Last June, Leila Haddad watched her older cousin's graduating class wait for their grad hoodies. The class had ordered them online from a company far away, and the box arrived two days after graduation. Leila, who draws digital art in her spare time, thought: I could have made those here, faster, and with a design the class actually picked. That thought is where most ventures begin. Not with a business degree or a pile of money, but with someone who notices a problem and believes they can do something about it. In this unit you will follow Leila as she turns that thought into Grad Gear, a small custom-hoodie pop-up shop, and you can use the same steps to launch your own venture.
What an Entrepreneurial Mindset Looks Like
A mindset is a way of thinking that shapes what you notice and how you act. An entrepreneurial mindset is the set of thinking habits that helps a person spot opportunities and act on them. It is not a personality you are born with. Each habit can be practised, the way you practise a sport. Business educators often describe eight elements, and you will use every one of them before your venture is finished.
| Mindset element | What it means | What it looked like for Leila |
|---|---|---|
| Being future-oriented | Thinking ahead about what people will need and where the venture could go | Planning for next year's grad class and school teams, not just this spring |
| Recognizing opportunities | Noticing a problem or unmet need that you could solve | Seeing that late, generic grad hoodies were a problem worth solving |
| Communicating and collaborating | Sharing ideas clearly and working well with others | Asking her friend Owen to run the social media account |
| Critical thinking and problem solving | Questioning assumptions and working through problems step by step | Asking whether students would really pay $45 before buying any supplies |
| Anticipating and managing risk | Predicting what could go wrong and planning for it | Taking pre-orders so she would not be stuck with unsold hoodies |
| Dealing with adversity and preparing for growth | Bouncing back from setbacks and getting ready to grow | Fixing a cracked print instead of giving up after the first test |
| Creativity | Coming up with new ideas or new combinations of old ones | Letting each class vote on its own design |
| Being a lifelong learner | Treating every result as a chance to learn something new | Watching tutorials to learn how a heat press works |
Your Lived Experience Is an Idea Generator
Your lived experiences are the things you have done, seen and felt yourself: your hobbies, your part-time job, your family's routines, the frustrations you deal with every week. They are the best source of venture ideas you have, because you already understand the customer (often it is you or people like you) and you already know what is annoying about the current options. Ask yourself the questions below and write down every answer, even the ones that seem silly.
- What annoys me, my friends or my family on a regular basis?
- What do people always ask me to help with?
- What skill or hobby do I have that others would pay for? (Leila: digital drawing.)
- What do people in my school or neighbourhood have to travel far, wait long or pay too much to get? (Leila: custom hoodies.)
- What do I wish existed?
The Design Process: From Many Ideas to One
The design process is a series of steps for turning a need into a product or service people can use. First you generate ideas: list as many as you can without judging them, because quantity leads to quality. Next you research their potential using evaluation criteria, which are the standards you use to judge each idea, such as customer demand, start-up cost, how well it fits your skills and how much time it needs. Then you select an idea, and finally you create a prototype. Leila narrowed her list to three ideas and scored them in a weighted decision matrix: she rated each idea from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent) on each criterion, multiplied each rating by how much that criterion matters (its weight), and added the results.
| Criterion (weight) | Grad Gear hoodies | Dog walking | Phone-case stickers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer demand (40%) | 5 | 4 | 3 |
| Low start-up cost (20%) | 2 | 5 | 4 |
| Fits my skills (25%) | 5 | 3 | 4 |
| Time fits my schedule (15%) | 3 | 2 | 4 |
| Weighted score | 4.10 | 3.65 | 3.60 |
Prototyping with the End User in Mind
A prototype is an early, cheap version of a product or service that you build so real people can try it before you spend serious money. The end user is the person who will actually use the product, and the end-user experience is everything they see, touch and feel while buying and using it: how the hoodie fits, how soft it is, how easy the order form is, how long they wait. Leila made two sample hoodies with a class-designed logo, let ten classmates try them on and wash them, and asked each one what they liked and what bugged them. Their answers drive the next lesson.