Why YouNoodle?
Our Methodology
At YouNoodle, we know that one of the cornerstones in helping entrepreneurs succeed, now and in the future, is providing an unbiased evaluation of their idea. For this reason, we have built a technology platform that provides a framework that allows any program organizers to set up, manage and run an unbiased judging process. By following a simple set of best practices, our methodology will help grow the applicant’s opportunities for success exponentially throughout their lifetime.
Despite popular belief, it is not only about who wins the final prize, the funding, or the grant. The steps you take to get there are just as important, if not more important.
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Backed by Research
Governments, foundations, and other organizations routinely support startups and entrepreneurs with financial and in-kind resources. But do their efforts make a difference in the future success of those startups?
Geoffrey Barrows from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris examines over 20,000 startups (in an anonymized data set) that have passed through structured evaluation processes on the YouNoodle platform. The team examines the relationship between evaluation and the future success of a startup by correlating future outcome metrics (alive, successful, funding, employees, etc.) and tying them back to their initial evaluations.
YouNoodle Global Data Study
$9K PER JOB
Startup grant winners generate one new job per $9,000 received.
64% HIGHER SURVIVAL
Startup winning grants are
64% more likely to survive.
10X FUNDING
If a startup wins a $10,000 grant, they raise a further $100,000.
$74.6 MILLION
In grants and prizes studied, across 2,870 startup grant winners.
3X SUCCESS
Startup winning grants show 3X better success metrics.
3-5 YEARS
Is how long the impact lasts for a winning startup.
Key Takeaways
Startup grant programs work - but only if the selection process is structured and unbiased and the funds are distributed over the right number of startups.
1.
A typical grant/prize (average $26k on YouNoodle) results in approx. 10x as much in funding ($260k) later in that startup's life compared to similar startups not selected for those grants.
2.
If the program organizers deviate from the structured distributed external evaluation format (global best practice) and partly choose their own winners based on intuition, the study finds a significantly lower impact of the grants or resources distributed.
3.
How Might We Restructure
YouNoodle's Evaluation Criteria
to Include Diversity & Inclusion?
In 2021, students at the University of California at Berkeley worked together with YouNoodle on a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) project. The challenge of the project was to redesign YouNoodle's evaluation criteria to include (more) DEI.
The result of the project was a questionnaire that allows program admins and applicants to score each program's level of DEI directly on the platform. This would create a public ranking of programs with the highest DEI scores.
The benefits of this new questionnaire, they estimated, would be increased transparency, more incentives to include DEI in programs, and a higher number of applications.
Equitable Design Lab: Innovation and Bias, Increasing Access for Diverse Startups
"Our task in the Equitable Design Lab program was to explore the question: "How might we restructure YouNoodle's evaluation criteria to include diversity and inclusion?”.
In order to answer this, our Equitable Design team deep-dove into the observation phase of our Design Thinking methodology to better understand how YouNoodle stakeholders work, how they understand diversity and inclusion, and to what extent they address these topics within their platform."