A key component of being an entrepreneur requires you to go out into the real world, ask real people questions, and test your assumptions. UTS Business and Law student, Louisa Tran takes us behind the scenes to explain her team’s discovery of what makes a successful business idea.
L to R - Louise Tran, Alexander Cheng and Vina Hing.
I had a preconceived idea that amazing solutions were borne out of dreams or were just a stroke of genius and while this may hold true for a lucky few, most of us don’t encounter innovation this way. A great solution comes from effective collaboration, hard work, and understanding your market.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is a good solution
As part of this year’s Hult Prize, we were tasked with creating a venture that could provide 10,000 meaningful jobs to youth over 10 years.
After conducting some basic research, our team discovered South Africa has the highest youth unemployment in the world and employers in South Africa were struggling to find people who possessed the necessary skills for entry-level positions.
To tackle this problem, our team came up with an upskilling service that matched potential employees with employers. We knew it wasn’t ground-breaking but the target market was unique, so we packaged this solution as “CareerSprouts” and presented it at the Hult Prize on-campus finals at UTS.
To our surprise, we won and before we knew it, we were headed to London to represent UTS in the regional competition.
In the following months, we spoke to any and all South Africans we knew, asking whether the idea could actually work and ultimately, we found out it wouldn’t. With only a few months to go before London, we were back to the drawing board.
Pivoting to find new potential
In our second attempt at solving this issue, we began by looking towards ourselves. What did we understand? What were we passionate about? What was our unique value proposition as a team? Realising that we had all come from refugee backgrounds, we thought it would be incredibly powerful to focus on that.
We found that refugees needed an outlet to practise conversational English, and needed Australian references. To ensure that our venture was self-sustaining, we needed to look at the market and find out what products were in demand.
We turned towards tourism and came up with refugee-led tours around Sydney, catered to both locals wanting to learn more about suburban Sydney, as well as international tourists wanting an alternative tourism experience.
We also reached out to experienced mentors such as Anne-Marie Ellias (co-founder of Unboxd, an organisation that has held various refugee hackathons and birthed a number of successful startups focusing on reducing youth unemployment) and Aaron Ngan of UTS Startups who gave us the honest advice we needed to improve our solution.
Pitching in London
During the Regional Finals in London, we were selected to pitch as part of the top six teams. We looked at each other, smiled, and mustered up all of our energy to give it one last crack. The experience was raw and we felt everything - the eyes on us, the nerves, the elation and the support when it was all over.
Although we were not ultimately successful in progressing to the next round of the competition, we each grew so much from the experience. It didn’t feel like a ‘competition’ with ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. We really were just a group of students from UTS passionate about creating real, lasting change.
Hult Prize at UTS was the most challenging and rewarding experience I have undertaken in my six years at university and the support that we received along the way from UTS was second to none.
While we have learned a lot about creating social ventures through lean-testing, we have also learned a lot about ourselves. Alex, Vina and I are so proud that we stood in London that night as part of the top six in front of a crowd of hundreds of people to represent our university.
To anyone looking to find a unique solution to a problem, or start their own business, UTS has everything you need, all you have to do is ask!
Hult Prize is leading a generation to change the world. To find out more click here.