Where Ideas Incubate: Updates from the Hatcheries
Through the Butler Launch Pad, the Blank Center awards graduate and undergraduate student entrepreneurs access to professional and semiprivate workspace to grow their businesses. Known as the hatcheries, these spaces encourage ideation and collaboration. In a series of blog posts, this semester’s hatchery teams will go beyond the four walls of their offices and share their experiences, advice for other entrepreneurs, and industry expertise with us.
The following post is written by Rachel Pardue ’19, co-founder of LOU.
Kyle Lawson and I founded LOU out of the Babson San Francisco program in February of 2018. LOU simplifies the web by enabling companies with complex web platforms to create interactive tutorials for their users. We had the privilege of having access to office space in SF, but when we returned to Babson’s Wellesley campus in August, we were back to working out of the library and our dorm rooms like every other college student. Given that we do exclusively enterprise sales, this was a huge challenge. We also are primarily working with companies that are based on the West Coast, so since traveling to the companies’ offices for meetings isn’t an option, our clients prefer to meet via video call. This meant my co-founder and I spent the whole first month of school running around the library in search for a quiet space that looked professional enough to pass off as an office. Fake it ‘till you make it right?
Having the opportunity to have our own office space in the Hatchery has been an absolute game changer for us. I spend most of my afternoons in video meetings with corporate executives, and it’s such a relief to not worry about people yelling in the background or not being able to find a quiet space in time for the call. It seems like a small detail, but being in the same office for every video call with a client goes a long way in helping portray us as a serious and consistent company that our clients can rely on. As student-founders there’s a lot of concern surrounding the risk that an enterprise client takes on by choosing to do business with a software company that’s ran by a couple twenty-one year olds. The Hatchery helps us to put our best foot forward in every client call and is the only place where we can truly put aside school work or other college obligations and just focus on growing LOU.