Unlocking BASE Camp: Insights and Experiences, with Leah Nieboer and Sam Fordyce

This Entrepreneurship@DU episode features an insightful conversation with two recent graduates of the E@DU Basecamp Accelerator program: Leah Nieboer, a PhD candidate and podcast creator, and Sam Fordyce, an undergraduate student and dumpling entrepreneur.  

They discuss their experiences in the intense six-week program, highlighting the challenges they faced, the valuable mentorship they received, and the crucial skills they developed, such as market validation and rapid adaptation to feedback. The guests offer encouraging advice to prospective Basecamp participants, emphasizing the program’s impact on their entrepreneurial journeys and urging listeners not to hesitate in applying. This episode provides a compelling insider’s view of the Basecamp accelerator program, a must-listen for anyone interested in entrepreneurship education or considering applying to BASE Camp program. 

 Transcript:

Joshua Ross:

My name is Joshua Ross and welcome to the Entrepreneurship at DU Podcast. On this episode, I sit down with two DU students, Leah Neighbor, a PhD candidate in literature and adjunct professor and entrepreneur, and Sam Fordice, an undergraduate pursuing a BA in both business management and psychology, and also an entrepreneur. Most important. Both Lee and Sam are recent graduates of the entrepreneurship at DU based Camp Accelerator. Our discussion focuses on their experience participating in the entrepreneurship at du basecamp. Basecamp is a six week accelerator for startups that want to grow and accelerate their business idea, find market fit, and ultimately decide to continue pivot a closeup shop. Each startup is accepted to the program, receives a private office access to our makerspace curated workshops, mentors, networking, one-to-one advising with industry experts and $5,000 stipend. Here’s my conversation with Leah and Sam. Welcome to the entrepreneurship at DU podcast.

Leah Nieboer:

Thanks for having us.

Joshua Ross:

Excited to be here. I think I’m the most excited. So I had the opportunity to get to know you two over six weeks through our Basecamp accelerator, which we’re going to talk a little bit about. And so I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. But I also have to say that I’m a little bit nervous because I’ve been doing this podcast hosting thing for about a year, and now we actually have a podcast host from the riter podcast on. So I hope I don’t get critiqued too much.

Leah Nieboer:

Not at all. Not at all. I’ve listened to the podcast.

Joshua Ross:

Oh, you have? Okay. Well, I appreciate it. It’s neat.

Leah Nieboer:

I like the format, so

Joshua Ross:

Thank you. We just try to keep it relaxed, interesting. And try not to put our audience asleep. So with you two as subjects today, I’m sure it’ll be awesome. So Leah, I want to start with you and I would like for you to tell us a little bit about yourself, your business, which is the riter, and what sparked your interest in entrepreneurship.

Leah Nieboer:

Sure. So I am a writer, published poet, PhD candidate and adjunct professor here at DU in English and Creative writing. And I met my co-founder and co-host Stella Corso through this PhD program five years ago. We kind of landed here via Nashville, and Stella was coming from New York as academic outliers from working class backgrounds. And so we had different references in other people. We ended up spending a lot of time together on Stella’s living room floor, just talking books and trading critical questions and digging into our love lives and writer drama and all of that too. But we had this experience in our friendship where we’re having these really dope conversations about art and books and music and why they mattered to our actual lives. And it had all the honesty and risk and vulnerability that we weren’t finding in the classroom, we weren’t finding in academia.

While we got really cool serious analysis there and learned a lot, that kind of activity and that aliveness that we feel like art does for us in our lives wasn’t there. So we were like, why not share that with other people? Turned on our mics, published our first episode of the Riter podcast this past March, 2024. And since then we’ve been publishing weekly episodes. We started as a literary and cultural podcast. That was kind of our whole idea as you know. And we saw this invitation come through miraculously because we’re not in the business world at all for this business accelerator. And we thought, wow, wouldn’t it be great if we could get a little cash, a bunch of mentorship and really figure out how to make this podcast kind of the vision that we hoped it would be, which is to help us become fresh voices in cultural commentary, blending this serious analysis, provocative ideas, the humor and honesty and vulnerability of our friendship for a bunch of listeners. So we weren’t thinking of ourselves as entrepreneurs. It was like a lucky coincidence that we saw yet, and then we got in the door and everything opened up for us. And I’ll pause there. I know we’ve got a lot of other chatting to do.

