Startup Fantasy Camp: throw a group of strangers together for 48-72 hours and have them pretend to be a startup.
Startup Fantasy Camp
Startup Fantasy Camp: throw a group of strangers together for 48-72 hours and have them pretend to be a startup.Good ideas can be fleshed out and explored and an accelerated product prototyping experience can be had in a 48-72 hour camp. But I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that you can bring strangers together and have them leave as co-founders of a viable startup.
Fantasy Camps Have an Established and Viable Model
There are fantasy camps that allow you to LARP (live action role play) a wide variety of different immersive, hands-on experience where you “live” a role, sport, or profession for a few days. There are fantasy camps for baseball players, comedy writers and stand up comedians, rock and roll musicians, and cowboys. These are intense and often physically or emotionally demanding vacations that take you out of your everyday existence. But they are not the same as trying out for a baseball farm team, walking on stage for an open mike night at a comedy club or a bar, or applying to work on a working farm or a ranch.
They are distinct from taking a lifesaving course, a first aid course, learning CPR, or signing up for training as a volunteer fire fighter. In these courses the test is ultimately a real life experience that may involve personal risk and perhaps having an impact on someone who has been injured or is drowning.
How does this Map to Entrepreneurs?
I think entrepreneurs benefit from courses, bootcamps, workshops, or other training that prepares them for the realities of working in a startup in the same way that a lifesaving course equips you rescue someone who is drowning. I worry that business plan contests and other startup fantasy camps that let you pretend to be an entrepreneur just encourage a form of entrepreneur tourism. Applying to incubators or accelerators, if the entity has a track record of help startups become viable businesses, would be in the latter category of effective preparation. But many pitch camps and incubators are closer to dude ranches.
How SKMurphy Supports Entrepreneurs
- Bootstrapper Breakfasts offer facilitated roundtable conversations with other entrepreneurs at various stages of their journey. You can compare notes with others in a supportive atmosphere that provides a variety of real-world perspectives on a challenge an attendee puts on the table for discussion.
- SKMurphy Mastermind groups encourage entrepreneurs to make progress together by meeting twice a month to compare notes on challenges, get feedback on next potential next steps, and create a supportive atmosphere that fosters mutual accountability against defined goals.
- We also offer advisory services and on-demand workshops that provide intense focus on near-term challenges you are facing. You don’t work on hypothetical exercises but the problems you must solve to move your startup forward.
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