Listen to this articleStartupWind is the Virtual Innovation Network platform that empowers entrepreneurs to bring their ideas to life by enabling them with entrepreneurship tools, courses, and an ecosystem. Below is our recent interview with Naren Patil the Founder of StartupWind:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to StartupWind?
A: Our mission is to reduce the friction for entrepreneurs so that more people can pursue their ventures and more of them become successful.
More specifically, StartupWind is the Virtual Innovation Network Platform for universities, state-wide innovation and economic development programs, entrepreneurs and enterprises with specialized tools built for Ideation, Customer Discovery, Business Model Canvas, Business Planning, Mentoring, Business Plan Competitions, Hackathons, Learning Management System and built-in Entrepreneurship Courses. The video-based entrepreneurship courses have contributions from Draper University, Innovation Professors at Northwestern Kellogg, and Silicon Valley executives.
In addition to the comprehensive tools, courses, and ecosystem, StartupWind also brings best practices from working with over 50 entrepreneurship departments worldwide spanning over 400 programs that include competitions/challenges, incubators, and accelerators and over 25,000 users developing 4,000 ventures on the platform.
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Q: You’ve recently partnered with Draper University; could you tell us something more?
A: StartupWind and Draper University share a common vision of empowering entrepreneurs across the globe. Our partnership is focused on delivering high-value entrepreneurial content created by experts from Draper University using StartupWind’s Virtual Innovation platform.
The video-based content from the experts at Draper University, coupled with the Startupwind platform provides a great way to help entrepreneurs acquire very targeted knowhow from world-class experts to grow their startup. The courses would help entrepreneurs all over the world in demystifying the unknowns while growing their startups.
Per Tim Draper, the founder of Draper University and legendary Silicon Valley investor, “StartupWind, with its large global user base, digital platform to deliver high-quality coursework to anyone in the world and software tools from ideation to business planning to mentoring, is very compelling and synergistic to Draper University’s mission.”
Our partnership with Draper University allows us to democratize the entrepreneurial knowledge that is typically available to elite urban startups and make it available at no cost to any entrepreneur or SMB business owner across the world.
Q: Can you give us insights into your courses?
A: Our courses are practical, video-based, and easily consumable. Each course typically takes one hour to complete. The courses are broken into short, consumable video modules that typically take 5 to 10 minutes to watch.
The content for these courses is contributed by leading Silicon Valley venture capitalists, angel investors, successful entrepreneurs as well as the world’s leading innovation professors from top tier business schools. Notable contributors include legendary venture capitalist Tim Draper, Northwestern Kellogg professors Mohanbir Sawhney and Rob Wolcott, and Silicon Valley executives such as Ido Sarig.
Our courses span across all stages of an entrepreneur’s journey:
• Ideation, Customer Discovery and Product Market Fit: These courses would help the entrepreneurs develop their ideas, gain deep customer insights, and identify a clear product-market fit.
• Business Model Canvas & Business Planning: These courses are designed to help entrepreneurs in identifying the right business model for their business. Coupled with StartupWind’s Business Model Canvas and Business Planning tools, these courses help entrepreneurs in building a compelling business plan and an investor pitch deck.
• Growth Hacking: The growth hacking courses would help entrepreneurs to drive traction for their startups, build an effective marketing plan, and provide experiential knowhow to drive pipeline, revenue, and media coverage.
• Get Funded: The Get Funded series of courses are designed to prepare entrepreneurs for fundraising. These courses offer insights and tips from successful entrepreneurs about effective business pitching. They also provide perspective from leading venture capitalists about what it takes to stand out from the crowd. The series also offers courses to shed light on details of fundraising, due diligence process, and term sheets.
• HR & Legal: The HR & Legal series of courses are designed to help entrepreneurs in avoiding common legal mistakes during the formation of their business and also give them knowhow to build synergistic teams as the startup scales.
These courses coupled with tools for ideation, customer discovery, business planning, and mentoring delivered by StartupWind’s Virtual Innovation Network platform levels the playing field for entrepreneurs anywhere in the world and make them ready to deliver the impact and scale their startups.
Q: What are the biggest challenges entrepreneurs face when developing their ideas and products?
A: Everyone has ideas. People see problems in their daily lives and feel like they could solve it. Most people don’t do anything about it and then learn that someone else pursued the same idea in some other corner of the world and made a huge impact for themselves and for the society.
Additionally, there is mystery about the process of building a business and fear of the unknown. People are not sure how they would turn their ideas into something meaningful in a step by step manner.
As a result, most people don’t pursue their own business. And the ones that pursue lack the entrepreneurial and business skills. As just one example, over 40% of small businesses fail due to a lack of market research. Many startups end up building products that nobody needs and spend enormous time and money doing that. Lack of business planning skills is another big problem. Ultimately, those who find a product-market fit, many of them fail to get market traction due to lack of growth and scaling expertise and others fail since their financial models are not profitable. Lastly, a large number of startups also fail simply because they are unable to raise capital.
At StartupWind, we are addressing these issues by providing a unified Virtual Innovation Network platform comprised of guided tools across every stage of the entrepreneur’s journey, entrepreneurship courses, and the ability to connect with mentors and investors.
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Q: How the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the landscape?
A: Since the pandemic, we have seen the enrollment to our online course increase by three times and a significant increase in mentor-mentee interactions.
Social distancing is making it difficult for startups to meet at an incubator or an accelerator. We are seeing a lot of our customers using StartupWind Virtual Accelerator to create the structure for the accelerator program, assign our online courses, and also plug-in their mentors into the innovation network.
In addition to gaining knowledge from the online courses, startups are able to schedule meeting with the mentors using StartupWind Virtual Mentoring and connect to the mentors using one-click video call without worrying about provisioning multiple licenses for the collaboration tools to different mentors.
In a nutshell, we are seeing innovation programs such as mentoring, competitions, accelerators, and incubators leveraging the StartupWind Virtual Innovation Platform to stay productive yet safe.
Q: What are the company’s plans and goals for the future?
A: Our mission is to reduce the friction for entrepreneurs so that more people can pursue their ventures and more of them become successful which ultimately drives greater economic development.
As part of this mission, we want to democratize the entrepreneurial knowledge, tools, and ecosystem and make it available tech entrepreneurs and 30 million SMB business owner in America.
We want to reduce friction for entrepreneurs by continuing to refine the platform, courses, and the ecosystem and help over 1 million entrepreneurs and SMB business owners in America and across the globe.
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