As a startup founder, I know first hand the enormous personal resilience it takes to overcome adversity, setbacks and challenges. During the GFC in Ireland I lost it all. With my young family, I decided to take a courageous leap of faith and relocate to Australia with only $5,000 in my pocket in search of… Read more »
Welcome to our weekly column on the important things to see and do for the ANZ startup community, brought to you by the director of the Spark Festival, Maxine Sherrin. Every Tuesday she picks out 3 things worth putting in the dairy for the week ahead. If you’d like to know more, sign up to the Weekly… Read more »
2020 has been a big year for the start-up industry in Australia. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported more than 340,000 new business entries in Australia between 2019-20, and KPMG reported startup investment rising despite COVID. Generally, companies take two different routes when kicking off a new business – seeking external investment or bootstrapping. I… Read more »
You’re a tech entrepreneur gearing up to build and launch the first release of your product – your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The plan: build out enough of the product to test the core value proposition in the fastest, leanest way possible. With enough luck, customers will see that your product fulfils their needs and… Read more »
Based on research with startup founders, Dan Bradley and Gareth Joe put forward a new approach to start up culture that prioritises health and wellbeing and could benefit VCs too. In the startup world, there has long been the assumption that sacrificing your health is the only route to success. It’s all about the hustle… Read more »
This week, after building the Momentum ESR platform for nearly 18 years, we’ve been acquired by Compass Education. I’ve been asked several times why I did this now. The simple answer is: we have found a shared vision in Compass education to provide a comprehensive school administration solution for NSW Schools into the future. We… Read more »
In all my years building and operating startups, the most important lesson I’ve learned is this… Those that build the right product and broadly market it most effectively, win. This might seem obvious to some. But in my experience, too many founders spend too little time building and too much time hesitating, philosophising, pontificating, and/or… Read more »
It seems audacious to compare ourselves to Amazon – one of the biggest ecommerce retailers on the planet – but let me explain. Amazon drastically disrupted the normal supply chain model by bypassing retailers. They then further disrupted the supply chain by acquiring suppliers, removing the need for wholesalers. Amazon has created a warehouse-to-consumer direct… Read more »
Sarah Neill is a serial entrepreneur who has also been been working in innovation in the telco space for more than 15 years. Her first startup was the travel tech company Doodad in 2013, followed by A Relatively Unique Inc, and most recently, the fashion tech venture Mys Tyler, which set out to solve the… Read more »
I want to thank Facebook and Zuckerberg sincerely. I truly do. The blindsided vengeance of this past week has proven beyond doubt how dangerous it is for small businesses to rely on any marketing channel they do not fully own and control. Many were Zuckerberg-ed into believing that Facebook loved them and would be a never-ending fountain… Read more »
Four years into our business journey, the sharks started circling – and we welcomed it. My co-founder and I were pleased to accept the opportunity to appear on Channel 10’s Shark Tank, the show where potential investors were the sharks and entrepreneurs the meat. While our venture had started well, we were at the stage where… Read more »
Historically most businesses have been either outside sales businesses with an army of people selling face to face, or inside sales business that sell remotely. The idea of reaching customers remotely is nothing new. The origins of inside sales date back to the 1950s when businesses were using telemarketing. But inside sales has evolved beyond… Read more »
Clubhouse is one of the newest social media platforms and I just had to try it. I’d heard that Clubhouse was a platform where you can connect with some of the world’s prominent industry leaders via live voice interaction. This means you speak directly to real movers and shakers in your industry just through your… Read more »
The ecosystem of technology companies and startups stands out for its intense competition, rapid scaling, and an often cut-throat, growth-at-all costs environment. It is an industry that did relatively well over the pandemic, while many others faced existential threats under the cloud of a global recession. The imposition of remote work and the rapid… Read more »
After an entirely extraordinary 2020, the dawn of a new year brings with it not only new technologies, tools and trends, but – perhaps most importantly – new opportunities for businesses post-pandemic. For many, 2020 was defined not by the pursuit of goals set at the beginning of the year, but simply by survival and… Read more »
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