Startupbootcamp FinTechAthon

It's been a while since I blogged as I haven't really been involved with startups since graduating. But I'm back in the startup world, in fact I'm properly involved in the techie startup world. I'm working as an event intern for Startupbootcamp FinTech (SBC FinTech), a London based accelerator.

I started about ten days ago and apparently SBC FinTech only started about ten weeks ago. Since I started, SBC FinTech have had three events and FinTechAthon was one of them which ran over the weekend. This blog post will be about the FinTechAthon and my experience . This is my first time being part of a hackathon and some aspects of it isn't what I expected. I've heard about it when I was studying at UCL as they have also organised one too. I remember some of my classmates participated in the event.  I was really excited about it but at the same time I was really tired from previous events that happened during the week and was concerned how I was going to cope. Nevertheless, I survived!

Day 1 of FinTechAthon

Preparing the room and badges

The day started with a team meeting where we discussed the roles and tasks and the objectives of the event. The team have been organising this event for about three weeks so I didn't have much to do for the event apart from logistics like printing and cutting name badges. Thibaut and Mela were in charge of setting the room up and Josephine putting the food and drinks out. 

The event started at 6 p.m.  but some people arrived earlier than expected.  I was in charge of the reception; welcoming, checking in the guests and giving them their name badges.  From previous events, we had to flick through pages of names and as it got busy it was a bit of a disastrous. I thought there must be an easier way to do this, a more techie method. I mean everything is more or less technology based now, so I checked on the EventBrite website to see if they have a check-in system. And yes, they have an app for it. It made our lives easier and we looked less clumsy and disorganised. You really do learn new things every day.

Thibaut taking photo of each participants

Here's Thibaut, the Research and IT manager, taking photos of the guests. These photos were then stuck on to the window with their skills mapped under their photo.

Skill Map

Hackers warming up 

The event started with an introduction about the limitations and landscapes of payments and then presentation from payment experts. I would say the excitement didn't start until Saturday.

Day 2

Saturday was a lot calmer, in fact calmer than I expected. I was in charge of the coffee and other bits and pieces that needed help with. At around 10 a.m. the mentors, innovation and payment experts presented; OpenBank project gave an overview of APIs, Ryan Terribilini from Ripple gave an overview about Bitcoin, Anand Viswanathan from Xignite spoke also about APIs. Anand wanted someone to take photos of him on his phone while he was presenting and I had the honour to do that. I tried to be a professional, taking photos from different angles; back, front, side. We then had a hang out with Ryan from Ripple. We used the flatscreen TV to conduct this. This session made the atmosphere extra techie, I loved it!

Hangout with Ripple

After the talks from the experts, the participant split into groups to brainstorm ideas. They had about two hours to do that. Some participants were shifting teams throughout this session.

3 p.m. was the checkpoint where each team presented their preliminary idea. Some teams used power point slides and a couple presented without slides. Those who had slides, I must say their slides weren't very good. They had too much text. If you've read my previous blog posts, I've mentioned how presentation slides should be- minimal text and replace any text with images. Too much text means the audience will be distracted from the text and will end up reading the slides instead of listening to the presenter. Ripple's presentation slides were good. Clear and simple diagrams and images on each slide.

Day 3- The Last Day of the FinTechAthon

While the FinTechAthon is happening, the London Marathon is happening literally next to us. I could see and hear the crowd cheering for the runners. I went out of the office to get a few close ups. A couple of my colleagues saw Mo Farah! Yes, I work next to Tower of London and London Bridge. It's really cool right?

London Marathon

Hackers working hard

The day started very calm and quiet as the participants were working and developing their ideas in their team. A few participants stayed over night and didn't sleep. That is some hardcore hacking! Not much had happened until 4 p.m. which was the presentation of the final results.

There were three teams altogether; Ashcroft, Open MBC and Ripl.UK. Ripl.UK was the first team to present.

Ripl.UK

Second up was Open MBC, there were six of them. They even built a MVP and it was pretty good. Apparently, one of the hacker in this team stayed up all  night in the loft working on this and his effort was definitely worth it because he won the Best Coder Award which you will see if you continue reading.

Open MBC

This was a good and simple MVP. It did the job that it had to and in my opinion they had the best MVP. 

Open MBC's MVP

The last but not the least, Ashcroft. They also prepared a MVP.

Team Ashcroft

Credits for the effort in building a MVP but I couldn't follow it and in fact didn't understand it. Nevertheless, well done!

Ashcroft Demo

After the presentation, the participants were asked to vote for the "Best Coder" and "Best Team" using the green and yellow cards that we prepared.

Counting Votes

The Best Coder was Sanyaade Adekoya. He is the man who stayed up all night coding. He literally had no sleep and he didn't even look tired. Thumbs up to him. For his prize, he could choose either a beer tasting class or 2 for 1 Segway rally and he chose the latter.

The Best Team (Hack Hard Play Hard team) was Open MBC. Congratulations! They received a USB fridge, a mini fridge that you can plug into your computer. They also won "The Best Idea" award, but that wasn't voted by the participants it was voted by the SBC Finyech Team. Their prize for this award is offering them an opportunity to join SBC FinTech's accelerator program in August.

