School for Creative Startups - a unique social enterprise - Guardian
School for Creative Startups is a unique social enterprise established by serial entrepreneur and former Dragons’ Den investor Doug Richard in 2011.
I found that universities weren’t doing much in the way of teaching professional development to creatives and they were going out into the world without the training they needed to make a living from what they did. When Doug Richard convinced me to join the School for Creative Startups I was really excited to develop something that would fill that huge gap in the market.
Our tuition comes in the form of a one year programme of bootcamps, workshops, surgeries and digital tools – teaching creative folk everything they need to know to create a functioning and sustainable business.
In our first year we had 56 students, rising to 92 this year. It feels great to be turning out businesses which are now contributing to the economy. We’ve done a lot of grassroots promotion: attending business festivals and fairs where our audience is, doing speed mentoring and organising free meetups every month where people can check out what we do.
We’re a startup ourselves so we haven’t got a huge marketing budget, but we promote ourselves via social media and we’ve also had a lot of word of mouth referrals. We’ve only ever had really positive feedback from our first year students, everyone really enjoyed the course and loved the startup community that we’ve built. We were really lucky that all our pupils from last year recommended students for this year’s class.