Being a student boss doesn’t just mean finding time — it means making it.
I recently had the pleasure of sharing my journey as a student entrepreneur in a talk in TEDxNUS. The theme was “Reset Your Mind”. While I knew that I was invited to share about my work, I was admittedly at a loss when it came to deciding which specific topic to talk about.
Upon reflection, I thought it was good to talk about the mindset shifts a student should have when approaching entrepreneurship. Personally, I am interested in encouraging more students to start entrepreneurship early in their studies.
There are three reasons.
Firstly, starting entrepreneurship as a student is great since you have less liabilities and responsibilities, along with a relatively flexible schedule.
Secondly, starting early allows you to learn the important lessons and cultivate a network that you can bring into subsequent ventures.
Lastly, there is a wave of initiatives that encourage student entrepreneurship in schools, e.g., school clubs, organisations such as Reactor and EDGE.
Without further ado, these are the major points that aspiring student entrepreneurs should take note of if/when they embark on the arduous journey that is entrepreneurship.
1. It’s no longer a school project
No surprises there- take whatever attitudes you had in approaching a project, and chuck it out of the window.
One thing about a school project is that you’re extrinsically motivated to do well (grades) and the length of time required to complete a project is typically just a few weeks. And if you do not get along with your group mates, you can choose to tough it out (or let others pick up the slack) and never see those bastards again once you’re done.
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However, if you start a startup as a student, you now have to have a mindset shift because you will need to tap into a lot of intrinsic motivation to keep the startup going. It takes a lot of discipline and willpower to build the company day after day in the face of uncertainty and overwhelming odds.
On top of that, unlike project work, you can’t just flail your hands about and leave things to fate and your partners when things don’t work out. Partner/co-founder management becomes paramount. And the stakes and risks are much higher since your work lives and dies with you.
No pressure.
2. Forge good relationships and partnerships
While this is general advice that applies to just about most entrepreneurs: your youth and general inexperience mean everyone will most likely doubt you and what you bring to the table.
This is understandable, especially when you have not spent any time deepening your expertise in any particular domains.
Instead of following the usual grit-hustle-endure mentality that you read from stories and news articles and suffer alone, consider tackling this in a different way - getting good partnerships.
Before I go on, a fun personal story: my co-founder and I happened to be life science majors, whereas the space we were working in was insurtech which seemed like a major disjoint between what our backgrounds and what we were solving.
As such, we spent more time and effort trying to convince users and customers that we understood the space and that our platform was legit.
In addition, I also lost count how many times VC associates and the partners asked me to go back to school instead of doing my startup. I saw where they’re coming from; it started with indignation and eventually doubt. It does wear you down over time.
Eventually, I stopped talking to VCs about my work and focused on building the company and the product. Joke’s on them though because eventually most of the naysayers dropped out of the startup ecosystem altogether.
It was not until we partnered one of the top personal finance media in the country and local authorities that people started paying attention to us and what we offered. In short, consider going for partnerships with established players and/or get someone experienced in your startup space on the board.
This way, people won’t second guess your team and product.
3. Time is not linear
A common question I get from people is how I find time to do everything that I did as a student entrepreneur. Not surprising, since there’s a lot of things going on in the day for students.
The workload experienced by students ranges from being easy to nightmarishly hard. As such, it’s almost masochistic to have additional entrepreneurship on top of this.
On a side note, I think this question is also pertinent for those who lead double lives, i.e. individuals with day jobs doing a side hustle in the evening.
My response to that question is that I did not find time - I made it.
This can mean various things. For example, it means giving up pleasures so that you can do your work. I’m sad to say I’m at least a decade behind when it comes to TV shows or games. One hour that you give up watching Netflix is an hour you gain to do business development or writing code. Another thing might be sleeping less (it’s pretty unhealthy).
If you ask any entrepreneurs, each and every one of them paid a price one way or another to build what they did.
You might be wondering why I shared a picture of the game Tetris above. Tetris is my favourite game of all time and I’ve always been fascinated by how you can make things fit into each other, forming lines after lines of completed rows. I love it so much that it made me think of life as blocks.
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I manage my time and tasks by thinking of them as blocks to be fit into each other. It’s surprisingly effective.
Practically speaking, how do you practise that idea? One feasible way is to keep your calendar constantly updated with blocks of events and tasks and having to-do lists on Trello.
Good luck out there students!
There you have it, three major points from my talk. As students, you do not have the luxury of time and space like full-time entrepreneurs. At times, you will inevitably feel bogged down and there’s very little progress.
That’s okay.
One of my favourite personal mantras is that the you of today should be better than the you of yesterday.
It can be a minuscule improvement, like learning a new fact, or having a major improvement — like a new job. Similarly, this mindset should translate to your double life as well.
As a student, you have tons of readings, homework, assignments, project work, etc which can be very distracting. However, they should not stop you from implementing at least one thing a day, be it an email to a customer or a paragraph on the article that you were working on.
I leave you with an equation that I find very inspiring.
If you improve or progress as either an individual or a startup by 0.1 per cent every day without fail, you’d be 44 per cent better at the end of a year than you were at the start of the year. This is the power of compounding.
And you have two to four years in school.
Most people aren’t going to get it right the first time round, so why not just start early?
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