Lessons learned/inspired from Expara's business plan workshop

I have completed a two-day workshop "From Idea to Investment For the IDM industry : Business skills master class" organized by Expara. In this workshop, I have learned about technopreneurship, business plan writing and presentation. Below is lessons learned/inspired from the business plan workshop

• To increase the chance of your startup being funded, try one of these strategies
  
  
  
  • Build the first version of your product using money from founder(s), friend(s) and/or family member(s). The reason is very few persons are willing to risk their money on a startup especially if the idea is very new. By bootstrapping your startup, it demonstrates your commitment and possibly faith of closed ones. Another reason for building the first version of your product is it helps the investors to visualize your idea.
  
  
  • Try to get at least an award for your product. This demonstrates confidence of an independent party on your product.
  
  
  • Persuade an experienced entrepreneur to be your startup CEO if none of the founder(s) has experience in startup.
  
  
  • Present your idea to investors with some experience in the industry of your startup.
  
  
  • Let investors know more about you and your experience before asking for money.
  
  
  • Practice your presentation in front of your industry novices and insiders so that you can answer a wide range of questions.
  
  
  
  


• In evaluating your ideas, make sure you answer the following questions:
  
  
  
  • How are you going to get money from customers?
  
  
  • What is your sustainable competitive advantage, e.g. how do you defend your turf?
  
  
  
  


• To increase your chance of being successful in your startup, you need to have access to marketing and technical skills. If a necessary skill is missing from the founding team, get help from outsiders. Therefore being young and inexperience is not a problem as founder, you just have to make sure the startup have access to the necessary skills which mean that the founder may not be the CEO of the startup.

Participants of the workshop, if you have any comments, please add them in the comment section.

P.S. I did not fall asleep during the workshop. This is highly unusual based on my past records :)