Thanks Assembler, mairsil and everyone else for the great advice. It is very appreciated! We are not yet planning to found a business for revenue. It's a student project so the short-term goal is just to gain experience for our future endeavors. It is not a business yet, it's a student-run club. It's at UBC and we are open to all UBC students, starting in September this year. In a nutshell, we organize a competition among business startups that consist of the club members and whoever is best (evaluated upon certain variables) will be the winner after 6 and 12 months. We are already constituted and just need to prepare some more until we can start operating. It's not for profit or anything, so we will only measure our success by how well-known and influential our club will be on campus. Are you going to UBC anytime soon? We could connect if you want, we are looking for members from engineering as well (if I sensed your academic interest right).
Going to UBC this winter, but not in engineering- currently sciences but I'm aiming for arts. Computer sciences, in whichever faculty. If it's for making a busines I'll probably pass, I'll be swamped with just figuring out first year things. Thanks for the offer though!
Just a heads up, there were some good posts in here, but it's not all cut throat as it seems. Anything engineering or tech sector related usually has a lot of competition so it can be difficult, but not impossible. Your best bet as a new comer is to find a void in some part of the market place. Try to sell to new markets or sell items/service options current competition cannot sell. Most entrepreneurs who try to compete directly with current competition usually struggle. So trying to find that new market or void can be very key.
Finding gaps in the market is good, but not something you can rely solely on as it's a huge financial risk. I previously have been in friendly contact with a great supplier, knew the exact gap in the market to sell their products to, could have gained exclusive rights to their products and could have essentially set up a working business right there and then, but it would have required thousands of dollars worth of investment to get everything together and there would have been no guarentee that I would have broke even and had a self sustaining business. Research, research and research would be my advice, even though I have never owned a business I recognise that it's what I'd need to do to make sure that my business would actually succeed, and if it didn't I'd need to expand and have alternatives to fall back on incase any part of my business was starting to fail.
I am in contact with a guy who is about to start his own financial consulting company soon and he said he already researched for the past 12 months and will only begin operating after another 6 months of research. Stories like Facebook exist for sure - just start it right up, learn by doing and experience amazing economies of scale, but that's 1 in 10 million.
