At an event held at Barclays Eagle Labs in Glasgow, CodeBase officially launched its ‘Startup First Steps’ course, with a cohort of participants engaged in a round-table discussion with Scottish Government Innovation Minister, Richard Lochhead.

The cohort’s entrepreneurial endeavours were a varied snapshot of the myriad stages in a startup’s life. Some were at an ideation stage; people who have a background that’s informed them of a specific need in a sector, but they don’t have an organic pathway or knowledge of business or tech to bring their solution to fruition (this was the case for one participant who has a background in mental health).

On the other end of the spectrum was a former teacher who had created a training platform — called ‘Creating Mindful Children’ — that was already in a sellable state and was being worked on full-time.

Both were participants in the same ‘Startup First Steps’ course, however, which may raise some questions as to how the course can offer compelling direction and guidance when the needs of entrepreneurs are so wide-ranging and, with that mind, how CodeBase identifies those who can benefit most from the course.

We sat down with CodeBase’s VP of education, Jim Newbury, who offered some insight into CodeBase’s approach with regards to this, as well some of the broader goals of the course as it moves beyond this initial stage.

Scotland Crying Out for More Entrepreneurs

In the Scottish Government-commissioned Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review (STER) in 2020, authored by Scotland’s Chief Entrepreneur Mark Logan, the report revealed that while Scotland’s Total Early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) rate had more than doubled in the decade since 2010, Scotland’s TEA rate remains below that of many other advanced economies.

The creation of Techscalers – launched last November – hopes to address Scotland’s need for more high-growth firms to drive productivity and innovation. Although for Newbery, looking at long-tail metrics such as TEA, won’t be a concise quantifier of success when it comes to the Startup First Steps course.

“With regards to economic metrics (like TEA), you’re only going to see an impact on those maybe three years into the future,” Newbery says.

He adds: “In terms of managing a program like this, we need to look at the more leading metrics.

“The question then becomes whether those leading metrics like participation in the cause, whether people raise funding, and what levels of funding they raise – quantification we can observe much sooner – are good proxies for the longer-term, economic, macro statistics that we’re really interested in.”

How Was the Program Curated?

‘Startup First Steps’ is a practical course, designed for current or prospective startup founders in Scotland who are in the early stages of their startup journey with the goal of taking a first version of a product into the market.

The range of programs include Startup Basics, Startup First Steps, and Startup Next Steps, delivered in a hybrid model — online and in-person — across 7 regional Techscaler hubs in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, Dundee, Aberdeen, Dumfries, and Inverness.

Despite being heavily headlined as a course built for those at the very early stages of their entrepreneurial journey, the actual criteria for participation is much more fluid, taking into account that while many startups may have certain areas of their business at a stage of realisation, there will more than likely be huge gaps in their knowledge with regards to having something resembling a competitive enterprise that’s ready to start pitching for funding.

On this, Newbery says: “When it came to choosing cohorts for the course, we tried to make it less about selection and more about curation.

“I guess the big thing, within that kind of framework of self-selection, was that they need to be working on the right kind of thing.”

“The difference being that it’s not so much us picking and choosing people that we think are right, but giving them the right information and resources to understand whether they’re going get value from the programs, and then providing a suite of courses and education opportunities that can fill in those gaps at every stage of learning for a business owner.

Recommended

• CodeBase’s Techscaler Launches Founders Course: ‘Startup First Steps’
• Cyber Risk Index Has Never Been Better but Companies are Still Worried
• 45% of Execs Say ChatGPT Has Led to Increased Investment in AI

“We present that as, ‘This is a course for people who are in the early stages of company development,’ but even within that, there’s huge variation in the stages that people are at that we want to accommodate. Some are at an idea stage, other people have got a product and are looking at raising investment.”

This approach, Newbery says, is necessary when you consider the wildly different needs of, say, a healthtech compared to a company that has a B2C SaaS platform.

Startup First Steps admirably takes on the challenge of welcoming budding Scottish entrepreneurs lying on a varied spectrum of needs, gaps in knowledge, and expectations for the burgeoning ideas they’re developing. The broad-take goal of the course seems to be to align these entrepreneurs through education that covers all the basics of running a modern startup, to plug any gaps in the founders’ knowledge and prepare them for more advanced courses down the line.

Applications for Techscaler membership are open, and interested founders are invited to apply and express interest in upcoming educational cohort programs.