating ideas from teams that comprise engineering students, graduates and postgraduates and here are just two:

Lancaster University – The ‘Quench Spike Free Cup’: The top team in Lancaster University’s competition created the ‘Quench Spike Free Cup’ which is designed to alert the owner if their drink has been spiked or tampered with. The plastic cup uses coloured detection strips within plastic cups to warn of this. As first prize winner the team received £1,750 and a business mentor from the Sainsbury Management Fellowship to support them as they move forward to develop the product and test prototypes.   

The remainder of Lancaster University’s £3,000 prize fund went to 2nd prize winner Buddyup; a sports app that would allow users to find sports companions at similar levels of skills and 3rd prize winner Tech Test, a  service where users can test new technology over short trial periods before committing to buy their own devices.

City, University of London: E-Mobility Bike: First prize went to a hybrid sharing bicycle system, called E-Mobility Bike, a lightweight half manual and half electric bicycle designed to make city travel easier, healthier and more accessible. Unicorn Electrics, the team behind it, has already secured pilot locations to trial the system and have used the EIB cash prize to perfect their product.

The incentive of the EIB prize fund has enabled City, University of London to increase the level of participation by engineers in its competition by 114%.

Alex Elkins, Head of Entrepreneurship at the university said: “The launch of our EIB competition resulted in an impressive jump in the quality and number of business ideas entered by our engineering students. The EIB support has been instrumental in launching this dedicated award within our broader innovation competition. We are very happy to have had the opportunity to establish this partnership!”

For details on how to apply for an Engineers in Business Prize Fund visit our competitions page or contact us at EngineersinBusiness@smf.org.uk.

 

 

Press Releases

Concept for Lower Cost Bionic Arms Wins Edinburgh University’s Engineers in Business Prize

The LAUNCH.ed Team at Edinburgh Innovations, University of Edinburgh, launched its first dedicated Business Ideas Competition for engineering students to inspire them to develop business innovations, with cash prizes provided by Engineers in Business Fellowship.  The Engineers in Business Prize was created to encourage more engineering students, graduates and postgraduates to get involved in business innovation early in their studies/careers.

The top Engineers in Business prize was awarded to the Augment Bionics team which developed the idea of designing and manufacturing affordable and functional bionic arms for use by amputees and people born without upper limbs. The winning team comprised four students – George Dzavaryan (Mechanical Engineering with Management), Moritz Muller (Chemistry), Iman Mouloudi (Neuroscience) and Will Saputra (Sociology and Quantitive Methods).

The Augment Bionics team was presented with a £500 cash prize at the event, How to Win at Business Competitions, which was co-hosted by LAUNCH.ed and the University of Edinburgh Entrepreneurship Club.  The event was designed to help the 60 attendees learn more about strategies for winning business competitions and included a host of entrepreneurs including Denny Schenk as the Climate-KIC Entrepreneur in Residence and Lorenzo Conti, Founder of Crover and winner of last year’s Business Ideas Competition.  As part of the prize, the members of Augment Bionics can also avail themselves of a Sainsbury Management Fellow as a mentor.

George Dzavaryan, Technical Director of Augment Bionics, said: “Applying to the competition was an easy process, especially with a project that was already several months in the making. We had developed a more mature vision for the future and had some results to show for our hard work. Winning first place was a nice surprise for us, as I’m sure it will be for future contestants. The £500 cash prize has been spent well on purchasing electrical components for the first version of the bionic prosthetic and to buy a domain for our website. It definitely gave us a much-needed kick start early on in the academic year, which is important for many student-led projects since it is a period of time when they are not as busy and can dedicate more time to projects like ours.”

Arthur Chee

There were also second and third Engineers in Business prizes: Arthur Chee, a postgraduate student studying Mechanical Engineering and Dilyana Karavasileva (Informatics), were awarded £300 for their idea of developing a robotic strawberry harvesting arm that is more efficient and less bulky than existing designs in development.  The design improvements would be achieved through greater degrees of freedom and an internal conveyor belt system.

Dileep Dasari

In third place was Dileep Dasari, second year undergraduate student at the School of Engineering, who created DASSUN (patent pending), an easy and cost-effective vortex generating system which can potentially decrease fuel consumption of Turbofan engines by up to 10%.  Dileep was awarded £200 cash prize.

