Starting up a business is one of the biggest things you can do in your life. It can be daunting, and often this can put many people off starting up one. There are so many things to consider: how will I get funding, who are my customers, who are my competitors, what makes me unique… The list of questions goes on.

This is why the Grad2Director programme is such a great asset to York St John University. My partner, Harrison, and I, are both students at York St John. Harrison is a 1st year Games Design student, and I am a 2nd year Computer Science student. With Harrison being good at games design, and myself having skills in programming and development, and with our combined love of all things games, we thought that it would be a great idea to combine our skills and start a games development business.

“Where do we start?”

After doing some research, we found out that we could apply for the Grad2Director programme, which aims to help students reach their aspirations of starting up a business and becoming entrepreneurial. We initially applied for the ‘Kickstart Your Business’ fund, the first step to getting onto the Grad2Director programme, so we put together a business plan and prototype, and pitched our business idea to Grad2Director founder, John Park. After some useful initial feedback, it was decided that our business was not at the right stage to be funded yet, but there was definitely potential there, and so we were put on the Grad2Director programme in order to develop our business idea and prepare us to get funding in the future.

After several business meetings with John, he really helped us to define our market and help us to understand who our customers are. What’s more, his ideas really strengthened our business plan and we expanded on our initial idea much more than we could have imagined. We went from thinking that we only have one large market, to realising that we actually have three separate markets that we need to investigate and do market research on.

This leads us to now. We are currently at the stage in the programme where we have a good idea of who our target markets are, and we are now preparing to carry out some market research. This will involve us getting out there and talking to our potential customers, to see if they match the assumptions that we have made of our market. Moreover, we have just registered our business as a Private Limited Company, making everything feel even more real for us. John has been guiding us through the programme and has really helped us to build a solid foundation for our business’ future; he has given us the confidence to develop our business idea to the point where we are now a company and looking to start releasing our games within the next year.

Harrison and I are really excited to continue working with John on the Grad2Director programme, and look forward to what the future holds with our business. If you have been considering starting up your own business, I would really recommend that you join the Grad2Director programme.

Grad2Director really does allow your ideas to become a reality.