Best Team

USB Fridge

There was one last award that was awarded by Xignite, "The best use of Xignite" to Ashcroft. They received Amazon service vouchers.  Well done!!

Ashcroft won The Best Use of Xignite

Overall, this has been a great learning experience in many ways and I was exhausted by the end. I've met and seen different kinds of people, the organisation and co-ordination of the event and developing a foundation knowledge of the FinTech. Thanks for reading!

Pitching at the Idea Works Competition

Hi guys! How is your November doing so far? UK has been freezing cold...bbbrrrr... and apparently it's going to snow next week. Not sure how I feel about that... Anyways, last Wednesday I pitched about my business idea (my second pitch) at a pitching competition. I didn't win unfortunately but I still walked away really happy. Read on and you will know why.

About three weeks ago I applied to enter a pitching competition called The Idea Works, a competition for food startups, where the person/ people behind the winning idea will win £1000. The competition was organised by Compass Group, a British multinational contract food service and support services. (Compass-group.co.uk) A week later, I received an email from Compass group saying that I have been shortlisted to pitch on 13th November (last Wednesday). I'm glad I did because it pushed me to work faster on my business idea for instance getting the product together as I wanted to have something to show to the judges during my pitch.

I had two weeks to get the product ready and prepare for the pitch. I learnt a lot during the two weeks, I will write about it later on in this post. I want to talk about the exciting part first. :D I only started preparing my pitch the last three days.

Below is a photo of me pitching; there were 4 judges, a small audience and a camera man- I think parts of the competition will be up on their YouTube Channel, I will look for it and show it to you guys soon.

There were 4 presentations including mine. Each candidate only had five minutes to present followed by ten minutes of Q&A. We weren't allowed to have power point or any sort of presentation visual aids as they want us to think outside the box and make our presentation entertaining and engaging. This was my first time presenting without any notes or slides and I think I did quite well. I'm impressed! I was the first one to present and I'm glad I was because I hate waiting during a presentation. I just want to get it over and done. I don't usually get nervous during presentations but this time I was shaking a little and my mouth was drying up (Lol!). My timing was perfect. I finished a few seconds before I hit 5 minutes.

So why was I so happy even though I didn't win?

I was truly happy for the people who won because I did like their idea as it's something similar to what I had in mind before and its related to healthy food. The feedback from the judges made me really happy. The judges were really pleased with my pitch, they said it was well thought- through and they really like my idea. I was actually the only one who covered every crucial aspects of the business in my presentation. I guess I had the advantage of having a master's degree in Technology Entrepreneurship as we were taught how to do a elevator pitch. Although I didn't win but Compass group is happy to help me by introducing some of their suppliers to me and one of the judges is a nutritionist, she is keen to help me with the nutrition part of my idea. One of the judges, is a business advisor at UCL Advances and she has offered to provide ongoing help. She also said to me personally at the end of the event that my pitch was the strongest! *Massive smile on my face*

So why didn't I win if I was the strongest?
Compass was looking for a food business idea that can be used inside the university, the winner's idea can be used for catering and lunch services. But Tudi Foodie is an online monthly food subscription service so not something they are looking for. Compass will help them set up a pop-up store in university so I'm looking forward to have my healthy lunch from them.

What did I learn during the preparation of the demo?

I did lots of research for packaging companies and calling them up for quotes and samples. I phoned up ten companies for a quote of a postal box (I wanted a particular size) and only two companies got back to me with a quote. Luckily I found a packaging manufacturer near me and they have samples for people to take away. They didn't have the exact size I wanted but I asked for a sample anyway as I needed a box for the demo.

Below is a photo of my product demo, not bad right? What do you think? The box worked out quite well, I might stick to this size.

The more I tried to look for the packaging I had in mind the more I realised that it's not easy to get your ideal packaging if you're on a budget especially for a startup. I also learnt that an entrepreneur can become too emotionally attached to their idea and then won't be able to accept any criticism. I have become so emotionally attached to my idea that I almost forgot about all the frameworks I learnt in my TE course; Lean startup, business model canvas, customer development, etc. I'm glad that I have my boyfriend to help me and reminding me to think about my budget. He gave me advice based on his experience when he had his own business a few years ago. Although he hasn't studied about the lean startup and Cust. development methodology but his advice made me think about those frameworks. I reminded myself that the initial product is a demo/MVP/prototype and that doesn't need to be perfect. I need to be using very little money and time to create the demo and make changes to whatever my early subscribers don't like or suggest. The build-measure-learn cycle.

I'm hoping to do a beta launch in January or early 2014 so I got lots to do before then. I will keep you updated! Thanks for reading. 

My Start up progress

Hiya, its been while since I blogged about my start up journey. I can say its not easy and there are lots of logistics but the biggest tasks I've done so far is registering the business and creating a landing page- signup.tudifoodie.com. Please check it out :) and sign up up if you want to receive updates.

