Guy Ryan is inspiring young New Zealanders to create socially conscious startups

March 4, 2015, 6:04 pm

≫ Next: Sydney startup ConX wants tradies to stop relying on word of mouth to find work

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Guy Ryan

Though it often goes unnoticed by those of us across the Tasman, New Zealand’s startup scene is booming. For Guy Ryan, recently named New Zealand’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year, the future of the country’s socially conscious ventures looks particularly bright. Guided by his mantra to “imagine if every young New Zealander unleashed their potential to change the world and if the stories of those young Kiwis could inspire others”, Ryan has been working with young people through the Inspiring Stories Trust, an organisation he founded to help young entrepreneurs tackle social, environmental, and economic challenges. “In the 21st century, I think there has been a shift toward entrepreneurship that is driven by more than just the desire to make money quickly. It's now critical for entrepreneurs and startups to be making a positive impact for people and planet, not just profit,” Ryan said. “As New Zealanders, we have to step up and play a positive role in creating solutions to the big issues of our time. We are making progress and the mindset is shifting - this growing global movement in social entrepreneurship is starting to take roots in New Zealand and we're seeing an increasing number of startups and social enterprises come out of our cities.” Ryan’s interest in social issues developed while at university. Over 2009 and 2010, he co-produced the short film Carving the Future, a documentary following four young New Zealanders trying to make a difference with the climate change movement. Through the film, Ryan met Bill McKibben, the founder of climate change activism organisation 350.org, and was inspired to do more. “I was frustrated that our leaders had known about the cause and effects of climate change for decades and not taken any serious action. I wanted to do something, but that rather than take a staunch activist approach, I wanted to focus on giving more support and visibility to people actually creating solutions,” Ryan said. He then launched Inspiring Stories in 2011. Able to get off the ground thanks to a scholarship from Vodafone, the organisation created the Festival For the Future, a youth-led conference celebrating innovation and social change, and Live the Dream, a ten week accelerator program for social enterprise startups. Inspiring Stories has worked with over 5000 young New Zealanders since its launch. Now going into its third year, the Live the Dream accelerator program has seen the development of ventures like WHAM, a startup creating tailor-made wellness programs to improve the quality of health and wellbeing in the workplace, Social Lab, which focuses on reusable wood waste, and Urban Kai, a venture collecting compost, growing and selling produce, and creating educational programs. “We take a very keen approach to looking at global organisations, how they source their ideas and what exists for young Kiwis wanting to make a difference. We're leading that conversation in New Zealand,” Ryan said. Inspiring Stories and its programs have been able to grow thanks to partnerships with industry and government organisation such as Wellington City Council, universities, and the Ministry of Youth Development - Nikki Kaye, New Zealand's Youth Minister, recently awarded Inspiring Stories a NZ$500,000 grant. These bodies are becoming increasingly aware of the potential of startups to help grow the economy and change the future. With Wellington home to more startups per capita than any other city in New Zealand, Jo Coughlan, the economic portfolio leader of Wellington City Council, said that the council is focused on growing and attracting young talent and businesses to grow its knowledge economy. “Initiatives like those led by Inspiring Stories are absolutely key to helping the city achieve its goal of a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita over 10 years, adding an additional $5.4 billion to our economy by 2031,” Coughlan said. As Inspiring Stories continues to up the level of conversation around social enterprises in New Zealand, Ryan is considering the possibility for partnerships with Australian organisations. “We're now in our fifth year of operation and we’re making real progress. It's such a privilege to be working with young people who are doing all kinds of remarkable things to make the world a better place.”

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Sydney startup ConX wants tradies to stop relying on word of mouth to find work

March 4, 2015, 6:14 pm

≫ Next: The mergers and acquisitions round up

≪ Previous: Guy Ryan is inspiring young New Zealanders to create socially conscious startups

