Career - Power Your Future
Supportoad - Crowdfunding for
Scholarships
Text: Sükrü Bezen, LC Ankara
Photographs: Sükrü Bezen, LC Ankara
I am Şükrü BEZEN, a member of LC Ankara
since 2007. My major is Computer Engineering and I am about to finish my M.Sc. Degree
nowadays. I really like coding and programming contests a lot, in which you are supposed to create solutions to problems provided to you.
When I graduated I realized that one does not
have to wait for problems to be provided to
them because in real life problems find them!
Everywhere you look you can see a problem
in society that needs to be solved, needs to
be handled. I had a very close friend of mine,
Ozan ŞENER, who is also one of the founders
of LC Ankara, applying to Stanford Electrical
and Electronics engineering for PhD. And he
has been accepted without a scholarship. And
since we are not so rich people, he just declined the offer unfortunately.
This whole process happened right beside
me so I witnessed the whole process and the
problem I have been waiting was in front of
me. So I thought why not build a site that uses
the power of crowdfunding and makes successful students raise their own scholarships
by using their academical success as a reference. So Supportoad was born. Supportoad
aims to support successful students by using
the power of crowdsourcing.
Firstly, I applied to an entrepreneurship contest named Etohum. There were 4000 applications just like me. Then I was in the first 50
projects out of 4000. This was a huge success
for me because I had literally zero experience
before that. I live in Ankara and the first 50
projects' teams were supposed to be trained
in İstanbul, which meant for me to travel to
İstanbul from Ankara every weekend for 2
months. It was really hard for me, because I
was also writing my thesis and I was not working so both in time and financial basis I was
going down really fast. The thing about entrepreneurship is you need to sacrifice much
more than a normal person does to be successful. That's because it is not the idea that
matters but how you execute it and every step
of product development is your responsibility
so you need to work real hard.
Later I was in the final 15 projects and I was
all like a famous person; popular websites,
business magazines were making news about
me and my project, people were knowing and
congratulating me, people that I have not even
met before!
Right now I am preparing for the final stage of
two contests, I am widely known in the entrepreneurship network in Turkey and I know well
how to present my business idea to investors.
The training I got was all about presenting the
project to investors in 2 minutes or less. You
need to talk fast but informative. Your slides
must not be more than 10 slides. You need to
provide visuals and estimations in your slides.
If you have a prototype and even better if you
have the usage data of your prototype, you
must share it. Just show the audience that
you believe in this project and your team has
the spirit to turn this idea into the product in a
well-established execution process.
To sum up, stop watching and start seeing the
world around you, find the problems, brainstorm on them and come up with a solution,
execute it well and tada! You are an entrepreneur.
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