Before creating the landing page, I had to create a background image for the page. Initially I thought I'll just google some images. I couldn't find anything I like or represent Tudi Foodie so I decided to create it myself since I have so many exotic ingredients at home- we Chinese people tend to have loads of it, half of our kitchen cupboards are filled with a variety of beans, herbal products, dried fungus (yes fungus lol but they are really good for you ), and many other dry ingredients. Here's a print screen of my landing page. The landing page is powdered by Launch Rock, a really good website to help you build your landing page. Launch Rock was recommended by my course and other mentors.

After the mini photo shoot, the clearing up went a bit disastrous. I went to grab the big container of black rice but didn't realise the lid wasn't on properly and the rice had fallen everywhere. Luckily its dry ingredients otherwise my mum would kill me for messing up her carpet lol. 

I've also set up a Facebook page (facebook.com/tudifoodie), Twitter account (@Tudi_foodie) and Instagram @tudi_foodie, please like and follow :) 

My next step is to get a logo, I'm going to use CrowdSPRING, a crowd sourced logo design website. I'm currently working on the designs of the packaging.

That's it for now! Thanks for reading! 

The End and the Beginning

Hi lovely readers! How's your weekend been? Mine has been pretty good.
Some of you may wonder what the title of this post means. Well, Friday was officially the last day of my Technology Entrepreneurship course so that's the end and the beginning refers to entrepreneurship. Read on and I'll explain. I'm going to rewind back to Wednesday.

In my previous post I mentioned that I will be doing a presentation on my dissertation and maybe pitch to investors if I get picked. So I did the 10 minutes presentation and it went pretty well, went quite smoothly. But not sure if my content was good enough though. I wasn't nervous at all, I guess because its my idea and I've done enough research so I know what exactly to say.

So did I get picked to pitch? 

Yes, I did! Initially I wasn't sure if I wanted to pitch because my business idea is still at a very early stage and I was a bit scared lol. Also, I didn't know this pitch was for the Bright Idea Award which means that there's a chance to win some funding towards my business even if investors don't invest in my idea. The Bright Idea award was later in the afternoon on the same day. I had do to a 5 minute pitch in a room full of people; investors/judges, viewers, other pitchers and lecturers. 

So what happened?

The pitch didn't go as well as I wanted it to, because I was running out of time and I had to rush to the end. And the faces of the investors said it all, they weren't interested. So I thought I'm not going to get any investments, but at least I did it and got some experience. But....

I won the Bright Idea award!!! Well I was one of the winners. I won ££££ towards my business!!On top of that UCL is providing an office for free at the Hatchery in Shoreditch and also free mentoring. You know I actually didn't think I would win. One because I've never won anything and two I felt my pitch didn't go too well. I am so happy!

Fast forward...

On Friday,  I handed in my 15,000 word dissertation. When I handed it in I didn't feel excited or relieved, not sure why. It didn't feel like the end of the course either. But I am so going to miss it and the people. No more deadlines, no more emails from Uni.

So what's next?

As I said, its going to be the beginning of entrepreneurship. I will be pursuing my business idea. I really hope I will succeed. It's kind of scary though because I'll be doing it all by myself. Self discipline is very important now, I will need to set myself strict deadlines to meet my goals.I will try my best to follow the customer development, lean startup methodology and monitoring those key metrics lol.

I will carry on blogging about my journey, the startup life began at 24!!!

That extra mile to do my competitor analysis.

Hi guys,

Today's post is about my dissertation progress. This time I will talk a bit about how I'm doing my competitor analysis. 

Normally people will do a competitor analysis by researching on the Internet, conducting SWOT and/or PEST analysis. I have done those but I also became their customer to get a better view and understanding of their service and product. 

Last week I subscribed to one of my closest competitor and today I've received my first box through the post. I paid £10/ month. The box was small enough to fit through the post box which is quite convenient. 

Simply Cook is a startup that aims to make cooking easier by supplying "hard to find 'taste ingredients' and simple instructions." And to be honest, I actually like this idea lol. 

Inside the box was 4 other boxes that contained 3 'taste ingredients'. 

Each box contains a small pot of oil, stock and herbs/ spice.  

As mentioned earlier, there are 4 recipe cards. 

I haven't tried it out yet as I only got the box this morning, but will definitely try one or two recipes this week. I'm kind of excited to be honest. Lol I've basically just marketed them to you lol. But it's ok, sharing is caring. And every startup should support each other. Hehe 

I hope my effort will get me a distinction for my dissertation! 

How's you're dissertation going on? How are you doing you're competitor analysis? 

Dissertation take off!

Hey bloggers, readers, colleagues, friends, and everyone else.
I am going to try and blog at least once a week on the progress of my dissertation. In fact Itxaso did recommend blogging to keep track of the progress. In my previous post I mentioned that I'm working with a beauty startup called Glow for my dissertation and because they haven't conducted the customer development I will help them do that for my dissertation.

I am actually quite excited because all the theory and tools I've learnt from this course I can apply them.  So I will try to apply every single step and tools; customer development process, lean startup (build-measure-learn, canvases, etc. However, I won't be posting the canvases every week because I don't think the girls would like me exposing their business strategy or structure on the internet like this lol. I will mention some results of the hypotheses, what I've been up to and what I've learnt.