Conx

When we think of job search platforms, the big names like Seek and CareerOne are the first to come to mind. However, as niche platforms targeted at specific industries keep popping up, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the big names aren’t working for every kind of job. Such is the case for tradesmen. With new contracting jobs popping up every day and requiring a quick turnaround, the big platforms - which require job seekers to sift through thousands of jobs and businesses to look through CVs - aren’t particularly suited to the trades and construction industry. What’s more, with tradies frequently shifting from site to site and job to job, subsequent work often comes from connections they made on a previous job. This means workers new to the industry can find it difficult to get work due to their lack of connections. It was this idea that led to the creation of tradie job search platform ConX. Co-founder Annie Slattery, originally from Ireland, said that she and her co-founders, one of them a tradie himself, saw first hand how difficult their Irish friends were finding it to get trade jobs, even though Australian builders were crying out for workers. “It didn’t take long to realise there was a huge problem industry-wide and a better solution than what’s currently available was needed. So we built a system that’s simple, convenient and cost effective for construction businesses of all sizes to source and hire workers in a really quick turnaround time,” Slattery said. Contractors pay to post jobs, specifying things like the level of experience required, whether the tradies will need to bring their own tools, and the start and end date of a job. ConX launched in beta last August. Slattery said the site has seen solid growth since the start of 2015, with over 400 tradesman now registered on the site and 70 jobs posted, each with multiple positions available. The site is currently charging $50 for each job posting. “We've been focused on testing a few key channels, both online and offline, and will continue to test until we find out where we can get the most registrations for the cheapest price...We are currently running with a very basic transactional model but testing more complex models. If you can make a customer’s life easier, they will always choose you, so getting that price point spot on is critical,” Slattery said. She said that the startup’s achievements thus far have been small but consistent, from getting the first 100 tradesmen registered on the site and getting the first businesses registered to return with good feedback and post another job. “We are looking to build out the team and the product and start really ramping up the numbers by running a top down, bottom up approach. Top down we're starting to form strategic partnerships with respected industry bodies and bottom up, we'll be optimising channels where the tradies hang out,” Slattery said. ConX may face competition from platforms like OneShift, which has already become an established name for short-term and contract jobs, and a quick search showing it boasts a significant number of job postings in the trades and construction industry. However, the fact that ConX is tailored to just one industry and hosts only industry-specific jobs may see tradies prefer it. Furthermore, the biggest competition ConX faces may not be other job search platforms but, in fact, the word of mouth nature of hiring in the trades and services industry. It’s far easier for a boss to ask around about someone for a job rather than waiting a day or two to post a job online and look at applications. Partnerships with industry bodies will certainly help make ConX known to both businesses and workers. The networking side may even be able to help here - Slattery said Facebook has been a big driver to the site as tradies have shared the word about ConX. To ramp up the business this year, ConX is applying for a government grant and will be looking to raise capital.

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The mergers and acquisitions round up

March 5, 2015, 12:33 pm

≫ Next: YouChews will not be going to China with other muru-D startups; its focus is firmly on the Australian market

≪ Previous: Sydney startup ConX wants tradies to stop relying on word of mouth to find work

