How Experimenting With My Idea Back In College Helped Me As An Entrepreneur If you ever have to start doing anything that is really worth doing, you need to do it NOW!

Do you believe wormhole exists? Or for that matter the blackhole? As depicted in the movie Interstellar, a wormhole is similar to a tunnel with two ends, each at separate points in spacetime. And if you happen to ever travel by the wormhole, you will find yourself as two different persons at each ends of the tunnel.

I am not sure whether wormhole exists. However, I am sure that there exists a tunnel right here which can transform you completely as a person. And such wormholes are where you find your life calling and decide what you have to make out of your life.

Such wormhole can be a moment, an epiphany, an experience or incident. When it comes to Entrepreneurship, I believe, colleges work best as such wormholes. I started experimenting with my idea during college as a project which slowly took shape of an organization and has clocked eight-digit revenue figures in its first year of inception.

And I must admit that starting up in college had definitely its own advantages which I would like to share with everyone.

1. Frugality gets into the DNA of the organization

Not everyone who wanders is lost. And not everyone who is frugal is a miser. Frugality teaches you management and budgeting. It also teaches you to prioritize the things that are actually important for you. I wanted to experiment with the idea of advertising over paper tea cups.

I started it as a college project only to find out that paper cups can only get printed in huge quantity (which was obviously out of our budget). We desperately needed branded paper cups to test it out in the market and gather customer's reactions to judge the medium through key parameters.

Finally, we bought plain paper cups and printed stickers of a fabricated brand separately. We pasted these stickers on the cups and voila, we were almost there!! Had I waited for money to print cups and test the idea, it would have never happened.

As someone famously said - By being frugal, we reap liberty, a golden harvest. During the surveys, we found the idea highly effective which boosted our confidence in the idea immensely!!

2.The College is a stage and all of us are, well, experts

Do you feel that you are surrounded by people smarter than you? If yes, a great opportunity is waiting to be explored. If you are studying in a good college, there are many things that you can learn from your peers. For example, how they manage their time, what are their problem-solving skills, what they read etc.

And each of them has something to offer which you cannot refuse (better you should not refuse). And other than peers, needless to say, faculties can also provide Master Shifu-sque insights which you will find very useful in solving day-to-day problems.

Thanks to the intense discussion with batch mates and faculty, we were able to identify the problems that we are going to encounter and its probable solutions.

3. Freelancers as Freebies

Whether you realize this or not, your friends will be highly paid and will make a name for themselves in corporate world. And some of these "prodigy" will be damn good at what they do. And unlike The Joker, they will do it for free when they are in college.

I have experienced this first hand during my college days. Our project involved creative work to be printed on the cups which I would never been able to do it myself. But again thanks to my friends, I was able to get a fantastic job done as a freebie.

There will be instances where you would feel lost, but thanks to multiple hands for help, you will regain the momentum most of the times. And you would feel like exclaiming "Oh Captain, My Captain".

4.Cheerleaders for Life

As you reach each milestone of your entrepreneurship journey, you will find your batch mates there. They will be in stealth mode but observing, appreciating, applauding, and cheering for you. I receive messages from friends which are at different parts of the world saying Atta Boy.

They wish CupShup team all the best and state that they are so happy to see that one amongst us has taken the plunge into world of entrepreneurship and promise all the help they can provide.

We at CupShup are of the opinion that if you ever have to start doing anything that is really worth doing, you need to do it NOW!! The learning environment of a college will help you in tweaking, adapting and perfecting the business model of your idea.