To start off this dissertation I will be using Ash Maurya's Lean Canvas to distill the essence of Glow onto one page. I chose the Lean Canvas instead of the Business Model Canvas because Ash Maurya adjusted his canvas for startups before product/market fit which is the case of Glow. This step of mapping out the hypotheses onto a canvas is also the first step of customer  that Steve Blank's ruled out in his 'The Startup Owner's Manual', except he mentions using the Business Model Canvas.

After mapping it all out, I will be discussing it with my mentor. Then I guess the next step is to write out a script, using the Ash Maury's guidelines, for interviewing potential customers. And yes, I will get 'outside the building' as Steve Blank strongly emphasizes. Okie dokes, that's it for now. I'll be back! Thanks for reading.

My Dissertation topic

Hi guys! It's been a month since I blogged here at Startup at 24. I have been revising...or shall I say TRYING to revise for my exams coming up in May. I've written a timetable to make sure I fit everything in, I hope I will follow it lol. I have 4 exams so that's not too bad and the good thing is they are spread out.

Anyways, the main thing I wanted to talk about is my dissertation topic. I have sorted it out! Itxaso is a well connected person, she has tonnes of contacts from different industries. I said I want to do my dissertation on health or beauty and she helped me find a beauty startup called Glow. (Its a mobile app that connects beauticians and customers - won't tell you the full details yet) She made an introduction for me via email to the founders. They are two girls, Thais and Kaska, who previously studied at Imperial college for their MBA (I don't remember the exact name of the degree, I think its Innovation entrepreneurship), and Itxaso was one of the guest lecturers there which is how she met them.

I've met with Thais last week to discuss about the stage of their startup and what I could do my dissertation on at the same time that could help them. They have developed a mobile app MVP however they have not gone through the customer development; testing hypotheses, interviewing customers, etc. She said Imperial does not teach the same methodology as UCL- Imperial doesn't teach about the lean startup- so she doesn't really know about the customer development process. Therefore we both decided that I could be working on the customer development side of their startup. I will be meeting Kaska this week, didn't get to meet her last week as she was away.

I am actually looking forward in working with them because I am working on something that I am passionate about lol. Everything I'm doing at UCL is just 10 times better than at Westminster! I'm not talking in terms of reputation, its obvious the reputation is a lot better lol. I'm talking in terms of the things I'm doing. I didn't really enjoy studying Criminology and Economics, I only studied it because I went through clearing and didn't know what else to study. I only enjoyed half of the modules we studied back then. My dissertation topic back then was although my choice but wasn't my biggest passion, I did something about the music industry. But fingers crossed hopefully I will do well in this dissertation and will earn me some big opportunities after I graduate.

Thanks for reading, I'll be back very soon!

Day at London web summit 2013

Hiya! Thanks for taking the time to read my blog. This post will be about my day volunteering at London web summit.

London Web summit is the largest tech conference in Europe and it was taking place at The Brewery on Friday 1st March.

Just a quick summary of the event programme. There were an exhibition area for all the start ups, a room for speed-dating (my lecturer Itxaso was there, she's a Venture Capitalist). Whilst all that were going on there was a startup competition where each startup has to pitch about their idea to the judges, this took place between 9am to 12pm. The winner was Flubit, an online shopping site. The CEO of Flubit, Bertie Stephens explains that their goal is to;

“provide online shoppers with a platform that will enable them to seek out the best possible price on an item they wish to purchase.”

“Right now, online shops spam consumers with deals and discounts that they guess you might want. We’re changing that by adopting a demand-led model, where we give consumers a lower offer for a product we know they want to buy,” 

 Between 3pm and 4:30pm there were tech talks, some kind of workshop. In the main stage, there interviews with with various CEOs and founders, speakers included; Mike Lynch (founder of Invoke Capital), Joanna Shield (CEO of Tech City Investment Organisation), Matt Mullenweg (Founder of Automatic), Shakil Khan (Head of Special Projects of Spotify), Jeff Lawson (Founder and CEO of Twilio), Danae Ringleman (Co-founder of Indiegogo) and many more. (Sorry the list is too long to write. Lol!)

Most volunteers had to arrive at 7am but I arrived at 8am. ^.^"
Every volunteer were assigned to different roles and I was assigned to work at the foyer, handing out brochures and greeting the guests. Fun I know.... But we had regular breaks where we could wander around   to network, watch the competition and talks.

The Reception

My wristband

Pauline and I

There was a robot there that everyone were obsessed with. It was a bit cheesy to be honest lol.

Interviews with the CEOs and founders in the main stage

Startup Competition, Kreditech one of the finalist

A caricature of me!!

During my break I walked around the exhibition area and saw a lady drawing caricatures of people for FREE.  Here's mine, took about 10 minutes. I don't really like it. I know I'm goofy but she exaggerated that lol!

We present you, iEducase!

Hello all! Thanks for reading. As promised previously, this post will be about the progress of the new idea, iEducase, I am working on with two talented guys in my class, Bryan and Benjamin.