Joshua Ross:

Well, thank goodness people still check their email, right? Serendipity. So Sam, what about you? Tell us a little bit about yourself. And I know you have a very, very strong and long and story background as an entrepreneur. A little bit about your business for Basecamp and what makes you so interested in being an

Sam Fordyce:

Entrepreneur? I really love small business for the opportunity. It allows me to engage with my local community and really make an impact. My first business, I guess pre-business was selling silly bands and fidget spinners in middle school when I saw that opportunity arise and seeing the joy on people’s faces for solving a problem that they knew they had but couldn’t find a solution to was addicting. And after that, I went on a spree. So I’ve done a knife sharpening business. I’ve done two catering companies and currently I’m working on Denver dumplings. We make seven different unique flavors from around the world, package it into an easy frozen dumpling that’s ready to eat in 15 minutes. That’s what we do currently. But entrepreneurship’s always been a big part of my life. My uncle’s an entrepreneur and I really look up to him. And throughout high school, middle school, everything, every dinner table conversation was, what are you doing this week, Sam? Like what’s on the menu? What opportunity are you focusing on? So kind of keeping that same mindset of fast moving business that’s impactful. That’s why I like it.

Joshua Ross:

So Sam, why did you decide to apply to the Basecamp Accelerator? What was that moment that you’re like, I want to do this?

Sam Fordyce:

Well, I’ve done a bunch of small businesses. I’ve done the brisket business here at Du Briskets for Betterment, but I found myself lacking a lot of direction when it came to more of the big picture entrepreneurial things. I’ve been an entrepreneur on my own, which is one thing, it’s very difficult, but the entrepreneurship program at DU does a great job not only extending resources, but extending actually useful knowledge to students that enabled them to create a successful business. And after seeing people like Chanel that came through, it was really a no brainer. If you want to start a business, this is the way to get all the foundation and for that journey. So we hopped on as soon as we saw the opportunity.

Joshua Ross:

So Leah, when you and Stella, you saw the invite and you were thinking about joining and applying and you were going through the application process, what was your biggest fear of concern? What were some of the nervous thoughts that you had?

Leah Nieboer:

We had no idea what we were doing. I mean, for that particular application in our pitch, we were Googling stuff, we were trying to find the resources at du. We were using AI to help us language things in the right format and direction, which is the fear was business school. Neither of us have a background in that. It’s an entirely different language for us. Are we going to be able to get inside the terms? Are we going to be able to use them? And are we really going to be able to learn what we need to be successful entrepreneurs? We know that we’re learners, but that was the big fear. And then of course, are we going to entirely have to change who we are inside a totally other language?

Joshua Ross:

Right? Absolutely. No, that makes a lot of sense. And Sam, you came from a little bit different perspective, having the background as an entrepreneur. Do you have any concerns before starting Basecamp?

Sam Fordyce:

Yes, I did. As a solo entrepreneur, managing myself was really easy for this Denver Dumplings project I brought on Bryson Temper as a co-founder and worker. Food is hard and food means a lot of hours if you’re going to make good stuff and convincing another college student to work with you and managing that is a challenge. And I was a little worried about that. Thankfully, Bryson’s the best. Beyond kind of managing to scale. I’ve always done businesses that are sufficient for my local community, very small local community, but nothing that scaled huge or else I probably wouldn’t be in college anymore. But yeah, I mean it was very helpful for that kind of stuff.

Joshua Ross:

So Basecamp is intense. Those aren’t my words. Those are words from all of our different base campers that have gone through the various cohorts. It requires dedication and requires hard work. And so we’re going to have startups, I believe, thinking about applying to Basecamp that will listen to this podcast. We’re actually going to encourage them to listen to this podcast. So Sam, why don’t you first walk us through a typical week during the six week accelerator. What activities or assignments stood out to you?

