4 Undeniable Reasons Starting A Startup In College Is Perfect Timing

Starting a startup in college may seem like a daunting, somewhat impossible task, but it certainly is not. In fact, the college environment may be the perfect place to launch your entrepreneurial career. There are a number of successful startups that have gone from dorm room to Silicon Valley, like Facebook, Dropbox, and Snapchat to drop a few big names.

Why did these startups have immense success? It very well could be attributed to the university scene they grew from. And this is not an uncommon occurrence. There are still hundreds of startups spawning from colleges across America.

For example, HourlyNerd, now Catalant is a startup out of Harvard connects top-level MBA students to small businesses looking for added expertise. From marketing to business strategy, HourlyNerd has landed some big time clients, such as American Apparel and Coca-Cola.

What is catalyzing college startup success? The environment. With access to like-minded intellects and cutting-edge resources, it’s hard not to build a startup primed for growth. Let’s take a deeper look!

1. You Are Surrounded By Intelligent Like-Minded People

One of the reasons college is a perfect time to start your startup is not much about you, but more about your peers. The creativity and innovation found within the halls and quads of a university is essentially an incubator for startup success.

Let’s say you have a startup idea for a mobile app, but you are nowhere close to having the expertise to develop an application. If you were not in a university setting, where would you turn? The Internet? Being in college, you can potentially throw a rock and hit someone with enough app development knowledge to start your project.

You also have your peers to bounce ideas off of, as well as a built-in customer base if you are solving a problem that is within the same demographic as yourself. This alone can be the catalyst for success.

Need to hold investor meetings? What better place than the aesthetically pleasing design of a higher education platform like university. College campuses now resemble Bay Area startup campuses to attract top students. You can learn more about it here: http://ozarch.com/practice-areas/higher-education/.

2. Growth And Success Does Not Need To Be Rushed

Starting a startup alone takes time, not to mention the effort needed to grow said startup into a successful business. One of the biggest mistakes startup founders make is accelerating too quickly. For instance, bringing products to market to fast, only to have a landslide of negative reviews follow.

When you start a startup in college, you don’t need to rush. After all, you are kind of committed to around four years, not calculating in graduate school. This gives you the time to nurture your idea for the best possible outcome after launch.

This is also important if you are bootstrapping your entrepreneurial endeavor. Like most students, you probably don’t have a box of seed money under your PlayStation. You will need to develop each stage of your idea based on the money you can hustle, which is good, since you won’t be launching a rushed idea.

3. Low-Risk — High Benefit Period In Life

Another very important aspect of starting a startup in college is the low-risk nature of doing it. You don’t have serious responsibilities quite yet, like making mortgage payments, feeding children, car payments, student loans, and more. These types of responsibilities can really stretch a startup founder thin, and cause loads of stress.

Having the ability to take a low-risk that has a high benefit at any stage in life is valuable. University time is that moment. Take advantage of this time and attempt something you may find more challenging down the road.

4. You Have Tons Of Resources Around

Resources to build upon your startup idea can be hard to come by later in life. This makes leveraging the often cutting-edge resources on campus an absolute must. You can basically find every resource you will ever need to start a startup on any college campus in America.

You can also enroll in the classes that will help you build upon your idea. Do you need a programmer? There’s a class for that. How about marketing? Most colleges have that too! It is endless, and you can make connections with people that can help you use labs and research material essential to your startups success.

In Conclusion . . .

There are plenty of reasons why starting a startup in college is the perfect time. From resources to time, you can take advantage of so many great opportunities to get your idea off the ground. Are you thinking about launching your dorm room startup? Let us know what strategies you would use for success.