buildpurdue

Founding rationale

The main problem we aimed to fix at BuildPurdue was that there was no density of founders. What that meant was that Purdue was producing a lot of great founders, but they weren't in the same place. Aspiring founders couldn't talk to them to figure out what they should do to improve. We couldn't celebrate each other's successes. There was no publicity of the accomplishments that founders at Purdue were having. We weren't tracking them because we didn't know they existed until they had graduated and left.

Because of that, we created BuildPurdue to solve that one problem: how do we make a dense community of founders at Purdue?

Operating model

BuildPurdue runs two primary things.

First, we run Night Shift every week. This is an open-to-all co-working event that runs from Saturday 7 pm to 3 am, and people stay for quite a while. It inspires founders to meet people who are working on real things and just be around others who want to stay dedicated to a project they're passionate about.

Second, we have an exclusive program called The Cohort for those who are actually making progress on their ventures. This is application-based, and we select those who we have found to have a viable business idea and who have actually made progress, whether that's customer discovery or building an MVP. These cohort members get exclusive access to alternating weeks of workshops and co-working, which again aim to serve the purpose of a dense community of founders at Purdue. The workshops are completely founder-led and discussion-based. There's no guest speaker teaching the room how to do something. We take a problem one cohort venture is currently facing and dissect it together, using the thinking of everyone else there.

We also have guest speaking events, as well as larger events such as panels, Q&As, pitch nights, startup career fairs, but none of those are our primary offerings.

Why founder-led workshops over guest speakers

There's nothing wrong with bringing in a successful founder. In fact, we do run those types of events, but they can't be the primary method of helping people, because people don't listen to advice unless they're faced with a challenge that they need to fix in that moment. That's why, instead of having someone give a talk that may or may not be applicable to the founders in that room, we directly create value by taking a problem that a venture in our cohort is currently facing and figuring out how to solve it.

We theme them around certain aspects. For example, maybe it's a customer discovery workshop, a value proposition workshop, an ICP definition workshop, or an MVP dissection workshop. All of these workshops, while they do have topics, address problems that either some or the majority of the ventures in our cohort are facing. As a result, the venture having their problems dissected gets primary value, and those doing the dissecting get secondary value by seeing what they can take away for their own businesses.

Why The Cohort is gated

Our cohort is built on the principle of iron sharpens iron. We want to make sure that the very best people are in who are both willing to give to the community and are willing to receive feedback from the community. It's gated because exclusivity creates an environment where people are actually facing the same problems, not people who simply came to learn about what it's like to make a startup. There is a different place for them. This group is for people who are fully aware of and understand the same problems that student startups face.

How do you balance your time in a venture as well as school? How do you raise money? How do you talk to your customers? How do you get a paid pilot? What's your MVP look like? These are all things that people who are simply interested in entrepreneurship don't have direct insight into because they've never experienced it themselves. That's why we gate the cohort, because now those in the cohort will know exactly what problems the other ventures are facing, and they will be able to help.

After all, a student founder, even just two months ahead of another student founder, is infinitely more valuable than somebody who gives an unfounded opinion with no knowledge of the space.

My role

I am the co-president and co-founder of BuildPurdue. While I didn't directly start the actual student org itself in the official name, I was one of the two people who took it from simply a get-together club to a club that had marketing, a cohort program, properly run night shifts, and funding. All of that was through me and my co-president. Whereas before it was simply an idea and a club that people didn't know about nor respect as a credible location for founders to have a community.

My week-to-week now looks like making sure our team is running things correctly. We put together a good team that is high agency and fun, so they're able to run those things themselves. Marketing gets done.

As a lead on the tech side, I have put together most of the web development side of things, including a complete CRM to gather data on everybody's interests in entrepreneurship through web traffic as much as possible. Events, check-ins, and everything else are integrated with our website so that things work out properly and we can track everything that people do in regards to BuildPurdue in one place, instead of having fragmented information across Google Forms or Luma and a bunch of other places.

Internal platform and tracking entrepreneurship at Purdue

We have data on around 500 students and a mailing list of about 1,000. We track things like what events they've registered for, where on the site they've clicked, and whether they have an application. We also gather data from external sources like hackathons, ideation sprints, and entrepreneurship classes themselves. We track what events they RSVP'd for, as well as every single answer to RSVP and check-in questions that they've had.

Our goal is to aggregate this information so we can track entrepreneurship at Purdue, something that's been sorely lacking in our pursuit to grow entrepreneurship as a school. After all, if we can't track the entrepreneurs, then how do we know how to help them? If we don't know who they are, how can we reach them to help the program?

How I describe it

BuildPurdue is Purdue's community for founders.

What Purdue's existing entrepreneurship infrastructure gets wrong

Everything that exists at Purdue is a class or a competition. They teach you to "get involved" with entrepreneurship by attending a class that makes you create an imaginary cap table for a fake business you haven't done real customer discovery with. As far as real things go, we have competitions where talented, creative individuals pitch and then do nothing with their idea afterward. We have programs with great content, but they don't solve real problems that the students' ventures are facing in that moment, and are instead lecture-based, hoping that the students will absorb some tangential knowledge and be able to apply it. We have hackathons galore, but all those potential founders aren't actively encouraged to do anything with their project.

People don't understand that founders are the best teachers for founders. Secondarily, universities don't understand that the best way to learn how to start a business is to just start a business, learning to tackle the challenges as they arise. It doesn't make sense to spend time learning about cash flow in and out when we haven't spent time validating a business idea in the real world. Similarly, competitions are easy to set up and easy to write off as a success: "we had 10 pitches, we gave the best one $10k" and then call it a day. Sustained progress, however, is difficult, and thus has very little effort put into fleshing it out as well as possible.

The decision that draws the most pushback

My biggest decision was to have everything be student-founder-led. No lectures, no teaching, not even presentations, just discussion and open problem solving plus coworking. It's incredibly different from every other technical or education organization on campus.

What the format costs us

It's hard to get people to show up and see value in it. Since it's non-traditional, people only take away value when the discussion leads to something valuable. That means every time we run an unstructured or bad workshop, or have too few people at a coworking event, the discussion can be lacking and cause people to not get value out of the event.

The "we don't do anything" critique

People sometimes say we don't "do" anything. And at our core, yes, that might be true. We don't provide cohort members with any monetary resources, or have projects that we work on as club members together. Realistically, all we are is a community that has its value created by the quality of membership.

How we measure success in year one

When a startup is in its preseed, no VC is looking for revenue. We have traction and density, and that's what matters. We will have demonstrable results soon. One of our easiest early metrics though is that we have partnerships with 4 VC firms and have a cohort of 20 ventures. This is after we received 50+ applications that we had to filter through. The startups are here, and they aren't involved with anything.

The traction buildpurdue has is higher than any other entrepreneurship organization on campus. At our peak this semester, we had 50+ people at one Night Shift.

Who buildpurdue isn't for

BuildPurdue's cohort is not for people who are "wantrepreneurs". We need our members to show initiative and drive. If you're surface-level interested, you're more than welcome to cowork at our open events. But it's simply a funnel, and our focus is the people who are making active progress.