At this time last year, still in a jetlagged time haze and reorienting from living on the other side of the world for a month, I started as Director of Undergraduate Incubator Programs at The University of Iowa John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center. I showed up the first day of the fall semester under the impression that the syllabus was going to be finished, existing curriculum available that would just need some minor tweaks for the next school year, and a number of students returning to campus who had taken part in either the spring semester academic program or the summer accelerator program I’d helped coach before my trip overseas.
Man, was I wrong.
There was a steep learning curve the first few weeks, as I tried to figure out what I was responsible for teaching beyond the basic stuff that I’d been doing for Startup Weekends across the country and the Business Model Canvas course that I’d taught in Uganda just days before. On top of that, there was an entire organizational structure to learn and an internal server to dig through where most of the information I needed lived but much hadn’t been updated since the pandemic began. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but in a number of cases, I had to redesign the wheels that were there to fit a program that was reintroducing itself to campus.
Part of reintroducing the program to campus was taking our building out of mothballs. The summer program in 2022 used the classroom and the students had offices, but there really wasn’t a sense of community in the building. Most of the students worked on their businesses from home during the week, preferring to meet by Zoom while I coached them through that program. I had to do the same, as it took weeks before I was issued a temporary key card for the building’s front door. The weeks-long delay in receiving a key card should have been a sign of things to come.
Creating community in the BELL was one of the main priorities I had as we started the fall semester. We had ten students join us on the first day of classes, with a late add joining us during the second week. Weeks later I came across the directory from spring semester as I was trying to generate something to hand out to guest speakers during the fall semester and found a list of over two dozen businesses that had been participating in the program but had disappeared between May and August. It looked like some of them were in the idea stage and some were more advanced, but all had chosen to leave the incubator program. Many of them had graduated, but a handful were still on campus and had an open invitation from me to rejoin the program – none of them did, and figuring out the cause of this took a bit more digging.
I didn’t change most things during fall semester – I left the progression of stages alone and let everyone have offices, since there were so few students. In the latter half of the fall semester, I started tinkering with a few things, including separating the Introductory and Advanced Groups from the progression of stages, as well as retooling the progression of stages to have four instead of three categories, to better line up with the four years of undergrad. Separating the Introductory and Advanced Groups from the stages allows us to better streamline the onboarding of students – most students have to go through the Introductory Group during their first semester unless they have previous experience in an incubator program outside the university. Once they successfully demonstrate proficiency in customer discovery and with the Business Model Canvas, students can move into the Advanced Group.
The four stages of progression include Idea Stage, Startup Stage, Traction Stage (the new addition), and Growth Stage. Students are expected to move into the Startup Stage after a maximum of two semesters, Traction Stages after a maximum of four semesters, and Growth Stage after a maximum of six semesters in the program. Most student businesses progress faster than this, and a number of students have entered the program in Traction or Growth Stage. Idea Stage is designed to test ideas before formalizing the business. Startup Stage requires a formal business structure like an LLC, tax number, and bank account, along with starting to build a minimum viable product. Traction Stage involves beta testing an MVP with potential pre-sales. Growth Stage is reached when the business has more than $5000 in sales a semester. These stages line up better with external accelerator programs and better explain the business to others outside our program.
I did a ton of recruiting during fall semester, growing the class from 11 to 33 during spring semester. Unfortunately, over the four weeks of Winter Break, I lost my Marketing Specialist and my student graphic designer. I filled in as Marketing Specialist temporarily on top of my duties as Program Director. I also moved my office from the classroom to the former Marketing Suite on second floor, as a heating water pipe broke and we lost half of the classroom ceiling. If I thought things were going to calm down for my second semester, I was way off.
We had a number of events scheduled to be held in the classroom that had to be moved, along with my Friday class. Thankfully, I received help in finding random places on campus to hold my classes. I received no help in finding a new workspace, so the silver lining in the Marketing Suite being empty was that I had two empty offices on second floor to choose from. I personally moved my computer and the rest of the stuff from my classroom office upstairs into one of the offices, much to the irritation of the same person who took multiple weeks to give me a key card the previous summer and provided no help in relocating my workspace until the classroom and my former office were repaired. At this point, the Marketing Suite officially became the Executive Suite, my new home away from home.
Even with the chaos of moving classrooms, spring semester went surprisingly well. I don’t feel as though I spent as much time on recruitment as I did during fall semester. However, I had 25 applicants for the 16 slots available in the Incubator Summer Track, most of whom applied prior to Spring Break. Not only did I have over twice the number of applicants for 2023 compared to 2022, but the applications were also significantly stronger than the previous year. I had a number of engineering and computer science students apply, meaning I was doing something right over in those departments with recruitment. I wish I’d had more than 16 spots available, because I had to turn away a couple of ideas I think would have flourished in the summer program. I invited everyone who didn’t make it into the top 16 to register for the class in the fall – we’ll see if any of them show up this week.
