Experimenting with The Takeoff
Running The Takeoff as a series of experiments
Hey everyone 👋 — this is my first official post from my personal Substack.
I am a rising senior at WashU. I just finished up an internship at JMI Equity. I am also the Founder of The Takeoff (a student-run, student-focused ‘platform’ designed to inspire the next wave of startup & tech leaders). This post is about The Takeoff; more specifically, it is about our experiment-first, learning-first approach to building The Takeoff over the past few months.
Intro
For the past ~6 months, we have been running The Takeoff as a series of experiments. We want to learn as much as possible and with that, we value the idea of taking things slow, testing things out, getting feedback from our subscribers, and focusing on detail.
When Roshan, Lukas, and I started The Takeoff, we had a few ambitions in mind:
Solve a problem. We wanted to solve a problem that the three of us were facing — a lack of relevant startup- / venture-related resources for students
Start and grow something. Here, we recognized that we were students, with academics and social lives coming first for all three of us and the ability to focus 100% on a startup impossible. So, we thought about how we could start toward our mission without sacrificing everything else in our lives. Essentially we asked ourselves the question: How can we start providing meaningful resources and content for students interested in tech, startups, and venture capital, while at the same time not sacrificing our academics and social lives and testing out if this is really an issue faced by many students (i.e. is this a real issue / is the TAM big enough?).
Interviews
We decided to launch The Takeoff by interviewing founders, operators, and investors for our Substack newsletter — this checked the box of being able to start solving our issue, seeing if this is a real problem that many people face (i.e. are we getting new subscribers over time?), starting to building a network of founders and investors (we see this as critical if we want to expand The Takeoff to its full potential / go down others paths in the future), and doing so without fully committing ourselves to The Takeoff.
Contributors
We then saw the value of allowing select students at schools throughout the country to join The Takeoff as Contributors, interviewing folks in their networks (or people they got in touch with via cold outreach) for The Takeoff. This is a win-win across the board.
It helps The Takeoff create more content, increase our reach, and work toward our mission. It helps our Contributors expand their network, create content, and further their learnings. And, it provides a host of other benefits for all parties.
What We’ve Been Following
We then started a bi-weekly newsletter sharing content for our subscribers, called What We’ve Been Following. This, obviously, started as an experiment, and we've gotten consistently positive feedback across the first 7 What We’ve Been Following newsletters.
The Takeoff Podcast
The next experiment for us is The Takeoff Podcast, which Lukas is spearheading with his Telehealth Series. The Podcast will look very much like the long-form interviews we release via our Substack newsletter, but it will be released via audio.
You can check out our Intro episode (by clicking Intro). We will launch the official Podcast in late August, kicking it off with a 3-part Telehealth Series with guests Russell Glass (CEO of Ginger), Guy Friedman (Co-founder & CEO of SteadyMD), and Saurabh Bhansali (Partner at Health Velocity Capital).
What’s Next?
The next experiment? I don't know yet, but I am excited for whatever it is. We have set several OKRs to measure how we, as a Team, are doing over the next few months and to help us better answer the questions of: are we solving a real issue, and is there a big enough TAM?
Upon achieving / falling to achieve these OKRs, we'll have a better sense of the path ahead for The Takeoff.
That's it for my first attempt to "build in public" for The Takeoff. If you want to learn more about what we're building with The Takeoff, shoot me a note (Twitter DM, email [spirom at wustl dot edu], or LNKD message). I'd be happy to fill you in :)