In the past couple of  weeks, in our BFP class we've been building the MVP (Minimal viable product) using Wordpress. We are required to create 2 static pages, 3 dynamic pages, a Twitter, SEO and Google analytic pluggins, all these are due on 11th February. I am pleased to say we've done it! Yay!! lol. Please please pleaseeeee check it out and give us some feedback, we NEED feedback. Www.ieducase.com
There are some sections not fully completed yet. I must say I quite enjoyed working with WordPress. I can use the stuff I learnt for my parent's business website.


What is iEducase?
iEducase is an online educational platform designed for students who have learning difficulties like dyslexia, students who are visual learners, or just simple looking for a short cut to reading a long case study. We make case studies into videos, making it quicker, more enjoyable to study and more effective learning.

The Team
Like the previous idea I was working on with Roxy and Nele, our team is very diverse in terms of ethnicity, education background, experience, skills and age? Bryan is Vietnamese, Benjamin is Indian/ German and I'm Chinese.

For our marketing class we were supposed to come up with at least 9 hypotheses and had about 4 weeks to test them. Well in this period of time, we changed our idea twice and so only managed to test 5 hypotheses 5 out of 15. lol. Better than nothing I guess. Our value proposition hypotheses are;

• iEducase would minimise the time to study case studies
• iEducase would create a better way of learning for those students with learning difficulties/disabilities e.g. dyslexia.

Revenue Stream Hypothesis:

• Students are happy to pay for a small one-off fee for each each study.

So far the first two are valid but not the latter.

Moving on...

On Wednesday (6th Feb), we had to deliver an elevator pitch during BFP class. We had to present the problem we have identified and our proposed solution, the 3 main minimum feature of our MVP.

We got some awesome feedback, the mentors and Itxaso like our idea. Score!! Itxaso suggested we should maybe start off create studies on UCL alumni who have startups. Great idea. And guess what 2 alumni have already agreed to corporate with us! A couple of classmates said that they would definitely used iEducase if it means less time to read and have more time to go out/ go out for drink in the pub. But a couple of classmates were so confused with our idea. One of them asked a question to clarify the idea but he still didn't understand. He had a really funny confused look! lol.

Next step
We haven't got a logo yet, Benjamin is working on it. Once its done we will upload it onto our website.
We are looking for students to trial the service and to interview to test our hypotheses. So if you're interested  please go to iEducase.com and subscribe.

I'll  be back!

Decision Decision Decision

Hi guys, this is going to be a short post. In the last two weeks I have made quite a few decisions.

Decision 1
I am no longer a co-founder of Share & Wear. I have left. Cut the long story short. Not sure if I've mentioned in my previous post about the modules this semester, basically this semester the modules aim to help us to work on a real business idea. Roxy and Nele obviously wanted to use Share & Wear but I wanted to work on another idea at the same time for the course but the girls said it doesn't make sense for me to be a co-founder of two start-ups. So they made a generous offer to me. Instead of being a co-founder, they will pay me to be the marketing manager in exchange for their knowledge (e.g. how to use photoshop, illustrator,etc) and other professional knowledge.  And no, I didn't take on the offer. Why? (or maybe you're thinking 'nor would I')Well, after asking a couple of UCL mentors, they said if you don't enjoy working with the team its better to leave early. I didn't enjoy working with them because there were quite a few things we couldn't agree on. We have totally different tastes. Anyways, yes I allowed them to have my ideas for free- name, logo and other little bits and pieces- Lol. =p

Decision 2
Bryan, Benjamin and I (BCB is what I'm going to call us lol) changed our business idea from the online Oriental games to cycle phone dock. We decided that the online game market is too difficult and competitive. We felt that not many people would commit to a game for a long time. The cycle phone dock will have a charging feature, and will be placed on the handle bars in front of the cyclists. The idea is to try to aim at Barclays Cycle Hire customers.

Decision 3
We changed the business idea again, from cycle phone dock to online education platform. iEducase. This is Benjamin's idea. We changed it because our lecturer Chris said he can't see the pain point and it is not doable. I hope we won't change our idea again as it is week 4 now lol. Seriously, all these coming up with a an idea that solves a problem, coming up with hypotheses, etc are a lot harder than I thought it would be.

I will update you guys with our progress on iEducase and I will tell you guys later what exactly iEducase is. Stayed tuneddddd!!

Share N Wear- Our Business Idea

Hi everyone, as promised this post is about the business idea I am working on with Roxy and Nele who both are from my TE class. As this is the first post about it I will start from the very beginning, and I will update you guys on this blog as we progress.

Logo

The logo title above was designed and created by Nele. What do you think? You like? I don't like the colour grey. To me grey makes things look dull and boring but Nele said she thinks it looks elegant. Ok then. Well I guess Share n Wear are still in its early stages, we can always re-brand.

What is it?
Share N Wear is a social fashion network, where users can give and receive styling advise from friends. Each user will have a virtual wardrobe where they can upload images of the clothes that they own in their real wardrobe. Share N Wear will be based on a mobile and web platform.

