Swin-Biz-Rockstar Training Session 2: How to turn a business idea into reality?

As one of the special perks when participating in the Swin-Biz-Rockstar contest, Top 35 teams participated in 3 exclusive training sessions with mentors and business leaders. The second training session, “How to turn a business idea into reality?” with Mr. Maarten Tak – CEO of Causasui Company, founder of UNDO-Collective in Belgium, provided practical insights on entrepreneurship and business development for the contestants. 

Mr. Maarten Tak – CEO of Causasui Company, founder of UNDO-Collective in Belgium

Learn from failures

A veteran with entrepreneurial projects, Maarten currently owns his successful startups in Belgium. However, Maarten stressed that he learned more from his failures. For him, difficulties and failures are essential to the success of startups, and students need to be able to see the feasibility and practicality of their ideas.

During the training session, Maarten shared his two “traumatic” lessons. The first lesson was a creative platform that allowed team members to cooperate and share with each other. However, the project was unsuccessful despite a lot of money and effort spent on its launch. The project failed to identify the right consumer needs and hence, failed to stand out from other competitors despite a lot of effort and money from investors and the team. Through this project, Maarten warned students to thoroughly research customer needs before launching a product.

“Don’t build a product thinking your customers will understand it like the way you imagine it. You need to have proper research,” says Maarten.

The second project that Maarten launched was also a “valuable lesson” because of the mismatch between customer needs and product features. He again realized that a very common problem is that startups always think their products are innovative, but they do not put themselves in the customer’s shoes. 

Maximize your chance of realizing your business idea

Through his two failed projects, Maarten Tak guided participants through how to overcome failures and learn from them. Most importantly, Maarten introduced business design thinking and idea-to-business model in this training session.

The Business Thinking Model

According to Maarten, business design is a process, not a skill. He reminded the teams to evaluate their ideas with three factors: business viability, technological feasibility, and users’ desired capabilities. He also introduced 5 steps that entrepreneurs should note when developing their ideas, including: (1) clearly define the idea; (2) review business strategy’s suitability; (3) review the compatibility of the solution to the problem; (4) assess the product’s suitability for the market; (5) assess the fit of the business model

“Startups need to be meticulous in each step of the process to validate their product’s viability,” Maarten asserted. He then offered three tools to assess the viability of a business plan: Problem Solving, Product Market, and Business Model.

At the end of the training session, Maarten concluded: “If you want your business to be successful, you have to consider a lot of factors. You need to be marketing-wise, HR-wise, and so on. With these tools and careful consideration, you will be able to make your idea come to life.”

The training session was met with positive feedback from the participants

The training session was met with positive feedback from the participants. Dr. Tran Thi Bich Hanh – Head of Swin-Biz-Rockstar’s Organizing Committee – share: “Through the competition, we want to create an exciting international playground for students and more importantly, give them the opportunity to get feedback from great leaders in the industry and bring their ideas to life.”

The final round of Swin-Biz-Rockstar will be held on January 22, 2022 hybridly and streamed on the Swinburne Vietnam and Swin-Biz-Rockstar fan page.

Trung ST