If you live in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area of North Carolina, it may surprise you that hidden behind the Jimmy John’s on West Franklin Street in Chapel Hill is a business accelerator pumping out cutting-edge ideas.
Launch Chapel Hill is tucked in beside UNC-CH but is not exclusively for Tarheels. In fact, they boast that even a few Duke Blue Devils have made it through their doors. Their goal is to grow business and attract entrepreneurs to the Orange County area. You don’t have to be a specific age or run a specific type of company to participate.
If you live in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area of North Carolina, it may surprise you that hidden behind the Jimmy John’s on West Franklin Street in Chapel Hill is a business accelerator pumping out cutting-edge ideas.
Launch Chapel Hill is tucked in beside UNC-CH but is not exclusively for Tarheels. In fact, they boast that even a few Duke Blue Devils have made it through their doors. Their goal is to grow business and attract entrepreneurs to the Orange County area. You don’t have to be a specific age or run a specific type of company to participate.
The Digital Mettle team visited Launch Chapel Hill as a part of our new “Lunch and Learn” series. Throughout their semester-long cohorts, Launch CH brings in local companies to speak and offer advice to the participating startups. It’s a win-win for the cohorts and visiting companies. During our visit we met diverse participants such as a UNC undergraduate working to make sustainable packaging and cattle feed with algae at a company named Phyta and a gentleman working with his wife and adult daughter on a new software product for their company, Stratus TMS.
In addition to meeting these highly motivated, cutting edge innovators we learned a lot about connecting with early-stage businesses. In preparation for our visit we created a slideshow and practiced a talk outlining our formal custom software development process. We were planning on taking questions at the end, however when we walked into their laid-back space we quickly realized the best way to engage this audience would be to immediately begin asking for their questions. By the end of our session we had not made it past the third slide in our prepared deck. The questions from the cohort members began a worthwhile conversation which helped us understand their concerns and it helped cohort members leave with advice specifically applicable to them.
The icing on the cake for our team was the positive feedback from Amy Linnane, Director of Launch Chapel Hill and this quote from a cohort member that our talk, “didn’t feel like a sales pitch, more like they actually wanted to help and give advice.” Which is true: that is exactly what we wanted, and we were really pleased to hear they felt like we delivered.