Meet the Get Started Entrepreneurs Part 2: Democratizing Education
Our Get Started programme, which helps first-time entrepreneurs move from idea to actual business in 10 weeks, has seen more than 200 entrepreneurs launch their venture. This post is part of an ongoing series where we profile the many different kinds of entrepreneurs that have been part of the programme, how they came up with their ideas and what they learned. Anxious to get started yourself? Check out www.getstarted.nl
Name Jan Hein Hoogstad & Sander Reukema
Background
Jan Hein: assistant professor at University of Amsterdam
Sander: data analyst, MSc in Business Information Management
Startup Offcourse
Sander and Jan Hein met during the Get Started programme. While originally they both started with their own ideas, they quickly teamed up to work on Offcourse.
Sander, to start with you, with what kind of startup did you actually begin the programme?
When I started the programme, I was working on my own startup called AgexData. With AgexData I wanted to develop a generic tool for assessing data quality for consultancy firms. After an internship where I was working on measuring the quality of data, I came up with the idea to make an algorithm myself. I have always been intrigued by Big Data and I noticed that many companies struggle with the large amounts of data they have to cope with nowadays. That was how I started, because I liked the idea of building solutions for such complex problems.
And Jan Hein, with what kind of startup idea did you start the programme?
I started the programme with Offcourse, which we are currently still working on. The central idea of Offcourse is that nowadays you could learn anything anywhere you want because everything is available online. But what is missing is some structure. Someone who teaches you where to start, what the next steps are and in the end something like a diploma with which you could get a job. Offcourse wants to offer a platform to those who are working independently, so called self-learners, to get that structure and a diploma in the end.
Learning has become increasingly important because of life-long learning. Learning today is not something you do only in a short period of your life but continually and with Offcourse you can structure and document that.
I came up with the idea because I am a life-long learner myself. I always learned in and outside the systems. As a high school student, I wasn’t really a good one but I did many extracurricular activities and wasn’t afraid of learning something new. A nice anecdote is that when I was fourteen we were in class for English but the teacher wasn’t there yet and I thought, oh it is funny to imitate him in the meantime. When the teacher walked in and said ‘Ok, Jan Hein are you the teacher today?’. I said: ‘Ok I can do it’, and I taught for two hours. What I learned that day is that, although we go to school to learn from teachers, you learn best by teaching.
Later I taught a variety of courses at university but realised over and over again that so many resources are lost in a classroom. When I look at a classroom, I see 30 potential teachers. But most educational initiatives see a teacher and 29 students. With Offcourse, we want to leverage the everyone’s knowledge in the learning process. In the world of programming where I was into as well, I saw many innovations in self-learning and Offcourse is the combination of those two worlds.
And to both of you why did you want to participate in the Get Started programme?
Sander: I think that Get Started is very good to get more structure in your idea. You start with your own startup idea but you don’t really have a plan how you are going to set things up. And therefore Get Started is really useful because it helps you to prioritise, to get your business idea validated and to get your startup to become reality.
Jan Hein: For me, it is besides what Sander said also the network you start to build. If you check out the website of the programme you think ‘Oh wow, coaching great! That is what I need’. And the coaching was really valuable but what was even more valuable is the horizontal network you get with the other participants. The same goes for the network of startups you have at the ECE campus. It helps in terms of feedback but also in terms of direct help. Your peers are your co-participants.
That’s a great stepping stone to the next question; how did you find each other and decided to work together on the same project?
Sander: We were both working on our own platform and then at a certain point we discovered that the skills that I have in analysing data and business development were actually very important to Offcourse. I was pretty much working on the basics of my platform, on the algorithm, and Jan Hein was working on his own platform but we realised we both made relatively little progress in business development. And that was actually an area where I could put my skills into use. And so we decided to work together for Offcourse to make bigger steps and more progress.
Jan Hein: At the moment we have a team of 7 to 8 people working for Offcourse and they all have in common that they are working on technology, learning or entrepreneurship. For Sander, that is the same so that is why he’s a good fit with the team.
Sander: For me it was a good opportunity to work on a more structured project. In the beginning, I was mostly figuring out what is possible with data analysis. But when I was discovering the possibilities, I noticed that data analytics in a learning environment is something that I find really interesting and has many opportunities. As I am a self-taught programmer as well, the idea of Offcourse really struck me and I found it very cool to work on it and develop it further.
In what stage is Offcourse now?
Jan Hein: At the moment the team is becoming bigger. We decided to turn the development of the platform into a learning opportunity itself. This Fall, we’re looking to open up a few new areas of the platform to a select group of developers who want to learn core programming fundamentals, as well as contribute to a live Open Source project along the way. And last but not least we are trying to get more ambassadors, people who can use our platform but also introduce it to new users, so we could connect better to our target group.
What do you want to accomplish in the end with Offcourse?
Jan Hein: Offcourse should become the way people learn new things. It is how we want to democratise education. At the moment, education is too bureaucratic, too expensive and most of all it is only for the happy few, especially if you look at if from a global perspective. Offcourse will make better use of technology to make education more widely available to all.
What was the biggest blooper you’ve made during this startup process?
Jan Hein: Well, we’ve made many haha.
Sander: Some we should better not tell, haha!
Jan Hein: But I think the most important misconception we’ve had was thinking that as long as you include more people in your project, you will make more progress. We discovered the hard way that isn’t how the world works. It’s absolutely quality over quantity; carefully considering what skills you need in the phase that you’re currently in. In the beginning, you should focus on the product and not on managing a big team. It’s important to stay lean.
Besides, you don’t need big, flashy victories in the beginning. Small successes are better. For instance, I wanted big media attention, international or national, but that didn’t bring us closer to our goals at the time.
What is the best advice you’ve gotten during the programme?
Sander: Hm.. every Friday was a revelation haha. There is not one particular thing but the advice from the coaches was really helpful. Every time, I had something I was struggling with I just could ask, which was fantastic.
Jan-Hein: The most important one for me was to dare to trust your intuition and then explore if the data supports this gut feeling.
Do you have any advice or tips for others who want to start their own company?
Sander: just do it. If you think that you have a good startup idea, join a programme like Get Started to validate your idea and to make the first steps.
Jan Hein: Responsible growth is better than fast growth. Put time in building a good team because you could have such a great idea but if you don’t have the team to make it happen it will never become reality. Make sure that every step you take is one step forward but keep your planning real.
You can check out Offcourse here. Are you an intermediate JavaScript developer looking to contribute to a real world project? Send an email to Offcourse to join their development community (yeehaa@
Are you ready to launch your startup?! Applications for the new batch of our Get Started programme close on September 11! Apply now via www.getstarted.nl