The Venture Academy incubator program

Generally, I would consider myself a risk-averse person. Certainly, this has helped me a great deal in many ways, with my cautious nature keeping me mentally, physically, socially and financially healthy. However, through gathering valuable skills and experiences in my life, I encounter more and more opportunities (ideas, people, places, etc.) that could be worth exploring — but not without a catch. I’m still having a hard time taking on such challenges, but luckily I’m not always the only one to decide. Participating in the Venture Academy incubator program was one of those opportunities that I would not have undertaken alone.

The Venture Academy is an incubator program for aspiring entrepreneurs, organized by PLNT Leiden. It is a 3-month program that helps you to develop and validate a business idea into a viable start-up through a series of workshops, coaching sessions, lectures, and networking events. I joined the spring cohort of 2023 together with my friends Enzo Sastrokarijo and Koen Hagen, with whom I had previously worked on the AEGEE-Leiden App. Committing to this idea of starting a business together (and the risks that come with it) was a big step for me.

The start-up idea

As I discussed in my post on the AEGEE-Leiden App, the AEGEE-Leiden App came forth from a need to have a single, ‘all-in-one’ platform for our student association to communicate with its members. AEGEE, and many other associations with us, had been using a variety of platforms to share information, including Facebook, WhatsApp, our website, e-mail, Instagram, and more. This fragmentation of communication channels made it hard for members to keep up with everything that was going on, while board members had to communicate the same message multiple times to reach everyone.

Already while we were developing the app, other associations showed some interest in this project, facing the same issues as we had. This led us to believe that there might be a market for a more general platform that could be used by any association, not just AEGEE-Leiden. Hence, we applied to the Venture Academy with this business idea, which we named ‘Zell’ (a derivative of the Dutch word ‘gezellig’).

The program

Starting on March 10, 2023, the program consisted of meetings roughly every other Friday, where all participants would gather to learn about a specific topic, usually by way of workshops and lectures. In-between these meetings, we would work on our business idea, either based on the knowledge gained during the meetings or simply by continuing to develop our platform.

Many topics were covered, all focused on getting our business idea off the ground. A sample of these topics included market research, business modeling, and pitching techniques. Apart from all the exercises and knowledge transfer, I also learned a great deal just by listening to the other participants and their ideas — it was a very inspiring environment.

The outcome

One exercise of the program was to perform a competitor analysis, where we evaluated similar platforms in the market to understand their strengths and weaknesses. During this analysis, we stumbled across a platform called Socie, which offered functionalities very similar to what we had in mind, for a decent price as well. While it was not exactly the same, it was close enough for me to reconsider the idea of Zell. If I were to start a business, I would want it to be more unique, and not something that exists just to compete with established players.

While we did finish the program, we decided to not pursue Zell any further, partly because of these concerns, but also because we were all starting our master’s theses soon after.

Nevertheless, I am very grateful for this experience, which has been helpful with the other projects I have been working on, and which has shaped my views on entrepreneurship. I can recommend the Venture Academy to anyone based in or around Leiden who is interested in starting a business.

About the image:
At the start of the program, we used this AI-generated logo for our start-up idea. It’s supposed to represent shaking hands, but image generators weren’t quite there yet back then.