watson

Another Friday, another mergers and acquisitions round up. A few big names have splashed some cash this week, including Visa and Uber. Get up to speed with it all: IBM Watson Group acquires AlchemyAPI IBM has acquired AlchemyAPI, a company making deep-learning solutions that allow developers to create apps that can analyse user data such as conversations, reports, and photos for its Watson product, an artificial intelligence platform that enables partnership between humans and computers that famously competed on the game show Jeopardy! Mike Rhodin, senior vice president at IBM Watson, said that the move shows IBM is continuing to invest in Watson, “amplifying a robust Watson ecosystem where third party organizations are creating new businesses and solutions powered by Watson. Our ability to draw upon both internal and external sources of innovation, from IBM Research to acquisitions like AlchemyAPI, remain central to our strategy of bringing Watson to new markets, industries and regions.” Visa acquires TrialPay Visa is set to acquire TrialPay, a cross-platform monetisation tool that works by letting users unlock content and features on different sites and apps by signing up for a free trial or offer from another business. The acquisition of the company follows Visa’s acquiring of a strategic license of TrialPay’s technology in August last year; Visa has also been a long-term investor and partner. Visa said it will be integrating TrialPay into its product portfolio to help businesses acquire customers, drive traffic, and increase sales by reaching Visa cardholders with targeted offers. Ramon Martin, senior vice president of merchant sales and solutions at Visa, said that “TrialPay will strengthen our loyalty and offers platform, which we expect to become a strategic and competitive differentiator that can help merchants build customer loyalty and increase sales in both the digital and physical retail environments.” NXP Semiconductors and Freescale Semiconductor merging in $40 billion deal Two chip companies are merging in a deal worth $40 billion. A joint statement said that the merger will create an industry leader with combined revenue greater than $10 billion, with the company becoming “the market leader in automotive semiconductor solutions and the market leader in general purpose microcontroller products. The combined company will capitalize on the growing opportunities created by the accelerating demand for security, connectivity and processing.” Richard Clemmer, CEO of NXP, said the companies “full expect to continue to significantly out-grow the overall market, drive world-class profitability and generate even more cash.” Microsoft looking to buy Prismatic TechCrunch has reported that Microsoft is interested in buying Prismatic, a news app that recommends articles to users based on what people in their networks are reading. Other companies like Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are reportedly interested in buying the app, but Microsoft seems to be the frontrunner. The buying price is said to be $30 million. Super Awesome acquires Ad4Kids London-based marketing platform Super Awesome has acquired Spanish startup Ad4Kids, a platform allowing brands and developers to reach children through mobile advertising. Dylan Collins, co-founder of SuperAwesome, said that the recent launch of a kid-friendly version of YouTube by Google shows that tech is beginning to take kids seriously. He told TechCrunch: “There’s $11 billion-plus spent on TV advertising but just $700 million in digital advertising across the kids market. Clearly that’s completely out of step with the reality of where kids are.” Uber acquires deCarta Uber is closing its first acquisition, buying San Jose-based mapping startup deCarta. The startup provides a location services such as routing, mapping, and local search and decoding. With Mashable first breaking the story, an Uber spokesperson told the site, "A lot of the functionality that makes the Uber app so reliable, affordable and seamless is based on mapping technologies. With the acquisition of deCarta, we will continue to fine-tune our products and services that rely on maps –- for example UberPOOL, the way we compute ETAs, and others – and make the Uber experience even better for our users." Docker acquires SocketPlane Docker, the company behind an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications, has acquired SocketPlane, a startup that software defined networking for container-based clouds. In a blog post about the acquisition, the SocketPlane team stated that Docker’s “focus on user experience and simplicity is unmatched. Our early work with Docker during the open network design sprints gave us clear indications that the Docker maintainers were interested in being good open source stewards for the networking community in a project with an already staggering community of users and contributors. We also saw a genuine desire from Docker leadership to do right by both, individual contributors and the ecosystem.”

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YouChews will not be going to China with other muru-D startups; its focus is firmly on the Australian market

March 5, 2015, 12:44 pm

≫ Next: Spotify’s Design Lead on Why Side Projects Should Be Stupid

≪ Previous: The mergers and acquisitions round up

