The first week is the loneliest one

Nobody tells you that the first week is the hardest one.

Everyone warns you about the coursework, the deadlines, the cost of living. Nobody mentions that you will land in a city where you know the campus map and not a single person in it, and that this will be the part you actually struggle with.

On September 8, ImpulsTrip spent orientation day at Georgian College talking to the people in the middle of exactly that.

The Henry Bernick Entrepreneurship Centre offered them a share of their table. So the arrangement was simple. ImpulsTrip talked about ImpulsTrip, and talked about HBEC, to everyone who stopped. That felt like the right way around, given HBEC has been backing them since before there was anything to point at.

Orientation is the one day of the year when the entire incoming intake walks past you in a few hours. New students arriving in Barrie for the first time, many of them from other countries, on their first or second day in Canada. Returning students starting a new semester. All of them somewhere between excited and quietly overwhelmed, usually both at once.

Which made the conversation easy to start and hard to repeat several hundred times.

They handed out pamphlets and let people pick their own goodies. The stickers went fastest. Stickers always go fastest.

Some people took one and kept walking, which is fine and expected. Plenty stopped. And the thing that came up more than anything else was not a question about features.

It was people describing the problem back to us before we had finished explaining it.

You get a version of the same story over and over. I moved here three days ago. My roommate is never around. I have four hours between classes and nowhere to be. Everyone already seems to know each other. Some of them said it laughing and some of them said it flatly, but the shape was identical, and it was coming from people who had been in the country for less than a week.

That is not a market insight. Everyone building this already knows the number. It is a different thing to hear it from a nineteen year old standing in front of you holding a lanyard.

The second most common reaction was surprise that the app was real. Not skeptical, just surprised, because it had been built by three students who sat in the same lecture halls in the same building two years earlier, and who came to this exact event as first years with no idea what they were doing.

That one never gets old.

In June, HBEC gave ImpulsTrip an award for a company with 105 downloads. In September they handed over half their table on the busiest day of the year. Neither of those had to happen, and both of them are the reason there is anything to write about.

Thank you to Ryan Burwell and the HBEC team for the space, and to everyone who stopped to talk.

If you picked up a sticker and have not opened the app yet, this is the reminder.