The first part of the Get Started programme of the Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship is in collaboration with the Validation Lab of YES!Delft. This means the participants of both institutions join forces during the first four workshops. One of the goals of Get Started is to encourage collaboration or co-foundership between participants of both groups. As it is always a good combination if a more business oriented individual works together with a more technical oriented individual.

We are happy to announce that the latest Get Started programme of ECE and YES!Delft has led to such a collaboration. Koen Vegter, student of the Rotterdam School of Management, began Get Started on the ECE side with his own business idea concerning private online security and safety of personal information online. He came up with Mimetric, an app which would give users more insights into what companies get to know about you through your online activities.

Meanwhile Hans van den Heuvel also participated in Get Started as part of the YES!Delft group. He began Get Started with Monkeywings, a business which would use special drone technology to make cool aerial shots of indoor and outdoor events. During the workshops of the Get Started programme he gained a lot of new insights and ran into some issues with his current business idea which made him to pivot. Instead of using this special drone technology for making video clips he decided to use the drones for a different purpose, namely the visual inspection of passenger planes. At the moment it costs a lot of time and money to inspect an airplane by hand and this technology would make it a lot easier, more efficient and cheaper to do so. During the weeks after the pivot he gained a lot of good feedback from potential clients.

Hans knew from the beginning that he needed a co-founder, he told Koen this and they arranged to have a conversation someday about the topic. With Koen’s approach being; “if it is not of interest for me, maybe I can help him look for potential co-founders.” But during the conversation Koen became so enthusiastic that he wanted to be part of Hans his project. They discussed the tasks he would be doing and found that it had a good fit with his interests and study. So Koen started to compare the potentials of Mimetric and Monkeywings and found that Monkeywings had more potential and was a nicer project to work on.

After the first conversation he joined Hans at a validation meeting, which he found very interesting and gave him a good image of how the project was progressing. This gave him even more reassurance, so during the next week they both decided to continue together on Monkeywings, Hans as founder and Koen as co-founder.

So Get Started not only helps you in launching your startup in 12 weeks, it is also able to provide you with a completely new venture. We at ECE wish them good luck on their entrepreneurial journey!