Teodora Handrea, Enterprise Executive, University of Edinburgh said, “The Engineers in Business prize has been a phenomenal success. Run in parallel with the university’s established Business Ideas Competition, the two competitions attracted 81 entries from teams of students and alumni, with the Engineers in Business Prize stimulating 45 entries from the College of Science and Engineering and 24 entries from the School of Engineering.  Overall, we have seen a 137% increase in the total number of entries to both competitions from the College of Science and Engineering, and over 600% increase from the School of Engineering.”

LAUNCH.ed is now working with all other competition entrants to offer further assistance to develop their ideas through workshops and one-to-one support with a business advisor.

LAUNCH.ed will be running the Engineers in Business prize alongside its general Business Competition again this year and in 2020 and is aiming to encourage even more engineering students, graduates and postgraduates to participate and develop creative solutions to real problems.   LAUNCH.ed will again be supported by an Engineers in Business Prize Fund.

 

Press Releases

Engineering Student wins £1,000 for Cybersecurity Business

Engineers in Business supports City, University of London’s CitySpark business ideas competition which is open to students and recent alumni.

A special category, MakerSpark, was created to recognise the innovations created by engineering students, and this element is supported by a £3,000 EIB prize fund.

The CitySpark competition focusses on finding problems, identifying real gaps in the market and building evidence-based start-ups from day one.  CitySpark places a core focus on encouraging students to ‘get out of the building’, meet target customers and develop a full understanding of the problem to be solved. This provides an excellent starting point for brilliant ideas to develop into fully-fledged business ventures.  The competition is split into two challenges taking place throughout the academic year to help students develop entrepreneurial skills and launch a business.

The MakerSpark prize covers the two challenges and we are delighted to announce that Alien Security, a new cybersecurity consultancy, has won £1,000 in the first challenge.

Alien Security, which already has clients, provides ethical hacking services for the purpose of finding security vulnerabilities that a malicious hacker could potentially exploit.

Founder and CEO, Noor Alrayes, who is studying the  MSc Cyber Security course said: “Cybersecurity is not only a technology problem but also a people problem, which is why we offer cybersecurity support to clients and tailor our services to their needs”

Working with clients, Alien Security causes ‘serious chaos’ testing IT environments and physical cybersecurity to maximise cybersecurity defence.

We will be back later in the year to update on the final winner of the MakerSpark prize in the grand final!

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Keep Your Early-Stage Company on Track

New ideas are thrilling. So many of us are great at starting things; the genesis of an idea, the moment the lightning strikes, that flash of inspiration is pure joy. Taking your first steps into a start-up business are some of the most exciting steps. You are moving at break-neck speed to set up your platform for success.

But, as with all the greatest success stories, eventually, a wall is hit. Nothing worth having ever comes easy, and when it comes to start-up businesses, that struggle often comes in the form of early stagnation. The vision is in your head, the picture of the palace you are going to build is set firmly in your mind’s eye; now you have to go through the potential mundanity of building it brick by brick.

The unfortunate fact is, the majority of new businesses fail within their first year of trading. These failed start-ups are usually victims of common mistakes and misconceptions. Here we have some tips on how to ensure that your early-stage company becomes the success it deserves to be.

Track Your Metrics
On the face of it, this seems like an obvious thing to mention. However, new businesses, especially when low on cashflow, tend to focus mainly on profits and revenue. These are hugely important of course, but there are other data that you should be paying close attention to in order to get a rounded view of performance. Keeping an eye on the following will also ensure that you catch potential pitfalls before they happen…

Customer Acquisition Cost: How much does each new customer cost you? This can be easily assessed by dividing your total marketing and sales costs by the number of customers you have had within a specified time period. How do those figures look against your projections and business plan?

Customer Retention: Retained customers are vital for reputation and cashflow. How good are you at retaining business? Is there anything you could be doing to improve customer experience?

Return on Advertising Spending: Is the revenue you gain as a direct result of advertising sufficient for your investment? Advertising is not cheap and is always a gamble. Divide total sales by advertising spend in order to see what kind of return this investment generates.

Profit Margin: Profit is everything in the end. You must keep a very close eye on the bottom line.