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I think we have all been there before, sitting around a boardroom table or standing within a room at networking events being offered stale sandwiches or cold chain store pizza as "snacks" to get you through the night. Not only is it boring, it is also extremely unhealthy - and why, especially in the startup space renowned for the pizza and beer combo, do we shovel mind numbing, un-nutritious snacks into our mouth knowing that within 30 minutes we will be restless, tired and wanting to leave half way through the speaker or presentation? Sydney based startup YouChews wants to show business owners and corporates that there is a better way of doing things. The company is an online catering marketplace for interesting and unique food options that have been sourced from the local community. It allows businesses and individuals to source and order bespoke food options from otherwise unheard of food artisans that are trending throughout the grassroots of the foodie scene and bring them to the 'masses'. The startup was founded by Liz Kaelin and Phil Doran and is part of the current muru-D accelerator programme. For a short time, the company had Jo Cranford as its CTO who recently moved on to pursue other projects. But during that time, YouChews came along in leaps and bounds from a technology standpoint and now has a team of 12 people working within the organisation, nicknamed the "Chewsy Crew". Kaelin, who has a background in nutrition and dietetics, came up with the idea for YouChews after attending a lot of networking events within the Sydney business scene. Kaelin questioned why offices and companies would spend money on crappy food when there was all this interesting community food available to them at similar prices. Setting out to prove product-market fit, Kaelin and Doran operated the business manually for the first year to get a sound understanding of what technology they needed and the types of activities they would need that technology to facilitate. Unlike other 'tech-first' businesses also part of the muru-D programme, by the time YouChews joined the accelerator it had already proven that it had a solid market, having made sales from day one even before a proper website was live. But make no mistake, technology, as Kaelin says, is in fact the most important part of the startup. "Technology is the most important component of the business" says Kaelin. "We have operated manually for the first year to really get the background and understanding of what we wanted the technology to do, and work out how we can introduce people to small local food businesses, but at scale," she said. Doing this has allowed the business to pivot slightly. At the time the startup started pitching to muru-D, the concept behind YouChews was that it would be like the 'Pandora' of catering. This meant that instead of knowing what they were getting, customers would just be surprised with the food that turned up to their event. Perhaps one of the biggest customer learnings Kaelin shared with Startup Daily was the realisation that users wanted both choices and different levels of budget options. The way the site works now is users enter how many people they will be catering for and the budget per person they have in mind. The budgets start out at a minimum of $6.00 per head. The site then populates a list of food options for the customer based on group size and budget. Everything is then co-ordinated via the YouChews interface from start to finish, with the caterer being the one that delivers the food to the user. This is not just for quality control reasons but because every foodie on the platform has a story and this can easily be communicated with the user, creating an even greater sense of engagement with the platform and the YouChews brand - although this interaction does happen offline, as delivery is the final step in the UX process. Of course, YouChews makes its money by taking a clip of ticket from each order made via the platform. At the moment, unlike all the other muru-D startups, YouChews is not preparing to go on the excursion to China. This is simply because getting a platform that has fresh food products to scale is dependent on making sure everything from a local perspective goes off without a hitch first. After the team is satisfied that they have gotten everything smooth sailing in the Sydney market, the most logical expansion plans for the platform are of a national nature first as opposed to going straight into an overseas marketplace. "At the moment we are taking a step back from business development," says Kaelin. "We already know that we [YouChews] has product-market fit and instead we are focusing on the technology and making sure that we get that right so we can reach scalability all over Australia". This decision is supported by the YouChews invested advisory board, who while not publicly revealed (until the upcoming demo night) includes a well-known figure within the hospitality industry and a financial and legal gun that has helped the company form some solid terms and conditions - something that is needed considering the industry being played in. Although YouChews claims to be profitable right now, Kaelin acknowledges that a potential funding round following the completion of the muru-D programme would help the startup scale faster. But Kaelin and the YouChews team are currently on the fence as to whether that would be the right move. "I am still on the fence about funding right now as the business is currently profitable, what it is going to come down to is identifying future investors that align with the [YouChews] vision in order for us to get that acceleration" says Kaelin.

