The experience of growing a company has been a rewarding challenge; there are many lessons and resources I wish I could relay to my past self.

As juniors at University of Wisconsin, Alex Wyler, Matt Howard and I started EatStreet, a company that provides online ordering to 15,000 restaurants.

One of the most important things I’ve learned is Madison and the university have created a vibrant startup community with fantastic resources that anyone starting a business should explore.

We didn’t immediately seek help or mentorship starting and scaling our business. If we had known about these resources, we could have avoided a lot of unnecessary work and growing pains.

I’ve put together a list of a few programs that helped us in our first few years of existence.

 Student business contests

Starting an online business costs money, from incorporating a company to paying server costs to advertising. Everything comes at a price.

That was the primary motivation for us to enter business competitions at UW.

The most significant competition to our company’s history was the Burrill Business Plan Competition, hosted at the business school. Though this contest is currently on a hiatus due to lack of funding, it was still a great resource.

We entered after four months in business and didn’t win anything, but we picked up an unexpected resource: mentorship.

The judges in the competition gave us valuable feedback to scaling the business up. A year later, we came back and won the entire thing, a $10,000 prize.

Looking back, the money made a huge difference by allowing us to expand, but the advice was just as valuable by making our company successful.

EatStreet also participated in the UW Computer Sciences NEST software competition. We did not participate in — but have heard great things about — the Qualcomm Innovation Competition and Innovation Days.

The Law & Entrepreneurship Clinic 

Legal services can be pricey, and as first-time business owners we were unfamiliar to jargon like Partner Agreement, Articles of Incorporation, LLC or C-Corp, Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

The Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic is a service offered by UW Law School that provides free legal services to selected new companies. All of the legal work for our first year of operation was done by the clinic, and saved us thousands of dollars.

 Merlin Mentors

Good mentorship is the single biggest reason EatStreet has survived and flourished over the past six years.

After participating in the business contest, we were connected to a group of local business leaders and entrepreneurs with significant success under their belt through Merlin Mentors.

These people volunteer to help new companies with their strategies and challenges. The insights we learned saved us hundreds of man-hours by keeping us from making preventable mistakes.

Capital Entrepreneurs

Being an entrepreneur can be lonely. Implicitly by walking a path less taken, there are moments where it’s hard to find other people who relate to your experiences and can provide support and camaraderie.

We joined Capital Entrepreneurs a year after starting, and found an entire club of like-minded individuals. Sometimes it’s nice to grab a beer with another startup founder and talk about the high points and low points of building a company.

 gBETA and gener8tor 

Once our company could demonstrate that for every dollar we spent, we would get more back in return, we were ready to scale out of Madison to the entire Midwest, and then the nation.

Doing that, however, would require years and years without any investment dollars to jumpstart the process.

The Madison and Milwaukee-based startup accelerator gener8tor invests capital in a company while helping them refine their business, forge good connections with potential partners and raise follow on capital.

They invested in us in 2012 and have been a great partner ever since. The acceptance process into the gener8tor program is competitive; they only select five companies from hundreds of applicants.

The program did wonders for us: we made it to 15 cities under their mentorship and eventually raised almost $13 million worth of subsequent investment.

Recently gener8tor launched gBETA, an accelerator for college students in Wisconsin.

This accelerator does not invest any money and does not take any equity, but it provides access to the entire gener8tor network of resources and mentorship.

With gBETA, you get great mentorship, office space and a good shot at a future acceptance to gener8tor.

In five years, EatStreet has scaled to employ over 100 people and sell millions of dollars of food every week.

We grew based on hard work and, admittedly, some great luck, but also because of our access to fantastic mentors and resources along the way.

We learned what our strengths and weaknesses were and found great individuals and organizations to help supplement our shortcomings.

If you’re considering starting a business, I can’t speak highly enough of these resources.

Eric Martell ([email protected]) is the co-founder of EatStreet.