Why a Startup is the best thing to do at University
Welcome to the first post about Student Startups! I’m Luke, a Third Year Computer Science student at Warwick University, and the proud co-founder of Acomorate, the company I started in November 2017 with my housemate.
This is a blog to share my, admittedly small, experience of creating a startup at University; as a means to document what I’ve learnt and in the meantime hopefully someone will find it useful. If you’re a student who’s thinking about founding during their studies, great!
Why haven’t you started already?
Ideas are Everywhere
Everyone has occasional moments of inspiration, they’ve got a revolutionary idea that makes them think “Why hasn’t someone done this already?”. For me this always happened either in the shower, sitting in bed or while having drinks with housemates, the last one by far being my favourite.
Unfortunately they’re always a great idea for about 15 minutes or so, before something else comes up and those ideas get locked in a vault of things-you-want-to-do-but-never-had-the-time.
This comes to what I think is one of the most important things in life, despite how moronically simple it sounds.
Whatever it is, and this applies to everything, just do it.
Most of the time it’s even better not to contemplate, because most of the time you psyche yourself out of it just by spending time thinking. That nuisance of motivation comes into play.
While Acomorate is one of the only platforms of it’s kind out there, it is hardly an original idea. When an article was released about us by our University Newspaper, the comments were filled with people tagging their friends, talking about when they had this exact plan.
Bluntly, that miraculous brainwave you had that one time is worth nothing if it remains stays just that, resigning itself to occasional contemplation when you’re bored.
Acomorate was no different, one of many random ideas but the only one we decided to run with.
Queue the elevator pitch…
Who We Be
The Tool
Succinctly Acomorate is TripAdvisor (or AirBnB) for student housing.
We provide a platform for tenants to share their housing experience, they can talk about the pros and cons of their home, as well as give advice to readers.
This is valuable because that information is only ever found if you sit down and have a chat with whoever lives there. Putting it in one centralised location online helps people wanting to move into that house quickly find the important stuff.
A house is more than a floor plan, a number of beds, and a price.
Further, because we believe this will have so much traction with students (and all signs so far points to yes), this adds value to landlords as well. It increases their presence among students, as well as providing a feedback and communication system.
We hope this innovates on how students find houses, so instead of finding a listing and spending a day walking around houses, they can narrow it down on Acomorate first.
The History
We came up with this idea in our second year, because we were shocked by how little we knew about the issues we faced with our house that year beforehand. If we had Acomorate, we probably wouldn’t have moved in.
We spent about a year (far too long) developing the website in private until it was fully polished and professional. We ‘soft-launched’ October 2018 and as of now (February 2019) we’ve accumulated over 180 reviews for over 150 properties.
Honestly, we need to move faster because that’s no way near enough. We want Warwick students next academic year to all use Acomorate, and for that we need volume.
I’m telling you that because I want to emphasise that you learn on the job, something we’re doing every day. A startup is a mess at first, you do most things wrong because you don’t know how to best grow your business. Weirdly that’s a really good thing, you end up learning quickly and finding what works best for you.
Counter-intuitively you don’t need or want a finished product before you get it out to people, that’s time wasted; something I am guilty of because we didn’t know any better. Fortunately you learn and meet experienced people that guide you on being less terrible as an entrepreneur.
The Now
We’re a way off perfect, but improving as best we can. We both come from tech backgrounds so developing the product was what we knew, what we didn’t was generating awareness and making our idea actually matter to people.
If you have any opinions or ideas about Acomorate let me know! At the end of the day your opinion about it is more important than mine.
To Conclude the Introduction
I hope this has interested you for the few minutes it took to read. If you’re thinking of creating something I hope you’ve gleaned how supportive of your idea I am, and how important it is for you to give it a go.
With regards to blog posts, I’m planning on alternating between the more general ‘Student Startup’ topic and then specific ones about Acomorate itself on a weekly basis. I’m also likely going to write about topics I think are interesting, and likely relevant to what I’m interested in at the moment, but we’ll get to that when we get to that.
This week I’m planning on releasing two more articles, the first discussing how you still succeed if your company fails, and the second explaining actually why University is the best place to start a startup.
As a final side note I’ll have a “Song of the Article” at the beginning of most posts, they’ll last roughly the same amount of time as the read since I think it’s nice to listen to while you’re reading.
If you want anything specific talked about or have any response, good or bad, please let me know below! I’ll try to get back to you as best I can and my dream would be little forums of discussion will form, if that’s possible on Medium?
Thanks for reading