How did it all happen?
This is Roxy's idea and as I said in my previous posts I teamed up with her to work on this idea for the E-challenge. Nele joined us a couple of weeks later. It is so weird how I ended up working with Roxy. I remember just before university started, Roxy posted on the TE Facebook group saying she is looking for co-founders to work on a fashion idea. I saw it and ignored it because I was lacking confident at the time even though fashion is one of my passion. But I don't think she mentioned that it was virtual wardrobe idea. She told me about this idea later on when we officially met and started talking in university.

An example of the avatar-by Nele

 At first I didn't want to take part in the E-challenge because I didn't have an idea or a team and no confident. With encouragement from the lecturers and the things I've learnt from the course, my confident was building up. I thought to myself, I have got to make the most of my time here and I will learn a lot from taking part in this E-challenge whether the business idea will be a success or not. I decided to ask Roxy if she was happy to work with me on her idea. She was overwhelmed. Originally she wasn't working on Share N Wear, she teamed up with a few people in our class to work on a business idea based on smart home technology (for the E-challenge). So she obviously left that group and worked on this idea.








The Name
Share N Wear wasn't the first name we came up with. There were a few; Style Me, Me & my Wardrobe, Dress me and some others which I've forgotten.

I told my boyfriend about this idea and that we were struggling to think of a good name for it. As usual my boyfriend used his creativity and came up with Wear and Share. I thought that was a great name and the girls liked it too. We later changed it to Share N Wear because the order of the concept is sharing the clothes first then the user will wear it.

E-challenge
E-challenge was split into two phases; first was to do a 5 minute pitch which took place in October and second was to write a business plan and pitch about it which took place in December. We took part in both and didn't win any of the phases =(

However, we did better in the second phase as we were more prepared and made an effort with our outfits. Nele made some really good mock ups; she made an avatar of each of us and we dressed exactly same as them at the 2nd phase. Tim Barnes (the judge) noticed it, he was like "you're wearing what the avatars are wearing" Lol.. See below (there's an error, I couldn't find the one Nele made for me. I didn't wear that red jacket and those brown boots. I was wearing a cream blazer and black thigh high boots.);

A shot of our temporary website with mock ups

Nele has set up a Facebook page and website for Share N Wear.
Please check them out:

• Facebook
• Our mock ups of the avatars
• Official Website(under construction)

Post E-challenge/ our next steps
We have found a developer to create his social network so watch this space!
We are negotiating with fashion brands to use our platform and promote their clothes.

2 busy weeks at uni

Hi everyone, thanks for taking the time to read my post. A couple of my classmates read my first post and said to me that they they like my idea of this blog ^^ thank you!

I was going to write one post for week 10 but was too busy so decided to wait for this week to finish. I have been quite busy in the past two weeks. Yes I know I say that every week lol but I have been working extra hard as deadlines are coming up. 

We have a 30 minute presentation for Strategy on 11th December and then followed by a 5000+ word report on the presentation due on 17th. But one of the group member is going back on 15th so we are trying to finish before 15th. Then it's the business plan for E-challenge's second phase which we have submitted on Friday- we have to pitch our idea on Tuesday 11th. I'm so excited!!  As for Creativity, we had to do the paper clip task during week 10. We then need to write a 2500 word report on it which is due on 21st Dec but a group member is leaving on the 14th so need to complete it before. One word. Madness.

Monday 26th. 

Source: Mint.com

At Finance we learnt about the Due Diligence process. I really need to revise Itxaso's lecture notes because I always tend to drift off and I've forgotten what she spoke about. I only remember the 3 Ts; Technology, Traction and Team. Second hour of the lecture, we were given a task to do in our groups, we have to write a Due Diligence that we will need to carry out for a company. She gave us a choice of 5 companies. We chose Mint, an online service where users can manage personal finance.(See the image above) We were so indecisive, first we chose Mint, then we changed it to Square, then back to Mint again. lol. 

Source: Yplan.com

The last hour of lecture, was the guest speaker part. Rytis Vitkauskas the Founder of Yplan App came to tell us about his new app. Before becoming an entrepreneur he was a venture capitalist. This app is like Lastminute.com. It presents all the events(gig, theatre, etc) that is happening that night. For example, majority of the time, 30% of the seats at a musical are empty, so Yplan will show these on the app. A pretty cool app. I couldn't download it though because it requires iOS5 and I still have updated my phone since 2011. I can't be bothered lol. My phone contract ends in January anyway so new phone for me! *BIG SMILEY FACE*. After the lecture I had a 2 hour meeting with my strategy group regarding the presentation. It was a productive meeting, no chit chat just discussion about work.  

Tuesday 27th

A couple of days ago, a classmate posted on the TE Facebook group telling us all that he has confirmed with Chris (our Strategy lecturer) that there are no pre-reading for Strategy this week. I commented on it saying 'wicked!' and guess who liked my comment? Chris. Lol! 

I didn't go to E-challenge this week because it was just about how to write a business plan and we've learnt that already. So Roxy, Nele and I just had a brief meeting regarding the name of our business and the fashion event. 

Wednesday 28th 

I went to Fashion Startup and P&G Leadership workshop. Click here to read.

Thursday 29th. 

Got my assignment back from New Technology Ventures and first time in history I got 86! I seriously was shocked! YAY!! Thank you God. 

