College years are the best time to have your own business. It is a unique time where you can easily find ambitious and like-minded people. Especially for the Global Business Program, students could gain low-risk, low-cost, high-return opportunities to accelerate their growth.

In my junior year, my friends and I co-founded "Designie," a software that reveals design errors and suggests improvements. The idea came from a personal need to make my designs look better, and I learned many design principles and rules online. Then, I wondered why current design tools did not automatically help me improve my designs. So, I decided to build one

I asked friends in design and tech to be my co-founders and applied for multiple funding to get our initial investment. Everything seems to be going well, but we inevitably met our first roadblock. During a Q&A session with potential investors, we were asked about the user satisfaction rate. I could only sheepishly tell them that we have no users.

Previously, we wanted to release a polished product to the public. After that day, we understood the value of having early adopters and getting their feedback. We changed our approach to building only the core features and launched as soon as possible. Our first version is a web application with only 1 page, where we accepted image and vector files uploaded and provided fundamental analysis. As users told us what's good and what's bad, we continued to iterate and build better solutions. Currently, we are beta testing additional features and will integrate Designie with Figma and Canva in the near future.

With only a laptop, everyone can turn ideas into reality. While 99% of startups fail, 100% of student entrepreneurs grow. At worst, you will continue your studies with hands-on experience in the business world. Otherwise, congratulations on becoming the founder of a successful startup!