I’ve been told by a number of people that the group I chose for this summer’s program was one of the strongest, hardest-working groups that’s gone through the program in quite a while. Every one of the students made progress moving their businesses forward over the 11-week program. Several students moved from Idea Stage or Startup Stage into Traction Stage or Growth Stage this summer – one student in particular came in with a completely untested idea on May 15 and was generating revenue by June 15. Several students who had been floating around in Idea or Startup Stage since fall semester are now prototyping physical products and beta testing Web applications. Another student who joined the incubator mid-spring semester and took his business to the next level over the 11 weeks of the summer program is ready to apply for accelerator programs across the country, having already generated over $100,000 in revenue since he first met with me in February.
I credit the strong showing with the structure and expectations I put in place during day 1 of the summer program. I condensed the amount of classroom time significantly from the prior year and demanded results from the students each week. I gave crash courses on the Business Model Canvas and customer discovery on the second day of the program and offered tutoring and Q&A sessions if students needed them. We spent a decent amount of time on networking and pitching over the course of the eleven weeks, as the students were exposed to a number of opportunities where they needed to use those skills. My coaching staff did an amazing job working with the students, and I really couldn’t have done all of this without their help. It also helped that the program was fully staffed this summer – I convinced a new Marketing Specialist to join us, and we found an amazing new graphic design student. I’ve also received a ton of help from our general student intern as well, getting things organized around the building and helping me get my recruitment schedule pieced together for fall semester. It’s a joy to have someone handle scheduling emails, so I can focus on higher-level stuff.
Some of that higher-level stuff included streamlining the Introductory curriculum for the fall semester. The biggest complaint I’ve heard from students – including those who left the program in the spring of 2022 – was the quantity of work assigned to the Introductory Group. A lack of due dates for assignments was a close second. I’ve gone through and fixed a decent amount of this stuff without touching any of the lectures, which I’ll leave to my Introductory instruction team. The assignments are now due prior to the class meeting, so we don’t have a huge pile of late work dumped into ICON at the end of the semester. Those assignments involve singular worksheets along with updates to customer discovery logs and Business Model Canvases. These changes are based off of the success I saw during the summer, where we emphasized talking to potential customers and attempting to achieve product-market fit. The goal is for students to perform 25 interviews in the fall, 25 in the spring, and 50 over the summer to reach the 100-interview goal over the course of 12 months. This is a one semester hour practical course, and the assignments now reflect that.
We have a bunch of amazing events coming up this semester, starting with the BBQ Bash at the BELL on September 6. I moved it back a week because I’m going to be in Indianapolis August 28-31 for the Rally Innovation conference. I had a chance to help narrow down participants in the pitch competition as part of the conference advisory board, so I’m looking forward to hearing the final round of pitches during the event. The speaker line-up looks pretty solid as well, so it should be a good couple of days over there next week. The BBQ Bash at the BELL is going to be similar to the program Janice and I pulled together last fall. We’re still going to have some giveaways, but instead of the Office Olympics, I’m going to have students set up booths in the classroom and outside in the front lawn showing off their businesses. I’ll also be offering tours of the building, and we’ll have some amazing food grilling out in the parking lot. This event is one of my favorite opportunities to show off what we’re doing in the Undergraduate Incubator.
On the evening of September 21, we’ll be holding IdeaStorm in the BELL classroom – something we wanted to do last spring but couldn’t be due to the sudden need to remodel that room. I expect the room to be absolutely packed that evening. I’ll be returning from Denver Startup Week the evening prior, so the timing worked out perfectly. I get a number of my mid-semester cohort students from IdeaStorm and Startup Games, which will take place October 13-15. I’ve also invited the folks from the Engineering Library and Business Library to hold the Business Building Blocks series of three lectures on September 26, October 24, and November 28. I’ll be giving my Business Model Canvas crash course lecture at the November session. On top of all of that, we’re in the initial planning stages of a co-founder speed dating session to take place at the BELL at some point in the coming weeks. A number of my students have requested some sort of networking event to find other student co-founders for their businesses. I’ll let you all know how it goes!
It’s a great feeling to have one year officially behind me. This year going forward is the year to truly expand the number of students we serve in the undergraduate programs. Depending on the number of students I talk to over the coming few months, I wouldn’t be surprised if I managed to have 50 student businesses running out of the BELL by January. As we keep pushing forward, it will be awesome to see which pitch competitions my students can get into and what kind of progress each of them can make toward the goal of leaving the university with a diploma in one hand and the keys to a viable business in the other hand. I have very few seniors in the cohort this year and a lot of sophomores and juniors, so we’re going to be able to make a ton of progress.
I hope you’re as excited for the ride as I am to pilot this thing.