Source: The London Academy Dance School

Guest lecture this week was the best so far. Greg Gillespie (that's him in the picture above) is a ballroom dancer (recently won a prestigious national award) and an entrepreneur- I like dancing which is probably why I enjoyed this one. He is the founder and principal of The London Academy of Dance based at the Reebok Sports Club in Canary Wharf.  

The most memorable part is when he said that you should look at your competitors to know your unique selling point. And differentiate yourself according to quality, price ad speed. Cheap is not always good. The academy was founded in 2007 and it is now already one of UK's leading professional dance institutions. The main reason his dance school is so successful because he is using the Blue Ocean Strategy. (I learnt this from Strategy class! I have learnt something lol) He is targeting the casual dancers and people who does it for fun rather than competing with other dance institutions who targets professional dancers. 

Friday 30th 

Met up with Creativity group before the lecture to prepare and rehearse a 3 minute presentation. A girl in my group had already created the presentation using Prezi, it was amazing. I volunteered to present it as I like presenting. During this week, we had to do the paper clip task. Did I say what it was? I'll explain it again. All groups were given 5 paper clips and we had to create as much value as possible from those. Our idea was based on the pay forward principle, do something nice for someone and give them that paper clip. That person with the paper clip will now need to pass it on by doing something nice to another person and it carries on. The image above is the banner of our blog. 

Before we came up with this idea. I had a "creative" idea. I said attached the paperclip to your earlobe and will have good hearing like a dog. LOL! I got this idea from a video I found on youtube. These guys also had to create value from paperclips and their idea was a 'get-chick paper clip'. It's designed for men as you can tell by the name. If the paper clip is attached to a girl's top, within seconds the girl will move to the guy who attached it. Because of this video I thought why not go wild with my idea lol. But when I told everyone, they just went silent. I was embarrassed.

Monday 3rd

Finance: 2 guest speakers from Total Access and another 1 from Cisco. The speakers from Total Access were terrible, their presentation skills were terrible. 

Tuesday 4th

In the Strategy class Chris discussed about our "favourite" book Strategy Safari by Mintzberg. That is the most boring book ever! It reminds me of the criminology books I used to read for my bachelors. 

Wednesday 5th- Day off

Day off but worked my ass off on the business plan as deadline was Friday 7th.

Thursday 6th

I had 2 meetings in the morning. First Nele and I met with Dave (our lecturer) to discuss our business plan. He gave us lots of useful advice. One thing I learnt that financial projections in business plans are nonsense but they have to be realistic. After an hour meeting with him, I met with my strategy group. The aim of the meeting didn't go according to plan but we still managed to do some work and gave ourselves a MUST DO task over the weekend as the presentation is less than a week. 

Guest lecture this week was John Bradford. He is the CEO and Founder of Springboard. "He starts start-up accelerators and loves to help start-ups and their founders achieve their true potential.  Over the last 2 years, Jon has helped to start 12 multi-company accelerators from Montreal to Moscow. "- Springboard.com

Before it started Dave came up to me and told me to pitch to John about Share N Wear after the lecture. Lol put me on the spot. He told John to make sure I pitch to him or I am not allowed to leave lol.  So while I was sitting at the lecture I wrote out the keys points of the pitch. 

So how did it go? John said he don't understand the pain point. Its not a bad idea but we just pitched to the wrong person as he doesn't have any fashion sense. His wife sorts his clothes out for him. lol 

Sorry guys I know I promised to write a post about the fashion business idea I'm working with my girls. Will defo do it very very soon. 

Friday 7th

We didn't have proper lecture at Creativity. We had a guest lecturer who has a branding consultancy firm, called Message Multimedia. Mike Villiers, he taught us how to form external relationship using creativity. He gave us lots of examples of re-branding that he has done for various companies across the world. 

Got my finance coursework back-79!! Not bad since I thought I did bad. There were 2 parts in this coursework. I got 59/60 in section A and 20/40 in section B. So yes I didn't do too good on B lol 

Business plan submitted!! Pitch on Tuesday. Stayed tuned! 

An introduction & the journey begins

Hi everyone!

I'm Cilia and I am a student at University College London (UCL) studying MSc Technology Entrepreneurship. If you know me, you probably know that I have another blog (missyungquainth.com) where I talk mostly about beauty and fashion but I do also blog about food, events, etc basically things I find interesting. I've had that blog for almost three years so please do check it out and maybe follow me if you like!

In this blog, I'll only be blogging about things I've learnt UCL and things I've done that is related to my course and entrepreneurship, such as events I attended- networking, startup, guest speakers, etc-, progress of the business idea I'm working with my team and many more. (For more info about my blog and myself click here) I should of started this blog earlier really because the first semester of university is almost over, but late is better than never. Right?

I'll TRY to give a summary of the highlights in the 9 weeks (1st week was induction, 8 weeks of teaching) of university.

Week 1- Induction week
A very productive week. Met most of our lecturers; Dave Chapman, Chris Coleridge and Itxaso Del Palacio. Itxaso is pronounced as 'ee-cha-so'.

