It was my first lecture in the Entrepreneurship course. The doctor who was going to teach the subject for the semester walked in and started introducing himself. The same repetitive beginnings there was nothing new. He reached the last part of the course introduction and finished by talking about the project required to be submitted at the end of the semester. “You must form teams to work on creating a profitable entrepreneurial project” that’s what the doctor said. That was perhaps the only thing that woke my sleeping brain up in that lecture. Could it be that the university overlooked this course ? Will we finally, for once, have something truly useful, far from those boring, useless theoretical curricula ? That’s what was going on in my mind at the time. I remember well that I immediately looked around and formed a team of 4 other attendees with me before even leaving the lecture hall.

I spent that night thinking and thinking about an entrepreneurial idea we could work on and implement effectively. Perhaps what ultimately drew my attention to the idea I came up with was a problem that was widespread among the students. I found that there were many students posting publications and ads on various platforms to offer their services. So I said, why not gather them in one place that allows them to display these services and reach students easily ?

I held a meeting the very next day with my team to pitch and discuss ideas. In the end, my proposal was agreed upon. It wasn’t a surprise to me, by the way since I was the leader, I would naturally make my idea more central and amazing. The work was divided so that the technical side of the work was my specialty, and the remaining marketing and advertising work belonged to my team.

I remember very well sitting for weeks thinking about using programming languages dedicated to building websites, but I finally concluded that we wouldn’t have enough time for that, let alone the other tasks that were also my responsibility as the team leader. So, I used WordPress to build the platform. That took a massive amount of time in setting up, linking, customizing the platform, and modifying it programmatically due to the problems that appeared with every new plugin I installed on the site. But the work was done in the end. A lot of meetings I held during that period to follow up on the work and develop it based on my team’s feedback, which ended with uploading the platform and testing it.

Yes, I skipped a lot of the story and the problems that arose. One of them was facing a major issue in uploading the platform to the cloud due to its large size. I couldn’t find a plugin to install the platform automatically, which forced me to upload the files and modify them one by one manually. They were long, stressful nights, but I felt a strange kind of enjoyment in them. I learned a lot from them, and I never deny that I gained irreplaceable skills from this experience.

After uploading the platform, linking it with geographical map services, and setting up bot verification, my team and I worked on it and made sure the user experience was smooth and problem free. Everything was perfect, so I then moved on to work on the marketing plan and explain the methods we would use to promote and advertise the platform to my team so they could follow up on the rest of the work.

A month after this, and just before the start of the project submission period, I remember talking to the course doctor. During that discussion, I told him about the progress I had made and that we were in the final stages of the project. I remember his response well, and it was the last thing you’d want to hear: “Nadim, there is no need for all this work. I only want from you a PowerPoint presentation consisting of 4 slides only.” But doctor, I have created a complete platform, and it is currently working, so let me present it and explain what my team and I have done over the past period. “Nadim, the presentation must be uploaded to the course’s website so I can evaluate it. I cannot give you any grade without uploading the presentation to the official site. Don’t worry, I will give you and your team the full mark.” Alright doctor, thank you.

With that, everything simply ended. It turned out in the end that what the university wanted us to do was come up with an entrepreneurial idea, not an actual entrepreneurial project. Damn it. I told my team about it, and I could feel the amount of frustration they had upon hearing that. They carried the vision with me, they carried the dream and the passion, but they couldn’t carry the pain we experienced after hearing that.

I asked them to work on the final presentation and stop working on the marketing plan. I didn’t even attend the final project discussion, as it conflicted with another exam at the exact same time as the discussion. I never got the chance to see it grow, or even present it in front of anyone.

And Khadoom is still working…