The University of Iowa’s Venture School business start-up program for entrepreneurs is on its way to Council Bluffs, the Quad Cities, and Iowa City.
Venture School is an intensive six-week course where people who have what they think are great business ideas work with experienced mentors and possible investors to test those ideas and see if they really are all that great.
“We’re evidence-based entrepreneurship, not faith-based,” says Kurt Heiar, a lecturer in the university’s John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center and lead instructor for Venture School.
Venture School is based on a model developed by the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, Stanford University, University of California Berkeley, and Columbia University. The idea is to take the discovery phase of building a business—when the entrepreneur gathers the information that’s needed to determine if there’s enough of a market to turn an idea into an actual going concern, a process that often takes a year or more—and take care of it in just a matter of months.
The Quad Cities class will begin March 3, with informational sessions to be held Thursday, Jan. 15 at noon and 5:30 p.m. in the Quad Cities Chamber of Commerce office, 331 W. 3rd St., Davenport.
The Council Bluffs/Omaha class begins March 29, with an information session to be held on Friday, Feb. 20 at noon in Looft Hall at Iowa Western Community College.
The Iowa City session begins Tuesday, Jan. 20, with 12 teams of entrepreneurs, including: JobScreenr, Chocolate Lounge, CODRIVR, Me2, CT Scan, Agropolis, Light Awake, Quotebuilder, Seizure Medicine, Subscribr, Needle Eye Medicine, and CartilageN.
An earlier session held in Iowa City last year was attended by Nate Kaeding, founding partner of Short’s Burger and Shine and Tailgate Iowa.
“I was thoroughly impressed by the simple, common sense approach of Venture School,” says Kaeding. “My eyes were opened to the importance of real, substantive market research and customer discovery; both invaluable exercises for any startup venture. I’ll never look at my startup projects, or anyone else’s, the same.”
A Venture School held in Des Moines last fall also generated similar raves from participants Lyndsay Horgan and Shawn Harrington, founders of the online floral retailer BloomSnap. Through the Venture School exercises, Horgan and Harrington found they had not sufficiently defined their market, and their message was too detailed.
“Our messaging wasn’t hitting the right target,” says Harrington. “We were talking too much about lower level detail, things the consumer didn’t value.”
More information is available at the Venture School website.