Brainstorms Issue #9

Brainstorms Issue #9

Happy Holidays 🎉 I hope you are all relaxing and taking some time off.

This week, I’m going to share a startup idea I wish I would have pursued, but never found the time or the passion to go all in. I still see a lot of opportunities with this idea, and I’ll share how I would tackle it today. My laziness can be your opportunity!

An Idea I Wish I Built

In 2017, I was working in Lincoln, NE in the startup investing scene - I know, not what you’d consider a startup hotbed.

While there, I was involved in a program called Jumpstart Challenge. The idea behind Jumpstart was simple, get a group of entrepreneurial-minded people to solve real problems for local businesses. Those solutions are then spun out into startups or stand-alone companies. Here’s how it worked:

1. Each year, mid to large-size companies submit an internal challenge that they believe tech could solve.

2. The Jumpstart team evaluated each problem looking for ones that could be industry pervasive or spun out into startups.

3. One company was chosen to pitch at a live event to a group of entrepreneurs.

4. The group of entrepreneurs formed teams to help build a tech solution for this problem.

5. One week after the event, the teams presented their solutions to the company.

6. The winning team received a contract from the company that pitched the problem, making them the team’s first customer.

When you look at it, it’s a win-win. Companies got entrepreneurs to build real solutions for free, and entrepreneurs solved a real problem and got a big enterprise customer right out of the gate. Because of this, tons of companies would submit problems and dozens of teams would take part.

Note: In case you were wondering, the companies that came out of this program were legit. 50%+ of the winners went on to raise money or successfully bootstrap the company.

The Pain Points

When looking at this model, I asked myself why this worked so well? It came down to solving problems for both the businesses and the entrepreneurs.

1. Pain Points for Businesses:

   • Buying off the shelf solutions often didn’t fully solve their problem. They needed something custom.

   • Building a solution from scratch using their own teams takes time + money

   • Hiring consultants were too expensive

2. Pain Points for Entrepreneurs:

   • Business ideas that solve real problems are hard to find

   • Getting your first B2B customers can be challenging

   • Finding a team of people to work on a similar problem is tough

The Opportunity

After seeing success on a small level, I started thinking about ways to expand this model. Here are my 3 best ideas:

1. Franchise The Jumpstart Challenge Model: One idea is to standardize the Jumpstart Challenge model and expand to new cities. This would be very similar to what Startup Weekend did. While this would take a lot of leg work, there’s definitely an upside - Up Global, the owner of Startup Weekend, got acquired by TechStars in 2015.

2. Take the Jumpstart Challenge Online: Rather than go from city to city to expand, create a virtual version of Jumpstart Challenge. This gives you a larger audience of entrepreneurs and more businesses to work with.

3. A Directory for Business Challenges: If you like the core idea of the Jumpstart Challenge, but don’t like the idea of an event, I’d create an online directory for business challenges. Take all the best problems from companies, put them on a website, and manage the logistics of the challenge. To keep things fresh, you could rotate out problems monthly/quarterly.

Current Solutions

There isn’t much in the way of competition currently. Here are a few notable solutions:

• Innovation Challenge: Innovation Challenge appears to be a directory of business challenges. That said, it doesn’t look like they aid in running the events in any way.

• Hackathon.com: Many corporations will run internal hackathons. These events help boost intrapreneurship and solve problems for the company. Hackathon.com helps corporates or local communities organize hackathons quickly and effectively.

• Local or Independent Events: There are several communities and companies that do similar events to Jumpstart Challenge. Sometimes they are one-off, others appear to happen annually. Regardless, I see this as a great sign of demand. Look at events like [RE]verse and GigabitDCx.

How to Execute

If I were building this business, here’s what I would do - 

1. Start Local: I would definitely recommend starting off by doing a local event. Regardless of if you want to build the online version or not, running this event “the old-fashioned way” will be beneficial. You'll learn which parts are valuable and give you some initial traction to show other potential customers.

2. Standardize The Process: The most valuable part of this idea is creating a standardized way to connect business with problems to entrepreneurs that can solve them. I’d continue to refine the process until you’ve got a playbook that delivers the best results for everyone.

3. Build Partnerships with Corporations: Focus your initial efforts on getting corporations on board. I see this as the harder of the two sides, so it’s best to tackle that first. If you can source some cool business problems early, I’m confident you can find entrepreneurs to help solve them.

Challenges

1. Two-sided Market: If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a dozen times, building a marketplace is inherently more challenging. You’ll need to find meaningful ways to add value to both the corporation and entrepreneurs to pull this off.

2. Monetization: Unlike some businesses, how you monetize this idea isn’t straight forward and could be challenging. The closest comparison is Startup Weekend. Their parent company (Up Global) operated as a non-profit. You could operate the same way, but I’m not a fan of that. If you want to be for-profit, you’ll need to find ways to either charge the corporations or the entrepreneurs.

3. Building Relationships w/ Corporations: Getting a corporation to invest the time and money in working with you could be difficult - especially if you’ve got a limited track record. Also, one of the biggest challenges the Jumpstart Team faced was getting a corporate to actually work with the winner's post-event.

Refer friends, get exclusive content

1 Referral: Our thanks and gratitude!

3 Referrals: An exclusive brainstorms edition

15 Referrals: One, 30min Zoom Call w/ Keevin

It’s easy, just copy and paste your unique link and share it in an email, on Twitter, or wherever you like. Thanks for spreading the word!

Your referral link: <<RH_REFLINK>>

Thanks for reading - now get out there and build it! 

Catch ya next week, 

Keevin ✌