If you are an ambitious entrepreneur with an innovative idea, but need some help to turn it into an actual business:  the Get Started programme is the perfect push forward. Over the past five years, we’ve helped more than 250 early-stage entrepreneurs test their ideas. Our goal is to further develop your entrepreneurial talent. We’re not going to create your company for you, but we are going to give you the knowledge, skills and network to enable you to do so yourself and do so fast! You’ll be able to ask the questions you want to our mentors, who are experienced entrepreneurs, experts in specific fields and investors. We’ll also give you a workplace at our ECE Campus, which is home to over 100 innovative companies for you to meet and learn from.

Contrary to many other startup programs, you do not need a team to join Get Started. Our focus is on early-stage entrepreneurs, and we know many of them don’t have a team yet. That being said, having the right team is a very a important ingredient for the future success of your startup. That’s why during the programme we also talk about how to find the right co-founders and team members, something many of our coaches have experience with. Perhaps even more importantly, the network you’ll gain through Get Started, can be of great help in finding team members. For example, every year more than 20.000 people visit the events held at our ECE Campus.

We are looking for ambitious people with innovative ideas. Your professional background doesn’t matter and our alumni come in all shapes and sizes: from students to lawyers and from former CFO’s to medical specialists. What they have in common is a passion about the idea they want to develop further and, perhaps most importantly, a drive to take action and make it happen.

Yes, you can and we’ve had many alumni who have done so successfully. In the end, it simply depends on how effective you are in the time that you have. Testing your idea and building a business is no walk in the park and we will push you to go as fast as possible and expect you to make real progress in-between sessions. We do require you to be present at all of the five sessions that take place every other Friday and the one kick-off session on Thursday evening at the start of the programme. Many of our alumni who combined Get Started with a full-time job tell us that having the structure, rhythm and a fellow group of entrepreneurs around them actually forced them to take steps much faster than they would have otherwise been able to do.

ECE encourages entrepreneurship amongst students. Therefore, we offer a scholarship of €300 as long as you’re a student. This is applicable to Dutch and international students from universities and universities of applied sciences (HBO). It is not available for students of post-initial education (MBO and other).

Our application process consist of two simple steps. The first is an online questionnaire in which you tell us more about you and your startup. Based on your answers, we decide if we want to invite you to the second round, a personal interview. During both steps, we review your application by looking at the idea itself on the one hand, and you as a person on the other. With regards to the idea, we consider to what extent it is something new or innovative and if it has the potential to scale. When it comes to you as a person, we look at your professional and entrepreneurial background, what you’ve achieved so far in moving your idea forward and your personal ambitions. If you can show us your potential, you’re most welcome to be a part of our Get Started community.

Every other Friday, we organise a mandatory session at our campus. The mornings will be filled  with workshops on several entrepreneurial skills and methods, such as fundraising, customer development, pitching and more. We’ll also have several experienced entrepreneurs as guest speakers who will share their experiences and lessons learned.

During the afternoon, there’s room to speak with our coaches to discuss questions, ideas, opportunities and challenges you run into. We do not mandate what you can talk about, it is entirely up to you to decide what you want to discuss with them. Coaching takes place both on an individual basis as well as in groups with your fellow entrepreneurs (peer-to-peer support). In our experience, you often share similar challenges and discussing them together helps to create new perspectives and ideas on how to tackle them.

These full-day sessions are the backbone of the programme and provide you with the necessary knowledge and feedback to move your idea forward. It is therefore important that you attend all of them. If the dates of one of our classes do not work for you, keep an eye out for our next programme; we run four of them every year!

On Thursday evening before the first Friday session we have the kick-off of the programme with all participants. For your information, this is the only evening session and the only session on Thursday in those 10 weeks; it is required you attend the kick-off.

Yes and no. ECE has a huge network that does include many investors. A number of our coaches are also active as angel investors or venture capitalists and the ECE Campus is home to companies such as Symbid, Equidam and Maas & Kleiberg who can all support you in your quest for funding. That being said, it is our experience that many of our participants are not ready for an investment yet and raising money is therefore not the primary purpose of the Get Started programme. We do spend time on discussing the many different fundraising options out there and the do’s and don’ts, so you already know the basics for when you are looking to raise funding at a later point in time.

The ECE campus consists of more than 10.000m2. We’ve got 7 amazing new floors that all have their own theme (including the Life Sciences & Health hub). Our campus is the home base for our community, consisting of 100+ innovative companies that are situated here: start-ups, scale-ups and corporates. During the 10 weeks of the Get Started programme,  you’ll have a Business Membership of ECE; that means you can make free use of all the flex-workplaces and facilities at every single floor.  That also means  you can reserve all the meeting rooms to host customers or partners and can even host your own event if you’d like. Did we already mention we also have a ping pong table, bar and stunning view over the port of Rotterdam?

While the Get Started programme has no specific industry focus, we do offer four special tracks focused on entrepreneurs with ideas in the area of Circular Economy (CE), Health, Food or the Creative industry.
You’ll be going through the same programme as all the other entrepreneurs, but on top of that will have access to a specific network of partners and coaches in these fields. They can offer feedback on challenges that are specific to your field, such as possible circular business models.
The Circular Economy track is done in collaboration with Stichting Maatschappij en Onderneming (SMO) and Het Groene Brein. Our Health track is a collaboration with the Life Sciences & Health hub that is located on the 9th floor of the ECE Campus and that has partners as Erasmus Medical Center and LabHotel.
The Food track is for entrepreneurs who want to innovate in the Foodsector.
The Creative track is an association with the Willem de Kooning Academy.

Is your sustainable company already a scale-up instead of a startup? Check out CE Booster for a programme that suits your company phase.