Making youngentrepreneur.com better - your ideas and requests

[akula]

Hi everyone, this is an ongoing thread about:

- Things you see are a problem on with this site
- Your suggestions for how to improve the community
- Your requests for new features or anything else

The management here (bizguy), is dedicated to listen to your needs and invest resources to make things better.

Please contact me directly to have a chat about what you want from YE and how we can help you.
You can PM me, send me an email or give me a call/SMS on +61 0423 076 755.

Good on you guys,

Danny

[akula]

I should probably start...I've been a member here since '06...it's almost 5 years now, and the way I think about it, is that it may be a time for a strategic review.

1. Mission/goals
I think that after more than 10 years of operation, YE is due for review.
At its core, I think the business needs to make a decision on whether it wants to remain the "largest online forum communities for entrepreneurs" or grow to become something more than that.

From my perspective, I think the end goal of the mission has always been to help young people start new ventures. But, I don't think we are benchmarking this important goal, and that's a problem. I can easily tell you off hand how many people have visited the site and read the articles/thread, but there is no way to tell how many ventures have been started as a result of our users benefiting from the site. Because we don't measure this metric, I think we are either failing in achieving our goal, or not taking it seriously enough.

I think that 10 years ago, it was sufficient for the business to define itself as an online forum that helped people connect on topics of mutual interest. I also think that now is the perfect time to start a new journey and aim towards becoming the world's largest real world organisation of young entrepreneurs, that helps people in a real way. Something more like eonetwork.org / c-e-o.org and and less like small-business-forum.com

Overall, I beleive that one possible future for YE is in becoming a specialist publications, education and conferences business, with distribution in schools and universities. I think it's an appropriate future that earnestly reflects the history of the business, and is a natural progression from its past.

This really is the starting point for all discussion about what we wanna do with the site.

What is your vision for YE?

[akula]

I have like a few minutes now so I thought I'll share some more thoughts on entrepreneurship.

The problem:
The issue for YE is in defining specifically the problem it wants to solve. That it self is pretty straight forward.
Society has changed very much over the past 50 years. On the one hand, casualisation and globalisation have made people increasingly more nervous about employment. There are no guarantees for life long job security or any of that rubbish. Generations Y and Z have seen their parents been retranched, and don't like the idea of having to one day look for a job at the age of 40. But that's nothing. The real influence of people's mindsets is the consumer culture. Young people grow up on images of celebrities and rappers. They listen to songs and watch movies that idolise money...and then they look at their situation and quickly realise that they're not gonna be making "fat stacks" even if they do end up going to college and working on wall street. It's a depressing thought - in a democratised society, if you are not reaching the heights of personal achievement, that can only mean that there is something wrong with you.
That's really what the problem is - it's the prevalence of status anxiety and it's record levels. It's a syndrome, and it needs solutions. People need education that makes them feel anything is possible.

The solution:
After WW2, US was largely broke and people turned to entrepreneurship education as a remedy to help them make sense of the world. Entrepreneurship education has since proven to be one of the most promising antidotes to feelings of hopelessness, or inability to achieve one's self actualisation. It's a rigorous scientific discipline researched in all of the worlds most prestigeous institutions, from Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, Stanford and so on. There are over 300 entrepreneurship centres in US alone...and they've been busy.

YE.com also teaches entrepreneurship. We do it in our own, informal, decentralised way...but nonetheless, that's exactly what we do. And we can do it better, but the way forward is to redefine the business as an education business rather than an online forum. That's really where the solutions lie.

There is of course much to say about the correct way to teach entrepreneurship. I'll leave it to others to provide the details, but essentially..there are three steps to doing it properly. Effective Reseach..which leads to a Curriculum...which leads to Standardised teaching...which leads to Outreach programs that stress experiential learning. That's really the best model for teaching entrepreneurship.

In terms of where we are at...YE has data, which could be turned into a curriculum, which would lead to much more. Books, Online lectures, conferences, business planning comps etc etc etc...But it all starts with a curriculum that meets the needs of our users. And that's what it's really about. Reading about startups on YE is one thing, but having gone through experiential learning programs like ja.org, I can tell you that getting out of the house and starting a business is a better learning aid than clicking through posts.

So yes, I think that in addition to redefining what problem YE is solving, it's important to look at the effectiveness of our solution.

[BizGuy]

Danny, (Akula)

Thank you very much for taking the time to put together a very thorough and thought provoking intro post for this thread. Yes, its very important to us that we continue to evolve, not only the community here but also the tool kit of options for our growing group of YE's. We've been working on a new program that we plan to integrate and launch later this year which will give an opportunity to each and every member to share their 'data', thoughts and ideas and also be compensated for it too. We have plans to start featuring YOUR stories, YOUR successes and we encourage you to contribute to this great thread that Danny has started. Over the past 10 years or so, we've been very happy to receive the emails and notes from members telling us how they have met their business partners, investors and new friendships here on YE and we would love to hear more of these stories!

Looking forward to reading this thread and implementing your ideas in upcoming versions of YE!

If you haven't joined the YoungEntrepreneur facebook fan page, we encourage you to do so as we plan on having some contests and updates posted through FB as well: YoungEntrepreneur Facebook Page

To your Success,

Adam Toren