Here’s how you can start your entrepreneurship journey with The Product Society
By Megan Marr, November 6 2024—
Are you a student at the University of Calgary and have a great business idea, but aren’t sure where to start? Aryan Panchal, founder and president of the student club The Product Society, founded his club for entrepreneurial students on campus who needed a space for idea development and guidance in jump-starting their business.
“I was going through my journey of creating InterviewPal, which is my company, [and] I saw that there were so many resources out there that I could use, but there was no single way for me to go from… that idea stage to building a product,” said Panchal during an interview with the Gauntlet.
The Product Society, which Panchal started in January of this year, is a student-led club at the University of Calgary that aims to promote entrepreneurship and help students understand how exactly to take their idea for a company or product and turn it into something real.
The club provides students with the resources and support they need to kickstart their entrepreneurship journey through hands-on and panel-style events.
“Every two weeks we do workshops or we bring in founders or product managers who have built a product or built a company to talk to students about their experiences,” said Panchal. “These are the two main ways that we’re trying to promote entrepreneurship among students.”
He shared that, over the next few months, the club is also working to develop a course that walks students through the product development process step-by-step.
“[Students] can either come in as groups or they can work on it individually and go from the ideation stage to building something really really small. That’s the number one initiative that we’re working towards, and hopefully in the next semester we will launch that program,” said Panchal.
Reflecting on the unique perspective that the club brings to campus, Panchal shared that “in Business there’s not a lot of awareness about different career paths that students can take besides our, you know, majors and concentrations such as finance, accounting, etc.” He continued, “there [are] other career paths such as product managers or product marketing, product analysts, that they can go into besides the regular career paths and the regular majors and concentrations.”
Panchal shared that The Product Society is open to all students, not just Business majors. In addition, there is absolutely no background or prior experience required to join the club.
“A lot of executives or a lot of members of my club, they don’t have previous experiences in building something, but they’re curious to learn more about how to go from that idea stage, and a lot of people have thoughts or great ideas but they don’t know where to start.”
If there is one piece of advice that Panchal has to offer for students wanting to start their own club or new initiative on campus — it would be to just do it!
“I would say if you have an idea and you want to do it right now, just do it no matter what happens, because if it works, it’s good- you get some experience. If it doesn’t work, you still get some experience and you learn from your mistakes.”
You can check out Aryan’s product, InterviewPal, here. For more information on The Product Society, click here.
This article is a part of our Voices section and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Gauntlet editorial board.