Source: Ted.com- Marshmallow Challenge.

On the first day, we were all assigned to groups and did some group activities to get to know each other- the groups were put together based on diversity, my group consisted of Indian, Polish, Chinese and Swedish/Chinese/British (that's me lol!) First group activity was to rank the severeness of some crimes that were given to us and later we did the marshmallow challenge (a team building activity). Our team won the challenge, we built a tower that was 20" high!


On the second day, we had a writing task for Dave to see our writing skills. Dave said that engineers are usually the worst writers, they cannot write to save their lives. We had a class discussion on a case study and a simulation session where we had to come up with a strategy for a game company to be making huge profits and own a big share of the market.

Third day was about networking, didn't do much just a lot of listening to the speakers.

Fourth day, we went on boat trip on the River Thames to Greenwich. We were given a task to do as a group, we had to use the video camera that was provided to us and make a video of a potential business idea in East London. Our group's idea was to bring back the Olympic equestrian site and make horse riding affordable for everyone. At 6:30pm, we were to told meet everyone at the Google Campus.

On the last day, we watched all the videos together- see below for our video. Followed by some alumni presentation on their business ideas.





Week 2- 1st week of teaching
Modules studying: Entrepreneur Finance, Strategy for high tech ventures, New Technology Ventures and Creativity and Innovation in organisation.

Studied about basic accounting- although its basic but for someone that has never done it before, me for example, it is advanced! An introduction to what is strategy  and discussed case studies on IBM & E-ink. New Tech Ventures began with entrepreneurship life cycle.I forgot what we did in Creativity class, lol!

Every Thursday evening, UCL has a guest lecturer who is an entrepreneur and talks about their experience. This week Rob Fitzpatrick spoke about his startups and experience, a very cool guy. https://twitter.com/robfitz

Week 3- My birthday week!

Source: ucl.ac.uk. E-challenge logo

Joined London Entrepreneurs Challenge (E-challenge)- "...a workshop programme and business plan competition open to all members of UCL, SOAS, the London Business School, the Royal Veterinary College, Birkbeck and the School of Pharmacy that aims to show participants the process of starting a business by helping them to do it themselves."(UCL Advances) It's on every Tuesday. I haven't teamed up with anyone yet at this time, was still contemplating whether I should do it or not.

Don't really remember what happened this week but I know there were class discussion on a couple of case studies- SMaL and USX. Didn't go to the guest lecture either. =p

Week 4. 

Teamed up with a girl in my class, Roxy, for the E-challenge. She has a business idea related to fashion and since I love fashion I thought this is the perfect opportunity for me. Didn't go to the guest lecture again =p

Week 5.
A girl called Nele in my class teamed up with me and Roxy for the E-challenge. Every team had to submit Idea Assessment form in order to enter Phase one. And nope, I didn't go to the guest lecture A-gain.

Week 6
E-challenge: We pitched our idea! We only prepared it a couple of hours before which was a mistake. We didn't win but it was good practice. The winner received £3000 ( I think it was £3000 sorry I have such a bad memory), and he did deserve it. His idea was creating a software that will read out the content of a webpage, different tone of voices for different sections. For example one voice for the title, another voice for the main body, and another for the sub heading etc. He even built a prototype so that must have impressed the judges.

I attended the guest lecture this week and the speaker was Jack Jackmann, the CEO of DRFP Holdings Limited.

Submitted first written assignment for Strategy. For Creativity class, we were assigned into groups for an Everest Simulation.

Week 7- Reading week
Worked on the Finance assignment. It wasn't easy. I thought I was able to complete it in two days but no ended up spending the whole week on it.

Week 8

Source: Knodium.com

Finance class is different now; accounting stuff are done and we have Itxaso teaching us about real finance and investment. The structure of Finance class is different too; one hour of teaching, followed by 1 hour of group activity and the last hour would be a guest speaker talking about their business. Each week Itxaso would pick a group to be the class reporter and another to be the CEO. This week the lecture was about Sources of Capital and following the lecture Itxaso invited a guest speaker, Michael Willmot. He is the CEO & Founder of Knodium- an online platform that allows student to study together and form groups called 'HUBS'.

Guest lecture on Thursday evening: Immaculada Martinez, Partner of Opus Corporate Finance LLP. The lecture was very inspirational. For more info on Immaculada Martinez, click here.

Week 9
The Finance class was about pitching to investors. This is one of the most interesting lectures I've had, not that the others are boring. During the 2nd hour, we had to prepare 5 presentation slides for a business idea and pitch to Itxaso and two other ladies which I have forgotten their names.Lol

Creativity class this week was just group work. We were assigned into groups and each group were given 5 paperclips. Our task was to create as much value as possible using those 5 paperclips. The instructions were quite vague as we were expected to use our creativity. Our idea was about helping people. Each person will hold on to a paper clip, the clip is a "symbolic representation to those who hold it to perform one random act of kindness and then encouraging the person/ group that we have helped to do their own good deed, passing on the paper clip in the process." (http://peopleclip.wordpress.com/  We create a blog for it)

That's it for now. My next post won't be as long as this. I will try to blog at least once a week.