Sam Fordyce:

Kind of the in-person tasting events, those were super fun for our business. We’re self frozen dumplings, so if you want to sell ’em, people have to try. So that means getting out in front of people in areas where your target market is at du, that’s super easy. I can go to the crappy bar down the street and go sell a hundred dumplings a night, but when I want to go sell to people I don’t know. That means setting up in a random apartment building and hoping I don’t get kicked out, which reinforced my entrepreneurial spirit of like F it, let’s go. Let’s make something happen. Beyond that, I think the customer validation through surveys and testing was really, really helpful. I’ve done some deconstructed versions of that prior, but never something so structured and segmented. I guess that really helped my business overall. I know a hundred percent that people like these dumplings. I know a hundred percent that people like X, Y, Z about ’em, and I know what I have to fix. So going through that step-by-step survey process and customer validation was a big part of our journey and very, very helpful to us throughout our weeks.

Joshua Ross:

Leah, what about you and Stella? What were your thoughts about these different weeks and the way they were set up and not being traditional business people coming into this program?

Leah Nieboer:

So I mean, to give listeners who might be considering applying a little overview too, our days together like Tuesday through Thursday, and one of the cool things that we really, really liked was going to visit local Denver entrepreneurs and hearing about their journeys. Because even though they were very, very different and people are from different backgrounds and we are, some of the things really resonated about just their hustle spirit or the kinds of decisions they had to make or how they pivoted from failure and kind of what some of their strategies were. So that would happen once a week or something on a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon or maybe Wednesday, and we would have people come in and speak as well. And number one, the generosity of everybody with their time and their knowledge was unparalleled to me. I cannot overstate that particular resource. There is something that we learned from everybody who walked into the room no matter where they were coming from, what their businesses were, what their background was, and that’s what we really, really hoped that we would get out of business camp.

And then we made a lot of slide decks. I think it felt like every night we were making slide decks or working on honing our pitch, like our investor pitch or our elevator pitch, and getting ourselves a little bit closer and closer to really articulating what our business was about, where it could go, how we could grow beyond this. So a lot of time doing the slide decks, listening to people, going out and speaking with people, as Sam said in the Denver community to test our ideas. And frankly, Stella and I are also a little bit older than some of these folks. So really Saturday or Friday we would wake up and just text each other from bed and be like, yo, man, you dead. Yeah, yeah, man. Okay, you want to work on the patio? Awesome.

Joshua Ross:

Yeah, our entrepreneurship community here at the university, the alums, the faculty, people, friends of the program, they’re just so generous and they’re so talented and they’re so willing to engage. And so when I reach out to structure this program, nobody ever says no. They’re like, when do you need me? And it’s just awesome and I’m glad you recognize that and also the quality of what they bring. I appreciate that. So how did the mentorship aspect of the program impact your entrepreneurial journey? And this question is for you first, Sam, and can you share any memorable interactions with a mentor?

Sam Fordyce:

Yeah, for sure. So one mentor that was super impactful to our business was Brian Gross. He has a background doing coffee products for Walmart, so really big time business guy. Talking with him, we quickly understood how far behind we were in the CPG space. As everyone knows, when you manufacture something at mass, you need procedural notation for each step of the way. And there were things that we just had completely wrong in our notation. So when I’d bring someone in that wasn’t folding dumplings to our company and ask ’em to fold, it would go terrible. And talking with Brian and figuring out how to really write down what you mean to say in your cooking process, how to simplify this procedure and how to extend that to scale, that was completely all Brian. Without the mentorship, once a week, we would’ve been, I mean, stuck. Stuck. I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time. I thought it was fine, but as soon as he came in and fixed it, it was a hundred percent perfect. We had never had another issue again. And that’s just one example of 20. I mean, the mentors were fantastic. Talking with someone every week about your business that actually knows what they’re doing is instrumental to success.

Joshua Ross:

And Leah, what about you? What aspects of the mentorship really helped you and Stella?

Leah Nieboer:

Well, every week we had a meeting with faculty members, you included, and that I think about as kind of part of the honing process, like these little, consider this question, consider altering your pitch this way, your messaging, branding. And that was critical for us. We also had outside mentors, straw Gaines who runs a consulting business and is from a theater and arts background. And so one of the early conversations we had with him was about how do you communicate arts to business people and other folks? And we knew that was going to be a challenge for us. How do we communicate the value of something that’s particularly intangible and in which we’re steeped in a very different kind of culture and language and communicate that to others with that kind of thinking. Then later in Basecamp, we’d met with Michael Myers, who encouraged us to think about what really the value was.

