One of the most unique experiences in the last several years was partnering and teaching at New York University. Partially it was so unique because just a few years ago I was a student myself. Sitting behind a desk and listening to professors and guest speakers. And now all of a sudden I see the room from the other side of the lectern.
The partnership with NYU itself started with an idea that many of Messapps potential customers are young students of business schools. Top business schools are essentially incubators for our clients. At the same time it happened so that at the time Messapps had a couple of interns from NYU. So it didn't take long to connect the two, we've prepared a pitch deck and started to reach out to different professors and directors at NYU. After about a week or two I got a call from Cynthia Franklin, who at the time was a Director at the Berkley Innovation Labs inside NYU Stern School of Business. After some time planning our next steps we came up with an idea for Mission: Appossible.
Mission: Appossible was an incubator / contest for the best app idea. Teams consisting of NYU students who would submit their app ideas, go through several rounds, while Messapps would teach them everything about apps (from app architecture to marketing and growth hacking), and then at the end up to 5 teams would make it to the Grand Finale. In the Grand Finale teams would pitch their ideas to the judges (that would usually include me, NYU alumni entrepreneurs, and often Twitter and Microsoft representatives) and then the winning team can choose a cash price or have their idea developed for free by Messapps. In the last year before COVID Mission: Appossible had about 200 teams participate in the contest.
Hundreds of prep, office, lecture and workshop hours later I can certainly say that working with NYU and sharing what I know about apps with bright and talented students was and still is one of the most rewarding experiences that I had.