Winning the Durham University Blueprint Enterprise Competition

While interning at a London startup last summer, I attended a talk by Joel Gascoigne, the CEO of tech company Buffer. He spoke about how in his final year of university — having messed around for the previous years — he discovered his university’s entrepreneurs society. Through this society he found inspiration, and fellow students with a diverse array of skills and the dream of starting a business. Over that year he began exploring how he could start his own venture, and was lucky enough to find someone who would become his business partner after university — his first steps on the road to becoming a successful founder.

With my mates already putting in grad scheme applications, I had not even considered that I could do my own thing after graduation — never mind the fact that pursuing my own business venture immediately after university would probably be the least risky time in my life to do so and could allow me to develop even more useful skills than a grad scheme! Plus, with my Computer Science degree giving me the skills to develop my own tech product, it would be rude not to. It was with this in mind that I returned to Durham for my final year, imbued with entrepreneurial spirit.

I began thinking about what kind of product or service would actually be worth developing, based primarily on my work experiences; when thinking of ideas, it really helps to have a problem you actually care about and want to solve. I discussed my ideas with a like-minded friend, and together we began fleshing out an concept we agreed had real potential.

We joined Entrepreneurs Durham (like their Facebook page now!), and realised that their upcoming Kickstarter Weekend could be the perfect opportunity to form our ideas into an actual plan; this turned out to be invaluable. Over 24 hours we formalised our thoughts, developed a lightweight prototype, and — with the help of the mentors on hand — developed our very first pitch. We went in taking the competition very seriously, with clear goals and a vision of how we wanted to achieve them, and we were rewarded with the first prize.

Our win at the Kickstarter Weekend gave us a huge boost in confidence and opened us up to a network of support and opportunity, from the enterprise department’s advisors to consulting with industry professionals. The natural next step was to get involved with Durham University’s Blueprint Competition, where up against strong contenders in the form of some already well developed businesses, we managed to secure another win.

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I really encourage anyone with the inclination to get involved with Blueprint. It’s the perfect way of taking something from the spark of an idea, to a fully formed business ready to launch. Its not a hand holding process by any means but it gives you achievable short term goals that can really focus your efforts. In particular, the chance to pitch to British business leaders is a great way of building your confidence, and the opportunity to develop a water-tight business plan forces you to confront the viability of your proposal. Blueprint also comes with some great support, and if your idea has legs the prizes can be exactly what you need to take your business to the next level.

University is the perfect time to get involved with entrepreneurial endeavours, while you’re surrounded by passionate people and you’ve got the support of a world-class University. If this is something you’ve ever considered, you owe it to yourself to give it a go.

We begin work on our product full time from July.