Building a High School Startup - Key Insights We Learned

This article goes over the five other key things we learned from building our startup out of high school, gained through experience, mentorship, and research. The first article goes exclusively into evaluating ideas, found here.

Building your team and motivation is critical.

It’s great working with people on a project, however you need to make sure everyone involved is highly motivated and has the shared goal of success. A common pitfall is for students to create a group with their close friends, who might be joining just to have some fun or add it to their resume. Make clear expectations from everyone regarding the amount of effort and time they need to put in. If someone ends up having too much classwork to contribute much, they need to make that very clear. Teammates that appear to slack off or put in less effort than others can pull the entire group down, so it really does require a combined effort. A united team is able to navigate challenges more effectively.

Also, take skills and roles into consideration. Play to each person’s strengths and value learning. As a student, you won’t know everything, but having the motivation to learn new things and to keep trying is very important. However, keep in mind that certain projects require a more technical team.

For example, if you’re making an app, it makes more sense to have a mostly technical team. When it comes down to it, your top priority is to make a functional product. If there are too many members working on the non-technical aspects of the business, you might end up wasting time on things that don’t matter yet. At the same time, having different backgrounds could be both beneficial and detrimental—use your own judgement and outside research to decide what works.

If you plan to go the venture capital route, keep in mind that many funds evaluate a startup by the strength and adaptability of a team. While it’s definitely helpful to have prior successes or affiliations, it’s important to showcase a passionate and competent team that’s ready to tackle whatever lies ahead.

Make sure you and your team realize that, if serious, startups will take up most of your life. If everyone only has a bit of free time between school, homework, and life, don’t set crazy expectations that will lead to burnout. Be realistic about workloads.

Don’t be afraid to seek out mentorship for advice.

Having expert advice becomes very valuable when making decisions on how to build and run the startup. As the project leader, I had questions on best practices of managing my team, whether it was a good time to pivot to a new idea, or even specific questions on legal procedures. With the internet and chatbots, finding answers to these questions has neve been easier. However, it’s still a good idea to have others with experience to provide guidance. They might help you discover new things you neve thought about.

In our startup, we talked to about 10 people, and should have talked to more. Every conversation we had was extremely valuable, and helped us come up with clear questions about our product and methodology, many of which are present in these two insight articles.

Create an MVP as fast as possible.

I remember sitting in bed one night reading about the importance of MVPs in The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, when I realized our definition of an MVP was wrong the whole time. As mentioned in the first article, you need to test your idea to see if your product is a solution to a problem people will actually use. This was a huge issue for us, as development before testing even started took much too long.

We knew we had to make an MVP from the beginning, so how did this happen? Our definition of MVP was wrong. In our mind, a fully-functioning app with semi-polished features was an MVP. However, it’s a good idea to step back and really think: What is the absolute most basic form of the product at hand?

Example: Our main app’s selling point was helping curb procrastination for students glued on social media, and the primary feature was a special notification system. We ran into a ton of issues related to general app development and notification timing, setting us back from testing. However, the most basic form of this feature could have been mostly replicated with just an existing studying app and a timer. That’s it. With no development time at all, we could have gotten insights about students’ willingness to adapt to a new studying pattern and if they would use such a system.

This shows the importance of testing early—it’s easy to waste lots of time building out a dead idea, and the only way to test if the idea isn’t dead is through testing. Make sure you have your target audience test and not just your team to avoid bias.

Consider legal protections, but don’t let them slow you down.

Legal work can get messy and take away from development time, but in some cases, is still important. If you’re serious about making your business official, evaluate your product timeline and confidence level before diving into legal processes.

For students launching a startup, here’s a general timeline to follow regarding legal processes:

Idea Validation & Prototyping

At this stage, set and document clear expectations from all members. Consider creating a simple founder’s agreement, but focus more on the prototyping process, getting the MVP out ASAP.

Early Traction & Testing

You’ve built out the MVP, tested with real potential customers, and are starting to get some interest through testing and social media. If serious, check-in with the team and start looking into ownership and exit agreements.

Launch & Formalization

Depending on different circumstances, it may be time to register the business. If you’re starting to make money or spending higher amounts, open a bank account for the business and maintain some form of accounting. Finally, sign off on official agreements regarding equity, NDAs, and consider patents/trademarks for key innovations.

Growth & Expansion

Now, you’re becoming confident that this is a sustainable business and want to expand it. Revisit company structure, equity, and tighten legal documents for the journey ahead. If you’re seeking investment, make sure the company structure is investor-friendly.

If you’re really afraid of your idea being taken, take the time to reevaluate your team and/or idea. Sometimes, it may be a team member trust issue, or an idea that doesn’t have strong differentiation. Dealing with legal processes strategically can save YOU FROM WASTING lots of money and time.

Don’t be rigid—pivots will happen.

It’s common to be attached to your own idea and want to continue it through. However, things change, and you as a founder need to adapt. Take YouTube for example, which started out as a dating site and pivoted to a video sharing platform, a far more successful outcome.

When deciding whether it’s a good time to pivot, ask yourself:

• Has your audience shifted wants and needs, and are looking for something else?
• Are there new competitors and technology advances that disrupt your space?
• Does the idea work, but isn’t profitable?
• Has feedback you received given you insights into new pain points or different use cases?
• These are all great questions to ask yourself throughout the development and testing process.

Pivoting doesn’t mean failure, but instead shows learning and adaptability. Being able to take insights and apply them to make better products creates successes and avoids dead-ends. This is why many investors don’t just back ideas; they also invest in teams. A team that can execute successful pivots is more valuable than an idea alone.

We hope these two articles have been informative and impactful. Startups can be fun, but can have a lot of responsibility attached to it. Keeping these tips in mind will help you in the long run, allowing you to make more informed and strategic decisions.