Match-making service helps entrepreneurs

You may have the world's best idea for a product, but you can't figure out how to design it so it can actually be produced. Or you're creativity itself, but are no good with finances or don’t know how to program the software on which the whole business adventure depends.

It's perfectly normal.

Unifounder is a match-making platform for entrepreneurs who want to start a business and where they can find students who have different skills than themselves. Unifounder cooperates with the incubators at the country's universities, including KEA's labs, and has recently established a partnership with VentureCup. Moreover, Unifounder just received DKK 300,000 from the Danish Business Authority.

The aim is to make it easier for students to set up successful businesses. Imagining that you can do it all by yourself is highly unrealistic.

"Starting your own business requires a lot of different skills - both in relation to the product itself or the service you provide, but also in relation to just running a business. Often, two or three like-minded friends or students from the same programme decide to join forces and establish a start-up. They are all very good at the graphic or technical aspects but do not dare to sell the product or cannot figure out how to code the entire backend part. This is a typical start-up weakness," says Gunnar Näsman, development consultant and start-up coach at KEA.

"As a start-up you have plenty of tasks, and many of them are inherently tasks that you solve for the first time, so the learning curve is steep. Therefore, I can only recommend that you receive all the help you can get. Using services like Unifounder can make the difference between succeeding or failing with your start up. A strong network is invaluable in all aspects of life – not least when you’re an entrepreneur."

The idea for Unifounder came about when Mikkel Strandkjaer wanted to start a business at the beginning of his bachelor's degree, but did not have the necessary technological skills to make his idea a reality. Therefore, he started looking for a potential co-founder in Facebook groups, on LinkedIn, and eventually ended up going to DTU and simply stopping people in the hope that they knew someone who matched the profile he was looking for. It failed, and when he vented his frustration on two of his fellow students, they said they were in the same situation themselves.

"We couldn't understand why it would be so difficult to find students with different skills than our own, so we decided that we wanted to do something about it," says Mikkel Strandkjaer, who is studying at CBS himself, but who has worked with several KEA students who have helped with i.a. UI/UX design.

Today there are over 700 registered profiles on the platform.