What 10 days can teach you about your business idea

Entrepreneurship is rarely a straight path, and no one understands this better than student founders navigating the early stages of their ideas. Students in Velocity’s Cornerstone program, a ten-day validation sprint, faced the highs and lows of turning an idea into something real—testing assumptions, gathering tough feedback, and making critical pivots along the way.

When Pivoting Leads to Progress

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For Kailey Chen, what started as a proximity-based dating app quickly turned into something entirely different.

“When I started this program, I was confident in my idea and ready to prototype,” Chen said. “The past 10 days have honestly felt like months—constantly thinking about the next step, who to talk to, and how to improve the platform. I’ve reached out to more people in the last ten days than I normally would in an entire month.”

Through the Velocity community, she connected with a founder who had already built and launched a similar concept. That conversation, along with multiple user interviews, confirmed a major concern: safety. Users were unwilling to constantly share their location, and the risk of revealing exact locations was a deal-breaker.

“The most impactful feedback I received was that my original idea wasn’t going to work,” she said. “It was tough to hear, but it ultimately led to a valuable pivot.”

Instead of proximity-based dating, Chen shifted to a matchmaking model—one that lets people set up their friends instead. Now, she’s testing this new approach in real life, running new iterations to measure its feasibility before moving toward an MVP.

Game Plan: Anticipating Industry Evolution

Jason Li, co-founder of Second Fiddle Studio, spent their validation sprint looking at the future of gaming.

“This was a fantastic experience,” said Li. “The Velocity team connected me with relevant experts and professionals, and the ten-day sprint was packed full of conversations with users and developers. I gained valuable insight into where the video game industry is heading and how our team can align with market trends.”

One key realization? Selling to a broader audience requires projections at a greater scale than anticipated.

“For consumer markets, you can’t just look at what’s working now. By the time you launch, the landscape will have shifted. Lots of issues are just beginning to emerge and continuous validation is key to staying ahead.”

With their first video game launching in March, Li and his team are now reevaluating their ideas to position them for long-term success. “We’re focusing on where the industry will be in four to eight years—especially with Generation Alpha joining the market. Games as a vehicle for personal expression and socialization are only going to grow.

The Power of Customer Validation

For Christian Sforza and the team at Woodpeckr, the biggest shift was in their approach to customers. As engineering students, their instinct was to build first. But the validation process pushed them to flip their script.

“The best feedback we received was to stop selling a solution and start learning from users,” said Sforza. “It’s easy to build something and then try to convince people they need it. Instead, we needed to let users identify their own pain points first.”

That insight led to a major change in how they approached customer validation.

“We reached out to more people in the last ten days than we had in the entire course of our project,” he said. “That wouldn’t have happened without Velocity’s hard deadlines and support system.”

Now, the team is focused on building out their prototype for their capstone symposium and expanding their client base after graduation.

Sarah Rezaei, founder of MoveMend, also walked away with a significant pivot. Her original plan was to use wearable sensors for movement tracking in rehabilitation. But through customer interviews, she realized that approach would only add complexity for patients who already struggle with keeping up with an exercise regimen.

“The most impactful solutions aren’t necessarily the most technologically complex,” Rezaei said. “Our initial plan would have created an additional barrier for patients. That realization helped us simplify our approach and move toward a more effective solution.”

For Hassan Alawie, the biggest lesson came from refining the way their team conducted user interviews.

“Learning about the ‘Mom Test’ gave us a sinking feeling—we realized we’d been doing interviews the exact wrong way,” Alawie said. “We were pushed to iterate rapidly, and having an end date helped us stay accountable.”

His team originally planned to host one major event to gather users for feedback but pivoted to a more iterative approach based on advice from Velocity’s Eric Blondeel. “Instead of going big all at once, we shifted our priority to maximizing iterations. That helped us figure out who our target users should be.”

Now, they’re pushing forward with an ambitious user goal ahead of their events throughout the Winter and Spring.  

Embracing the Journey

Each of these student founders walked into Cornerstone with a pre-existing idea—but the program didn’t just validate or refine those ideas. It reshaped how they approached problem-solving, user engagement, and iteration.

As Jim Murphy, seasoned entrepreneur and Cornerstone guest speaker, put it: “Things are never perfect or ready.”

For these students, embracing that uncertainty was the key to moving forward.

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