So we’re honing our ability to talk to other people about art. And he’s like, but what are people really getting from you and what’s special about what you have to offer? And kind of came back to this poet’s lens on the cultural world. We observe the ordinary world, find these moments of awesome, extraordinary, just minute wonderstruck happenings that break something open for any of us and that’s accessible to any of us. We decided to do that all the time and bring it to the page. But then now we’re trying to do that through a podcast and reads a bunch more people, but those two, those kind of polls, like having somebody help us translate, having somebody help us flip our perspective around, and that honing in between was so critical

Joshua Ross:

And a special shout out to straw gains part of our Basecamp cohort too. So now comes back as a mentor, which I absolutely love. And any of you, straw is a character. Moving on. One of the things we empathize throughout base camp, and sometimes I think it may even drive our base campers a little crazy, is how much focus on testing and validating your business idea. So Sam, can you describe how you tested and some significance around where it actually helped you?

Sam Fordyce:

Yeah, so prior to Basecamp, we had to fulfill a little bit of in-person testing for customer validation on our product. And we started Basecamp as sizzle pig sausages, and we were doing these popups at our local bar stad, selling hot sausages to drunk college patrons, and it was going great. One day, randomly on one of these assignments, we threw in dumplings into the mix. We had a seven to one order ratio from dumplings of sausage, which completely pivoted our business, making us a dumpling company and not a sausage company anymore. And then kind of beyond that, throughout Basecamp, one big thing, I mean, as a chef, I always think all my food’s the best and all the flavors are perfect, but talking to customers and seeing which of the varieties are actually worth marketing and putting funding before or behind rather was super important. Getting that testing and seeing, do they like the packaging? Do they like the flavor? Do they like the cost? All these things are super impactful to the end product, and we’re not going to sell anything if the market doesn’t want it.

Joshua Ross:

So Leah, what was the most surprising thing that you and Stella learned about yourselves during this six weeks journey?

Leah Nieboer:

I think number one, that we could translate ourselves into the business world and that the language was not way out there. And it was really a matter of we were encouraged all the time to figure out what we actually value, and then being given a bunch of prompts and places to put that message or to reach out to people or to be encouraged to reach out to potential collaborators, showed us how much more versatile we could be in language. And we’re already writers, so that’s of terrific interest to us all of the time. So I think just the fact that we could learn this stuff, see ourselves as entrepreneurs and treat this business really seriously surprised us. Of course, that’s what we wanted, but I think that, yeah, inhabiting this persona of the entrepreneur as the writers that we are. I mean, it was a revelation for us.

Joshua Ross:

One of my observations, and it wasn’t a surprise, but how well you all took feedback and went and applied it, and that you had this inner innovator, problem solver, entrepreneur, whatever you want to call it within you. It just had to be molded and brought up to the surface. And I saw a lot of that just over time, and also the feedback and the insight you gave your peers and the cohort. I was just always very impressed by that.

Leah Nieboer:

Oh, that’s kind. Thank you.

Joshua Ross:

It’s just what I observed. So Sam, talk to us about a major challenge that you went through over the program and stuff like that you and Bryson had to overcome and things that you had to deal with because it wasn’t simple. Entrepreneurship isn’t easy, right? Anybody that tells you it is they’ve never been entrepreneur and they’re crazy.

Sam Fordyce:

Well, entrepreneurship at its base level isn’t easy. And entrepreneurship and frozen food definitely isn’t easy. We faced so many legal hurdles throughout this process. So for those who aren’t familiar, if you’re producing a frozen packaged good, especially a meat package, good, you need two different licenses. One’s with the state and one’s with the FDA. And throughout our Basecamp experience, that license requirement, there’s some specifics you can apply for changed four or five times for us. So that completely changed how we were going to operate, how we were going to interact with the commissary, how we were going to interact with machinery, all that kind of stuff.

