by Virna Bottarelli |
Community data Startup Geeks confirm not very reassuring statistics on the precariousness of innovation entrepreneurship: many startups in Italy fail within the first year of their foundation.
Born in 2019 with the aim of creating a virtual support place where Italian entrepreneurs could interact and be supported by mentors and industry professionals, Startup Geeks has grown bigger and bigger, coming to count over 900 startuppers and more than 50 professionals - the "coaches" - experts in different areas, from product development to facilitated finance. The Startup Geeks team now numbers 11 people. The mission is to generate a positive impact for the community and the progress of Italian entrepreneurship. You can join the community by subscribing, but every day Startup Geeks publishes articles, guides and free information to spread the entrepreneurial culture in Italy, as well as informing about the world of startups.
The value of incubation
Startup Geeks has come up with Startup Builder, an online incubation program that is based on an imperative: don't found a startup before you complete the path. "The point of an incubation path is to be able to understand in a short time if your idea has a market and if it can become profitable. We hope that the projects that are admitted can, after all the analyses carried out during the path, become an innovative company. At the same time, if the analyses don't give the desired result, even deciding to drop out can be a victory: time is the most precious resource we have and it is right to quickly choose which projects to focus on. If we had done the Startup Builder ourselves, we probably would have saved six months to reach the same conclusions", says Alessio Boceda, co-founder of Startup Geeks. In reality, in fact, some business ideas do not have reference markets and future customers: proceeding on a similar path means wasting time, money and energy. Once the incubation process is completed, the entrepreneurs, followed by mentors, will be able to understand, depending on the results obtained, whether to create a startup or give up.
"Our goal is to make sure that those who go through the incubation program are clear that their idea might not turn out to be fruitful. That's why part of the success of incubation programs is to have the thanks of entrepreneurs who have been made clear that the path they had in mind was nothing but an announced failure," explains Giulia D'Amato, co-founder of Startup Geeks. "Two factors essentially decide whether an idea can be developed or not: the market and the founders. In this particular historical moment, for example, it is very complicated to undertake an entrepreneurial path for those who have an innovative project involving physical events, travel and activities that cannot be done now because of the various anti-covid provisions: it is very difficult for them to understand if there is a potential market, because they cannot test the idea."
An incubation program is a real path of a few weeks in which entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs must have support from the point of view of training, mentorship and networking to understand whether or not their idea can have a future. Some programs are physical, in presence, and can also provide shared workspaces, while others, the online ones, are managed entirely remotely with the help of various tools that facilitate communication between entrepreneur and interlocutors, giving the possibility to anyone, anywhere, to undertake the path, eliminating geographical barriers, often discriminatory for those who do not live in the so-called cities of Italian innovation. The incubation program for some may be the moment when they realize that their idea has no future, while for others, those with ideas with more space in the market, it can be a springboard thanks to a final event in which you present your project to a group of investors, with the aim of capturing their interest, continuing the conversation and obtaining funding for your business idea. In order to evaluate the seriousness of an incubator, in addition to the analysis of the mentors, the network and the path, it is important that the application to the path is free and does not include paid access: "This aspect is important, because it puts a sort of quality stamp on the incubator, which is not only interested in generating turnover, but in selecting ideas that could potentially have a market," says Boceda.
One year of Startup Builder
Startup Geeks S.r.l. SB was established in February 2020 and has been listed among the Italian Benefit Companies focused on the mission of generating social impact. "In a historical period in which the traditional job market offers more threats than opportunities, we believe it is essential to give bases of entrepreneurial training for free to anyone who wants to evaluate a new professional path for their working future, " explain the founders. "We want to make anyone with an entrepreneurial idea understand that it is not necessary to move to big cities or abroad to realize it: it is perfectly feasible, with good guidance, to do it even in small realities, as indeed it was for us, who returned to the province of Mantua from Germany".
Out of 310 start-ups that applied to the 4 editions of the Startup Builder, 143 start-ups were chosen for the incubation process, of which only 56, the most promising, had the opportunity to tell their business idea to the over 100 investors present at the 5 dedicated events. In this first year of activity, more than 50 top managers and entrepreneurs with experience in the startup world have offered their services for free as mentors: a sign that, despite the statistics and the historical period, there is a great hunger for innovation and a desire to contribute to the development of future businesses. "Of the entrepreneurs who participated in our online incubator, 40 decided to drop their idea: the data was clear and showed a probability of failure too high to continue. What we are happy about is that however they did not give up and are studying new markets, new targets and new ideas to be able to create something innovative, useful and scalable, that can really have the right potential to not fall into the negative statistics of the start-up world."
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