Traction and Momentum
Getting things moving is widely regarded as one of the hardest things to do; getting noticed, getting talked about and getting a great reputation out there. It is a grind, but you have to keep the faith; keep pushing forward. You might have to take it one customer at a time, but, as Mother Teresa once said, “the ocean is made up of drops.” Keep pedalling and the breakthrough will come.

Momentum and passion are tough things to keep hold of on your own. Make sure you have other people around you who are happy for you to bounce ideas off them, and who will inspire fresh ideas and enthusiasm. When you are grafting away on your own, it is vital to have input from people who understand the difficulties of the process.

Delegation
As your business develops, so will your workload. You need to recognise when this workload is too much for you on your own. There is no use in running yourself into the ground before your venture has even left it! To avoid this, take a look at the workings of your business and break them down into separate roles. This could be delegated to interns, or even employees if you are in a position to afford them.

Invest Effort in Talent
When a fresh venture is your baby it is really hard to take parts of it out of your hands and into the hands of others. But this transition must be made in good time. It is essential to invest real time and planning into hiring the right people. Do not wait until it is too late and get into a situation where you have to hire fast; this way you will most likely end up with employees that are the wrong fit for your company.  Make hiring the right talent a priority well ahead of when they are required so that you can put the focus, but not stress, into the task.

Under Promise and Over Deliver
This is a good rule of business in general. This rule not only helps you to gain a great reputation but also takes a little pressure off. An example of this is always promising a later completion date on some work than you intend to deliver so that when you do deliver, earlier than quoted, the customer is happy. This also buys you time if the demands of a start-up slow down a project or task for some reason.

Self-Promotion
Don’t work in secret. Many new companies fail because they are too timid, self-deprecating or fear apparent over-confidence in their product or service. With social media being in its heyday, self-promotion is easier than ever, go for it! Also, if you are planning a publicity event or advertising campaign, don’t be afraid to ask for things. Perhaps you can get a free venue for your launch if you promise to promote the venue. The worst thing they can say is ‘no’!

The bottom line is ‘make some noise’. You might have invented the greatest thing known to man, but all you will hear is crickets if the only living thing that knows about it is your cat!

Don’t Overwork Yourself
This is so easy to do. You have to relax a little; tension has never benefitted anyone or anything. We are told from a young age that the harder you work, the bigger and better the results. This just isn’t the case. It is an attitude that will grind away at you over time, extinguishing the flame that once was your initial idea. Many studies over the past decade have proven that sleep, rest and a healthy work/life balance are essential to wellbeing and success. Take breaks, delegate, keep to sensible working hours, eat properly and keep fit.

In conclusion, perhaps the most important thing to do to keep your business on track is to look after yourself first. Keep that positive vision in your head by keeping yourself healthy, happy and inspired.

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Cathy Breeze – Steering SMF Communications for 20 Years

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Cathy Breeze took up the role of Director of Communications at Sainsbury Management Fellows (SMF) around the time that email started to take off in business! 20 years on Cathy is managing a wide ranging campaign that embraces everything from the Annual Dinner and the Annual Report through to social media communications; running an active LinkedIn Group, Engineers in Business; an e-newsletter for Fellows, publications, research projects and a university business competition.

The communications channels may have changed, but the mission of Sainsbury Management Fellows remains the same – to help ambitious young engineers gain the skills and experience that enables them to become business leaders, either in their own start-ups or in blue-chip companies.

Cathy has spearheaded the external communications campaign to raise awareness of the scholarship scheme and attract high calibre candidates to apply for an award, as well as working with SMFs’ Trustees to build relationships with leading institutions such as the Royal Academy of Engineering and EngineeringUK. Cathy has helped to foster many mentoring relationships between Fellows and young engineers and helped the Trustees in the organisation’s transition to a registered charity.

At a dinner to celebrate her 20th anniversary as SMFs’ Director of Communications, Cathy said: “This has been the most rewarding job of my career, and I’ve had some interesting posts. I am fortunate to work with Trustees who have a strong vision for the charity and a commitment to deliver great results. They have inspired my work on the communications front. I very much look forward to our next challenge – raising £10 million to continue the charity’s work. We have already raised over £1.7million, which is a great start.”