We got through it. I mean, Basecamp extends you the opportunity to be a very hard worker with a bunch of other driven people, and I think we found ourselves in a lot of challenges. But thanks to the kind of peer pressure of the cohort and what we call the three wise men or the three faculty that were helping us, including you, Mr. Ross, on our Basecamp journey, the challenges were overcome. I think I’ve stayed up until 2:00 AM enough for this year. It must have been at least six days out of the week during Basecamp, but it was the most worth it thing I could have done. I got to understand how to overcome these challenges in real time and a lot of stuff I didn’t think I could overcome, but I did a lot sooner than I thought with the help of Basecamp cohort and mentors.

Joshua Ross:

Leah, what about you? What are some of the major challenges that you and Stella had to overcome or work through?

Leah Nieboer:

Well, number one, we both got Covid right away, so that was a huge bummer. We also were like, oh God, we feel bad if we exposed anybody. So we had to figure out how to pivot on some of our customer validation right away, which we were told was utterly crucial for our success in Basecamp. So we quickly learned how to put together prolific surveys and figure out how to ask salient questions about what people desire from their media and podcasting and what people are missing from their general conversations they’re having with folks. I mean, that was a huge challenge right away that hit us, but we just picked back up and obviously we had an encouragement from you all and the cohort, and it was like we got back on track. Eventually

Joshua Ross:

You did. I was there to see it, and I know it started off a little rocky, but sometimes that’s what happens. And sometimes the rockiest, it’s a great test of your character to see where you’re going to go, because there’s really two paths you can just decide to, I’ll close up shop and move on or face it and go after it. And I felt you all faced it. So well done with that. So Sam, what are you all going to do next? Based on your experience, are you going to pivot from sausage to dumplings to fill in the blank? Are you going to continue with dumplings or perhaps start something different?

Sam Fordyce:

Dumplings are a passion project for me as a Houstonian, I grew up eating dumplings. I’m very happy that our market feedback pushed us to dumplings and we continue to do it. Kind of our process now is figuring out at what capacity that’s done. I mean, I’m working two jobs currently and I have seven classes. My co-founder is a CS major, getting his master’s. So we’re busy people, but Basecamp showed us that we can push through challenges like this having a limited schedule. It’s just figuring out how. So it’s talking with Basecamp mentors, mentors outside of the program, other entrepreneurs, and figuring out how to schedule this. We’re definitely pushing forward. We’ve ordered a $3,000 dumpling machine, so we better be pushing forward, but I’m excited to get that in and start cranking out dumplings. We’ll have a commercial lease soon. We’re still waiting for a little bit of funding, but all is well, we’re pushing along. Sam. The

Joshua Ross:

World needs more dumplings, better dumplings, and a more diverse selection of dumplings. Amen. So do you feel that burden and the weight of the world is on you now?

Sam Fordyce:

I know I envision a world where you can get what you actually want from the grocery store. So until that’s there, we’re going to be chugging along, making dumplings.

Joshua Ross:

Leah, what about you? What did you and Ella decide to do?

Leah Nieboer:

We’re going. We’re going hard. We’re like, we would love this to be our main job. We both teach, we’ll both continue to write and stuff, but we want the podcast to be the thing that we do. We want to have these kinds of conversations with people everywhere. So we’re stepping out of the studio. We’re taking the show on the road. We are going to Wheaton College in Massachusetts in October to chat with university students about our art, our friendship, the power of non-binary thinking, and how all of that relates to the podcast. We’re hoping to work with more universities, talk with more university students about alternate careers in the humanities. We’d like to do some workshops with creative professionals or any professionals about creative collaboration. So we are stoked.

Joshua Ross:

So I teach in entrepreneurship and I work with lots of students that want to learn about entrepreneurship, but one of my beliefs is I’m not just teaching them about entrepreneurship and these skills, but skills that they can actually transfer to whatever they do in life. This idea of solving problems or seeing unmet needs or opportunities, coming up with solutions, putting themselves out in the world, being vulnerable, going and asking the tough questions, working through adversity, getting hit and getting back up, being able to communicate and work with other people effectively, all certain types of life skills, and that’s one of the things I love about my job. You may not be an entrepreneur, but whatever you go do, you can use these tools based on that. And going through these six weeks, and we had so many different impactful people and different topics, were there certain skills or knowledge that you gained from this accelerator that you can either use as you move on with your businesses or other businesses or just in life?

