Turning that project into a business

Faith-tanui — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 22:15:59 +0000

We have heard of many bigshot companies that started out in garages, dorm rooms, and basements. The likes of Amazon, Disney, Facebook, and Apple just to mention a few. All of them started out as projects, most of them never foresaw the success they have achieved now. Now, most have taken part in hackathons or implemented projects and have wished their projects would turn into a business idea. I know I have. So, how do you go from that "garage" to a business?

1.Research!Research!Research!
Just as I expect a lot of research went into coming up with the project idea, the same goes during this phase. However innovative and smart you think your idea is, it is always a good idea to look up whether it already exists in the market and if it does how many competitors are in that market, and is the potential market going to be able to generate a sustainable income for your business? It can be rather daunting as a start-up to join an already competitive market and counterproductive to start a business with a small market potential to keep you in business.

2.Just Go!
Now that you have established that you have a prospective business in your hands where do you go from here? Just start! Do not get so hung up on what you don't have; use what you do. Do presentations to your classmates, a mentor (if you have one), or your college professor and get their feedback.
Take for example Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, he would talk to classmates about his idea and continued perfecting it from the discussions he had with them. Do not shy away from applying for student grants. The most important thing is to continually be in motion. Even the laws of physics say that an object cannot gain momentum unless it's already in motion. Well, guess what, the laws of physics apply to you too.

3.Work on your project every single day
That sounds like a little bit of a stretch. Everyday? Really? It could be a few minutes daily, it could be an hour depending on your inspiration, it doesn't matter as long as you clock in a day's work. The point of it is to keep you in the focus of what your end goal is and that is to bring your business dream into reality. it also helps you fine-tune your project and keep polishing it and finding new ways to improve on it.

4.Sell your idea
Now that you have done all this work, it's time to sell your idea. This is to attract investors. Again, this is where feedback from your classmates and possibly more experienced people like your college professor will come in handy. You need to learn how to pitch to investors, at this point your work probably sells itself but why not give it an extra nudge with your pitching skills.
This is a whole other topic for another day😊😉.

Project ideas: How to come up with one.

Faith-tanui — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 11:54:41 +0000

Have you ever wanted to do projects but can't seem to get past the first step, which is coming up with a project idea? It can be quite daunting trying to come with a project idea and even more so when you plan on entering the project into major competitions like the Microsofts Imagine Cup competition. So in light of that, I will be giving some ways in which you can come up with one;

Inspiration from existing problems
The secret to a good project is one that aims at and has the prospects of solving an already existing problem. Therefore, a sure way to come up with an idea would be to draw inspiration from the challenges you see around you and try to solve them.

Exploring Github
Github has an extensive pool of projects worked on by different people and it, therefore, serves as a source of ideas either from the trending repositories and deciding to work on that or even identifying areas of improvement in an existing project. Improving the existing project could mean either taking a single feature from it and adding significant functionality to make it a project on its own or identifying a flaw in the existing project and improving on it significantly.

Brainstorming with colleagues
Forums such as hackathons or engaging your colleagues can serve to give insight on the potential project you could take up. A hackathon is even more beneficial because in addition to the opportunity to engage other people with the same interest it provides an opportunity to carry out projects to the end.

Searching the Internet
This could be the most obvious one yet but my list would not be complete without it. The internet is full of project ideas in different fields, some explored others not. It can be overwhelming so the trick is to choose one which you will most likely enjoy and also can potentially solve some common problems.

DEV Community: Faith-tanui

Turning that project into a business

Project ideas: How to come up with one.