Do you want to create your own startup?
MIUC – It’s not just about theory or getting a degree; it’s all about real life and how to succeed in it.
Have you ever thought of starting your own business?
Have you ever wondered how startups like Google, Facebook, and Uber began?
Have you heard of the term Unicorn Start-up?
Are you ready to start your entrepreneurial journey?
The fact is, no school or university typically prepares you for this journey. You go to university, study a lot of theory, accounting, business administration, statistics, and so on. These are absolutely fundamental building blocks, yet there is still one piece of the puzzle missing.
We call it learning to drive a startup.
Welcome to the MIUC Startup School, the only university on the Costa del Sol that teaches you what entrepreneurship is all about and how to run your startup.
In March 2024, around 30 students joined the MIUC Startup School. It was an instant hit. Let’s face it, who doesn’t want to be a billionaire?
We started with an energiser to provide students with tips about mindset and attitude. Whatever you do, this is 50% of the equation. Understanding the psychology of success, creating a vision for yourself, and ensuring you stay ahead of the game by constantly evolving and working on yourself to create a better version of you each day.
Studies on human cognition suggest that the average person has around 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts per day. This includes a broad spectrum of mental activities, from mundane and repetitive thoughts to more complex and creative ideas.
Yes, every day you may have one or more new business ideas, but how should you decide which one is the best? How can you find the value in each and make that final decision? Entrepreneurs often haven’t given it enough thought or find it difficult to decide on which project to choose or start with. Tackling and understanding the importance of problem-solving and the ideation phase, working on the product/market fit, and asking whether there are buyers for your service/product is probably the most important and difficult task.
In the last Startup School session, we spent the first three sessions working on this issue. This included identifying who your customers might be, defining your buyer persona, their locality, gender, age, language, and so on. All these variables are factors that affect your business viability, which you must be aware of before you dive into creating your product or offering your solution.
Once we had our initial product/market fit study done, we started creating our MVP. MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. This is the fun part, where we analysed competitors, identified what made them successful, understood their differentiation points, and showcased the Unique Selling Point of our product.
The following weeks were dedicated to creating your sales and marketing channels. It is not enough just to say that you will advertise on Facebook, Google, and TV. You really have to do your homework by exploring these social media platforms, understanding the dynamics of each platform, and determining if your buyer persona is using that platform. Selling is not just about advertising on every possible platform and hoping people will buy your product. Selling is about finding the most efficient and cost-effective way to gain customers and scaling your sales from 1 to 100 to 1,000,000 and more. This requires defining channels, crafting a sales message, creating a customer journey, and so on.
If you’ve made it this far, you now have a good understanding of what you need to do. This is where you can start building your financial plan. It takes time, but for those who put in the legwork, creating the financial plan was straightforward. A financial plan allows you to understand your costs in detail and your expected return on investment. After all, we are all in it not just to earn a good living but to make billions from this project.
You must have a solid plan that at least explains your basic costs for the first 18 months, and if you are very detailed, you can extrapolate it up to 3 or 5 years.
Have you watched Shark Tank or Angels Den? Do you want to pitch in front of these people one day? Or maybe not just them but other venture capital companies and investors? If the answer is yes, then you need two things:
A) A convincing pitch deck
B) The ability to speak and present so smoothly that people would want to invest in your project without hesitation
To secure investment, you need some final numbers. These numbers are your metrics, KPIs, TAM, SAM, SOM, CAC, LTV, MRR, ARR, Churn, CLP, CPC, and so on. They may sound like weird abbreviations now, but they are among the most important terms you will ever learn in the startup world.
On the 25th of April 2024, 11 startups delivered a 5 to 7-minute pitch to a panel of investors, entrepreneurs, and mentors. There were prizes for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners. Who knows what these entrepreneurs will do with their ideas, but what is certain is that now they have learnt to drive a startup. Once you learn the process, you can apply it to all your future ideas. If one doesn’t work, you can try the next, and the next, and the next. The important thing to remember is that success is not a destination. It is the journey you live and learn from.
Do you want to create your own startup?
Do you have an idea that you think will make millions?
Are you ready to start your entrepreneurial journey?
Join us at MIUC and be a leader of tomorrow.
Check out our Reel video here https://www.instagram.com/p/C7BpQCZNqCQ/
