Software Skills
Many institutions teach software. But they don’t help students learn by deliberate practice. At BuildSkills, our aim is to help students learn by building things. We do this by:
Product Sprints – a series of sprints (intensive coding sessions) to build a micro product over several weeks/months
Programming Challenges
Training on introductory programming and building nano/micro products.
Build to Learn – a free initiative for collaborative learning and practice by building simple useful products
Hackathons, Datathons and Botathons. Hackathons are immersive building of functional prototypes in short bursts of time – 24 hours, 48 hours. Datathons are hackathons with a focus on building data products. Botathons are hackathons focused on building chatbots (both rule based and AI based)
Product Skills
While many beginning developers know how to code to a specification and design, few of them know all the aspects of building even the simplest product, launching it, getting feedback and iterating over it. We aim to fix that through the following events/initiatives.
Identify problems worth solving
Evaluate existing solutions through some simple research
Write a one page specification for a simple minimum viable product/prototype (MVP)
Create a task list from the specification
Choose software tools and libraries
Build an initial MVP and get feedback from real users
Iterate and improve
EntrepreneurSkills
Students can earn even while they are in school/college by providing useful services and building simple useful products. Entrepreneur skills go beyond the ability to build a product. Here are some essential skills for earning money from your creations.
Finding problems worth solving and finding customers willing to pay for those solutions
Building the product yourself or with the help of a group of product builders
Finding your first 10 to 100 paying customers
Creating a small sustainable product/service business
Finding the product/market fit
Learning marketing skills – research, communication, lead generation
Learning sales skills – pitching to customers, presentations, handling exceptions, closing deals
Learning Inbound marketing and content marketing skills
Exploring various traction channels
Learning to scale from a 100 to 1000 or 10,000 users