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Guide to Entrepreneurship – Getting Started

George Fowkes Cropped
SMF George Fowkes runs The Clear Alternative, which provides interim director expertise to clean technology companies to catalyse their start-up and growth phases. George’s early career was in new product development for Cambridge technical consultancy Sagentia, and management consultancy at A.T. Kearney. Conversations with investors while raising finance for The CarbonNeutral Company in 2001 gave him the idea for a company that would bring commercial and project skills to clean tech ventures, to accelerate their development. This became The Clear Alternative in 2006.

Before I start I wanted to add to Chirag’s post by nominating David Hansson, the founder of software company 37Signals, as the international grandmaster of ‘CARD’. And in fact most things about getting a business started. I think he has written a book but his speech at Stanford boils his whole philosophy down into one irreverent hour that you can laugh along to on your way to work.

If I had to summarise the very best of what I’ve seen in the past 12 years of getting ventures started for people, it would be the following:


Find a complementary partner
Most people think that the expression ‘better to own a share of something than 100% of nothing’ came about from raising money. That may be true, but it’s even more relevant right at the beginning. To get any new organisation started is such a huge amount of work, requiring so many judgement calls and such a very wide range of skills, that even an engineer with an MBA cannot do it on their own. You can’t be world class at everything, and it’s lonely flying completely solo.

If I think of the half dozen really successful serial entrepreneurs that I’ve met – the people who have built and successfully sold more than one business – almost without exception they work with a business partner. That partner doesn’t just fill a skills gap with their co-entrepreneur, they also fill what I’ll call a ‘character gap’, as follows.
Everyone has a number of aspects of the business that they can’t help preferring. It could be sales. Or the numbers. Or building the team. It’s very difficult indeed for an individual not to give these preference – it’s part of their character – so stuff gets missed. The partner has an innate preference for different aspects of the organisation. Their first thought on Monday morning is quite different to their co-partner. And so most of the bases get covered. That’s why you see sales people paired up in business with accountants, marketeers with ops people, Myers-Briggs introverts with extroverts, and so on.

So my point would be to find someone who’s quite different to you that you can trust implicitly and make them a significant partner in the business. And even (especially) if you’re married to them, sign an agreement that at least covers what happens if things don’t work out.

Touch the market early and often
With the very rare exception that essentially comes down to luck, it is not possible to bring a successful new product or service to market without first exposing it to the target market. To compete against better-resourced incumbents your product or service has to not just work, but fit the way its users look for, assess, buy and use the thing.

For the product itself we need to bring the alpha and beta-test principle common in software development to our own business idea. How to do this depends largely on the nature of the product, but everybody should be able to find their own versions of customer and competitor interviews, pitching the concept to friendly contacts in the target market prior to development, lending prototypes to prospective customers, offering ‘no-regrets’ deals for early buyers and so on, as the feedback from this user experience is essential. The next proof point is the one where customers actually part with their cash for the product. Hansson is right that this cannot come too soon and, in general, almost any way to bring early revenue into the business (that does not distract from the main development effort) is a good idea.

Closely linked to this, especially in B2B markets, is that your product can only be successful in the context of the buying patterns in the target market. Every market has its idiosyncratic way in which solutions are sought and evaluated, buying decisions made, price and delivery negotiated. And if you’re not compatible with the time of year, use of OJEU, ‘Plan A’, Environment Agency regs, contract management or other trivial necessity you won’t sell any product to that sector. The least costly way to master an industry’s buying patterns that I have seen is to get an industry veteran on the board.

Have a plan
It is true that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, but keeping a plan (i.e. a list of milestones/targets and dates, with associated responsibilities and costs) updated on a regular basis confers many benefits. First, putting the plan together forces you to think about priorities and risk. What’s got to go right, and cheap ways to stop things going wrong. Second, it’s a fantastic communication tool. With a plan everyone can see where the effort has to go. Scope creep – possible the worst enemy of the pre-revenue business – is easier to keep at bay. And finally, it enforces realism. Not all milestones will be met. The insights from ‘why not’ and ‘by how much’ make achieving future targets more likely. And achieving targets is an essential skill to keep investors putting money into a business. So put together a plan and keep it with you. If you have to keep changing it, at least you’re learning!

None of this covers seed funding, getting an office, or marketing, recruiting and financing on the cheap, which will have to wait for another day. Or be picked up by another blogger.

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Guide to Entrepreneurship – The Idea!

