Startup Business Ideas for College Students | Computer Science

In this video, I’ll be talking a bit about the mental framework for you to explore startup ideas as a computer science student in college.

One of the most important things to recognize whenever doing any startup is figuring out your competitive advantage aka your Secret Sauce. The thing about startups is, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. In order to succeed at it over a competitor and to convince others would-be investors that you can win is having a competitive edge.

As a college student, you actually have a big competitive edge which you should 100% use to your complete advantage. The first edge is network effects. Startups grow when a small group of people relay love and rely on your product. This can be in businesses like direct to consumer, small-medium, or even enterprise customers. As a college student, you’re part of a network of young, open-minded individuals in a very dense tight space. Word of mouth spreads fast and many colleges are ecosystems in themselves. By focusing on early adopters that are college-aged, you’re also focusing on a subset of the population that will later become tomorrow’s power users.

The second huge advantage you have is that colleges are an ecosystem that can rapidly scale. For example, if you were to build a sticky product at a college like Harvard, one would be able to repeat that success at similar universities like Yale, Brown, Columbia, Stanford, etc. Being close to highly influential users with a clear path to achieving massive scale is a huge competitive advantage that college students have. If you think about it, in order for others to gain access to colleges, they must pay thousands of dollars to alumni networks or spend a lot of time finding advocates inside the school themselves.

The last big advantage you might have is access to research. If you’re a computer science student in a master’s program or a Ph.D., you will be exposed to the most bleeding-edge technologies. Many times, this technology is something that hasn’t been published yet. This can be a huge potential goldmine because no one else in the world probably has access to this information or knowledge. If you can use this understanding to create a startup, then this would be a large advantage to beat out competitors.

The biggest mistake you can make as a college student is not to use this competitive advantage. For example, as an investor, I’ve heard people pitch to me wild ideas that are completely out of their area of expertise. Focus on your core competencies and focus on the needs of your fellow students and this is an area where you can truly find great success. Other ways you can think about the problem is to focus on ideas that truly meet the needs of your fellow students, or frankly, just build apps and tools that can entertain them.

Another important thing to note is to not copy the ideas of the past. The environment in which companies like Facebook or Microsoft were able to be successful was a thing of the past, but the mental framework in which you can use to figure out the areas of focus remain the same. Don’t make the mistake of trying to copy or to try to hit a target that has already moved on. Instead, focus on what’s new and what’s fresh. Look at markets that are growing or will grow, and focus on the problems of tomorrow.

Видео Startup Business Ideas for College Students | Computer Science канала Startups, Coding and Shit