Sam Fordyce:

I know one thing that was really impactful for me, and I’m going to harp on this again, was the market feedback piece. I mean, as an entrepreneur, going into a unknown market with a new product is not easy, and I found myself thinking that people would come to me just because my product was good, but that’s never the case. So learning how to go out, survey the public, get real results that are impactful to your business, I will never forget that. I mean, my day spent at the Cherry Creek farmer’s markets on Sundays, annoying random families about a dumpling survey will never be forgotten. And I think that’s something that I can proudly say I’ve done and add to my resume. Working in the public with the public and trying to get real market data is something I haven’t really done before, but something I will now do for every business I ever am involved in.

Joshua Ross:

Awesome. Leah, what about you?

Leah Nieboer:

That’s cool. Yeah. There are so many transferable skills that we learned, number one. So if anyone’s thinking about it, you should definitely go for it, apply. One of the ones that stands out to me is just the ability to incorporate feedback quickly, change what you’re doing, test it, see if it works, if it doesn’t, try something else. So this idea of hustling and moving quickly, and for Stella and I, it’s also doing that without hurry. So being grounded in your values and ethics as a company, but then moving quickly alongside everyone else who’s hustling as hard as you are to shape this thing so that it can become a reality, which is another component of the things that we took away. Like we’re artists. We publish books, so we’re familiar with this process of turning just an idea into something real, hopefully, that people can hold onto. But when you’re surrounded by a bunch of other people also doing that in all of these diverse ways, you just keep glancing off somebody who has insight or intelligence that you don’t yet, and you just start picking up the little parts of their strategy or their languaging, how they’re thinking about branding, how they’re thinking about talking to various audiences, and particularly for us, how they’re thinking about business development in a holistic way that illuminates a sustainable path forward.

Joshua Ross:

That’s great. I appreciate that. That’s great advice from both of you. So my final question, what do you tell potential prospective base campers that are listening to this podcast? What advice would you give them? Maybe some encouragement? Lee, I’ll start with you.

Leah Nieboer:

Your idea is good enough. You can spend time honing it and thinking about who your target market is, but also there’s no perfect time to do it. We certainly weren’t investor ready or presentation ready necessarily when we got to you, but we had a clear vision. So if you can articulate what your problem or idea is and your vision for it and put some of the pieces in place, just go for it. Don’t wait. Now is the time to do it. We are both crazy busy. I’m finishing a dissertation. Stella was defending hers at the time. There’s no good time to do it, so just dive in. I love it. That’s my main piece of advice.

Joshua Ross:

Great advice.

Sam Fordyce:

Sam, what about you? Do it, do it, do it, do it. This program has been nothing but great for everyone that’s been involved. I go to the Daniels College of Business. I’m a marketing major or management major there. I haven’t learned one 10th of what I learned in Basecamp over my three years in Daniels. I mean, interacting with the business hands-on with people that know what the hell they’re talking about is something that’s really rare. You’re not going to get this again. You should take this opportunity if you have it. I think another thing worth saying is if you think you’re not ready or you think you’re hesitant for X, Y, Z, you think it’s going to be too much work, it’s going to be whatever you’re going to work in your life, squeeze this in. It is worth squeezing into your schedule. It’s worth cutting out and clearing your schedule for. I would never thought I’d have an opportunity to speak to 15 entrepreneurs making over 500 KA year from their business successfully, and that like their life. It’s the most unique opportunity at du. It’s the best opportunity at du, and if you don’t do it, I think something’s probably up. Do it, do it, do it, do it. No

Joshua Ross:

Excuses. I think Sam was pretty clear on what you should do.

Sam Fordyce:

Yeah.

Joshua Ross:

Well, Leah, Sam, thank you for your time today. Thank you for making me a little bit smarter. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you.

Leah Nieboer:

Thank you.

Joshua Ross:

The entrepreneurship at DU podcast was recorded in Marjorie Reed Hall on the University of Denver campus. You can find us on Instagram at du Entrepreneur on Twitter, X at DU entrepreneur, and on Facebook at entrepreneurship at du. This episode was engineered, edited, and produced by Sophia Holt. Entrepreneurship at DU is part of the Daniels College of Business, which has its own podcast. Check out Voices of Experience wherever you get your podcasts.