Learning from Startups’ Stories
It’s now just over a month since I begun publishing my series, The Startup Interviews. So far, seven interviews have been published, each around eight-minutes late and featuring some of Edinburgh’s best startups. So far, we’ve featured everything from tourist guide applications like GuidEd to food startups like 2 the Kitchen and CheesePlease, ticketing companies like SparkSeat and companies like Parkure who are on the hunt for a cure for Parkinson’s. So why am I writing them and what can we learn from the series so far?
Top Tips are Pretty Useless To me, there’s a limited use to all of these top tips posts one finds lying around the internet. Yes, some of them can be useful (I’ve written one myself) but they’re not going to inspire you to follow your passion and get your business off the ground on their own. So how should we be teaching entrepreneurship? Personally, I’m most inspired by talking to entrepreneurs in person and I believe that many of you feel the same way. This is why The Startup Interviews are built around in-depth discussions with entrepreneurs about their projects, experiences, challenges and aspirations — this way, we can learn from what they’ve done and understand why they did it.
The Art of Storytelling Today, we’re so caught up in a world of rolling news coverage that we often forget to pay attention to the detail. My aim with The Startup Interviews was not to publish another transcript of an interview (there are far too many other publications doing that) but to immerse the reader in each entrepreneur’s startup. I want you to feel like you’re with me in the room, interviewing the entrepreneur and discussing their projects. In my opinion, blogs and transcripts have a limited use. There’s no emotion for starters. How are you supposed to know whether an entrepreneur saying ‘I hate the term entrepreneur’ is being sarcastic or not if that is all you’re given to read? Context is key — and storytelling is much better at providing it than a blog.
Learning from the New Generation Young entrepreneurs are consistently under-represented in the media. Occasionally we hear of child prodigies who are breaking into business at the age of thirteen but nobody seems to care about entrepreneurs who are trying out their ideas while at university or shortly after graduation. As such, I’ve really valued the opportunity to talk to this fascinating set of entrepreneurs about their inspiration, ideas and startups and I feel we can learn a lot from them. Here are one or two of the big ideas that have popped up time and time again during The Startup Interviews.
‘Entrepreneur’ isn’t a Perfect Fit: Many of the entrepreneurs with whom I’ve spoken have told me of how the term ‘entrepreneur’ isn’t a perfect fit, how they don’t identify with it or, in some cases, how they ‘hate it’ as a term. It’s a topic that’s come up so much that I’m considering a dissertation in how student small business owners feel it should be defined. Stay tuned for that.
Make the Most of Resources: Many of the interviews I’ve conducted have involved students at the University of Edinburgh, who’s LAUNCH.ed business incubator support service has come up time and time again. But there are loads of resources out there for all types of entrepreneurs, whether it be social enterprises like Entrepreneurial Spark, startup resources like Start Up Donut, the list goes on.
Have Fun: Key to startup success is enjoying yourself — if you don’t have fun, you’re not in it for the right reasons and you are — how can I put this lightly?— destined to fail. So enjoy it. If you could do something differently and have more fun, why not do so?
