Rydge Conseil’s five top tips for student entrepreneurs

The School hosted the fifteenth Powered by NEOMA event on its Rouen campus on March 26. Alongside project pitches and the awards ceremony, Vincent Bouteille and Jules Blasquez from Rydge Conseil led a mini-conference on the theme “Surviving your first year as an entrepreneur”. Read on for the key takeaways.

1. Start from a real need

The speakers from Rydge Conseil made it clear at the outset that “the starting point for any strategic thinking about a project is understanding the need you’re addressing”.

Listening to customers, understanding their expectations and testing ideas in the real world — this is what should guide every decision that follows. A project should not originate in intuition alone but in a concrete problem that calls for a clear solution. And this approach is never rigid; it is part of an ongoing back‑and‑forth with the market.

2. Launch early — even if it’s not perfect

One of the most common mistakes is waiting for a product to be perfect. Bouteille and Blasquez were unequivocal on this point: “If you're not embarrassed by your first product, it means you waited too long to launch it. We've known lots of startups that dragged their feet trying to perfect their product, only for the ‘finished’ version never to reach the market”.

Their advice was simple: “Test your product. Go for it. It won't be great”. It’s the users who will help you make it better. Waiting too long leaves you open to a major risk: pouring time and money into something without knowing whether there is a real demand. And if the product doesn’t catch on, you have to be willing to pivot: it’s this agility that often makes the difference.

3. Surround yourself with the right people and structure your project

A project’s success often hinges on the quality of the team behind it. That means being able to recognise the strengths you have and those that others bring, and understanding how to coordinate them. As the speakers put it, “it's about being humble about what you know and what you don’t”.

The same holds true for the legal and organisational aspects, which are all too often overlooked. The speakers issued a clear warning about shareholder agreements in particular: “In many cases, if it’s put together poorly, it can ultimately cause real harm to entrepreneurs”. If these elements are not anticipated properly, they can create significant barriers when raising funds or entering key development phases.

4. Spend smartly

In a similar vein, watch out for ineffective resource management. “Smart spending means investing where it truly benefits the project’s development, instead of doing everything yourself and sacrificing quality”. 

Some functions, such as accounting or legal, really do need qualified professionals. Bouteille and Blasquez highlighted a classic mistake: “Founders frequently skip over fundamental things that really matter in the misguided belief that they know how to do everything”. And the speakers went on to illustrate the consequences: “We thought we’d do the accounting ourselves […] but what ultimately happened was that we ended up with absolutely disastrous indicators and hit the ground hard”.

5. Define the right metrics

Running your company also means choosing KPIs that are in sync with your business model and rooted in reality. “Beyond the indicators themselves, it’s about understanding what lies behind them and how well they align with the business model you’re building”.

The challenge lies in avoiding a purely theoretical approach: “We tested them in real-world conditions [...] which meant that when it came to monitoring performance, we could clearly see it wasn't just theory”. A timely reminder that metrics are only useful if they accurately represent what is happening on the ground.