Chirag Shah (1)
Sainsbury Management Fellow, Chirag Shah, is a serial entrepreneur.  A Londoner born and bred from a family of medical doctors, he studied Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He completed his Engineering apprenticeship at Rover Cars where he worked as a Production Manager before gaining a scholarship through the Sainsbury’s Management Fellows to pursue an MBA at INSEAD Business School in France. Following a short spell in management consulting, he started his first business at the age of 28. His entrepreneurial ventures include Trading Partners (a business services company), écurie25 (the largest chain of Supercar Clubs in the world), MarketMaker4 (an internet software company), and Assassin Live (an iPhone application game). He is also active as an angel investor.

Most people think the biggest obstacle to getting started with a new business is coming up with a really great idea. But this generally isn’t the case. Ideas are all around us and mostly come from finding solutions to our problems.
Unless your name is Jesus and you can simply perform miracles whenever you hit a problem, we generally tend to address problems by tolerating them or avoiding them. The key to successful entrepreneurship lies here. Instead of living with your frustrations, take the extra few seconds to challenge the issue and explore how you might solve the problem. The answer could be your business idea!

In my experience, the much more challenging aspect to getting started is turning the idea into a viable business proposition. To illustrate, I’m going to use as an example my 19 year-old cousin – who has half a dozen more new ideas every time I see him. He’ll be a great entrepreneur one day but first he needs to overcome what I call the “CARD-test”. In order for an idea to become a successful business it needs to be Commercial, Aligned with resources, Relevant (to you) and Defensible.

An idea my cousin had when we were 15 was the concept of having a rotating sunlounger. Just like a sunflower, the lounger would turn slowly during the day saving the users from having to get up and move the lounger themselves.

Commercial
Applying the “Commercial” test, the key question is: “can you make money from the idea?” If one manufactured the product, would there be enough sales to offset the manufacturing and distribution costs and still leave some profit leftover? In the case of the rotating sunbed, I’m not sure ‘enough’ users would pay the necessary sum to avoid getting up and turning the lounger themselves.

Aligned with resources
Another idea he had was to build a field of solar panels and sell the electricity, whilst growing some vegetables in the shade. In the right circumstances this idea can meet the Commerciality clause, and indeed there are such implementations around the world.

Alas, for my poor cousin, he does not have enough money to implement this idea nor could he hope to raise sufficient funds from other people given his lack of previous experience as a farmer or energy consultant or similar. So for my cousin, this idea falls down because it is not ‘aligned’ with his level of resources. [A particular frustration of mine, and a reason why I think the green energy movement fails to reach breakthrough levels of adoption is that so many innovative projects very quickly require significant levels of capital to bring them to market and hence remain the remit of larger institutional sources which are inherently more risk averse than your average entrepreneur. Compare this with the Internet revolution where the cost of starting a business is very small and new business concepts dominate.]

Relevant (to you)
As a general rule of thumb I tend to advise budding entrepreneurs to focus on businesses that they actually know something about – by way of their prior work experience, or background, or specialist product knowledge, etc. From the businesses I have seen people starting up around me, I would say your chances of success are less than 20% if you know nothing about a particular product or market, and probably closer to 80% if you have worked in that sector, already have relationships with potential customers, and are familiar with your competition. If you have a great idea in a sector you know nothing about, then getting a job in that sector is a great way to start.

Defensible
Defensibility, or Barriers to Entry as the academics would call it, refers to how difficult or easy it is for others to copy what you are doing. Patenting or copyrighting an idea is an important consideration but don’t assume that just because an idea is patented it cannot be replicated or if an idea cannot be protected that others will definitely copy it. In any case I mention this criterion with lower priority than the others because a business lacking defensibility is not necessarily doomed to fail.

As you will see in later posts, how well and how quickly you execute your idea can play a much larger part towards its success and having imitators can even be a good thing. There are benefits to competition in terms of growing the size of a market that can outweigh the downsides of competing for business. For example, one of my own companies, écurie25 Supercar Clubs, is the global market leader for enthusiasts wishing to share the costs of owning a Ferrari but I actually wish we had more competitors because the sector would grow from the resulting greater awareness of such clubs. And I would rather have a smaller market share of a larger sector than a large share of a niche market.
Now that you have your idea in-hand and you’ve vetted it with the CARD Test, it is time to get started. In my next post, I’ll give you some tips for making sure you de-risk your venture as much as possible before you commit too much.