Startup Daily has formally partnered with Muru-D over the next 12 
months to bring you the stories of its startups, mentors and 
investors.

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Spotify’s Design Lead on Why Side Projects Should Be Stupid

March 5, 2015, 12:45 pm

≫ Next: Growing from a startup to a large company. Where startups go wrong in the process.

≪ Previous: YouChews will not be going to China with other muru-D startups; its focus is firmly on the Australian market

Tobias van Schneider lives his life like one big side project. Today, he designs and builds new products for Spotify in New York, but he couldn’t have predicted that when he dropped out of school at age 15 to work as an apprentice in a computer shop in Austria. He couldn't have predicted that when he applied to graduate schools and design schools and was told repeatedly that he didn't have enough training or talent to build a career. [Source: FirstRound.com]

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Growing from a startup to a large company. Where startups go wrong in the process.

March 8, 2015, 3:52 pm

≫ Next: The Top 50 Women Entrepreneurs Under 40 List of 2015

≪ Previous: Spotify’s Design Lead on Why Side Projects Should Be Stupid

Startup Stock Photos

It’s not easy being a startup. Statistically, the odds are against you. A survey by Bloomberg has revealed that a shocking 80% of small companies fail within their first 18 months of existence. Now that is not to say that you can’t be the next Sir Richard Branson, what we are saying to you as a budding entrepreneur, it is important to steer clear of the mistakes commonly made by those who have gone before you. It simply means learn from those who have failed and those who have succeeded in business and find the best possible path for your business to both survive and flourish. Failure to plan strategically and financially Poor strategic and financial planning is by far the most common cause of business failure, with incompetence accounting for 46% of failures within five years of starting up, according to a recent study. Making pricing and other financial decisions based on emotion, not planning sufficiently and being ignorant of financing are some key examples of incompetence. The importance of devising a well-researched, sound business plan cannot be overstated. If you are completely clueless, it might benefit you to do some self-directed study or even enrol in business school, or at the very least to consult somebody who will be able to help you fine-tune your business strategy and financial plans. Not using the proper tools Many entrepreneurs are under the impression that they have to go all in and hire full-time staff straight away when they begin. The reality is, nowadays there are many services like oDesk.com that allow for a ‘testing phase’ before jumping in with both feet. Hiring online freelancers for certain duties not only teaches an entrepreneur how to communicate with future staff, but it also allows a risk-free way for founders to begin to scale their businesses without the added pressure of not being able to put things on hold, re-collaborate and pivot if they need to. Aversion to asking for payment It can be easy to send out a pile of invoices and then congratulate yourself on a job well done. However, invoices should never be mistaken for cash in hand. Startup and small business owners soon learn that getting payment from clients is seldom as easy as it sounds. Unfortunately, customers are not immune to failure and bankruptcy, particularly in the current financial climate. Avoid the temptation of assessing your business’s financial situation based on expected payment and put in place a system for reminding clients about unpaid invoices. Not having a clearly defined scope In the early days, it can be tempting to try to do anything anyone is willing to pay you for. However, in the long run, it is best not to try to be all things to all people. Diluting your brand and scope tends to result in your business being mediocre at a wide range of activities. Trying to offer a far-reaching range of services, developing products with which you have no expertise or trying to reach too far beyond your established target markets for the sake of a slight boost in earnings can hurt your business in the long term and divert resources away from focusing on your strengths. Trying to swim in unfamiliar waters without deliberate research and sufficient expertise can cause your team, your budget and your business in general to suffer from undue strain. Alienating employees As your business grows, it is crucial that you are able to recruit and retain talented people. A talented and motivated team can make all the difference between your business and your competitors. Always look for ways to improve your company culture, the benefits you pass on to your employees and the reasons your employees would want to continue working for you. Employees need to get the sense that the leaders of the business care about them personally and professionally, and if a business is perceived as treating its employees simply as units programmed to carry out certain tasks, it will repeatedly fail to retain top talent. Not having enough passion Running a business is hard work. Don’t let anybody convince you otherwise. When you are passionate about what you do, your enthusiasm will infect the people you work with, whether at the office, production plant or facility, encouraging them to work harder, be more focused and ultimately enjoy more success at their jobs. It is difficult to motivate employees if you yourself are unable to muster enthusiasm for your business activities. If you lack passion ask yourself seriously why are you in business? Assuming customers will eventually appear While focusing on producing quality products and services can in some situations help to increase your customer base, it is never safe to assume that this is a given. Many businesses make the mistake of regarding marketing as an unnecessary expense and try to cut it from the budget in challenging times. The sad truth is that the market is inundated with excellent products and great ideas that have failed to gain success due to insufficient marketing. It is important to understand that the average consumer’s consciousness is already flooded with products and that in general products a consumer has either tried or been recommended have a far greater chance of being purchased. It is therefore important to ensure that your marketing efforts are coordinated with each stage of product development, from innovation to release on the market. Even before your product hits the shelves, it should be very clear in your mind which marketing activities need to be carried out and when. Forgetting that the customer always comes first One unfortunate mistake many entrepreneurs make when they’ve hit upon a brilliant new business idea is to dive right into developing the product or service. This is a huge mistake if done without gathering sufficient information about the target market. The customer must be at the forefront of your mind at every stage of your strategy. Talk to your customers, try to put yourself in their shoes and treasure those who have given your business a chance. Loyalty schemes are a great way to incentivise continued loyalty, and referral programmes can be a great way to get existing customers to recruit new ones. Remember that a satisfied customer is the best form of marketing and can yield an extremely high conversion rate. Don’t forget to ensure that existing customers continue to receive communications from you, as it is far easier to sell to someone who is already known to your business than a complete stranger. Failing to communicate clearly Much can get lost in translation, and while communicating with your customers can seem as easy as making a post on social media, it is important that you scrutinise all communications to ensure they clearly transmits the appropriate value propositions in a clear, concise and compelling fashion. If you have uncovered a key selling point, make sure you communicate it effectively to the public. Many companies have garnered bad publicity with badly worded communications, or been dismissed due to ineffective or unclear communication. Don’t let that happen to your business. In order to communicate effectively, you will need a deep understanding of your customer base. Use the sort of language they would use and ensure your message is clear at all times, you are concise rather than meandering and that things are put across in a compelling manner that yields a high conversion rate. Not using the proper tools to scale properly Many entrepreneurs are under the impression that they have to go all in and hire full-time staff straight away when they begin. The reality is, nowadays there are many services like Elance-oDesk that allow for a ‘testing phase’ before jumping in with both feet. Outsourcing certain duties not only teaches an entrepreneur how to communicate with future staff, but it also allows a risk-free way for founders to begin to scale their businesses without the added pressure of not being able to put things on hold, re-collaborate and pivot if they need to. Unfortunately, there is no secret formula for business success, and the most successful entrepreneurs are able to combine excellent strategy and logic with creative thinking in order to build a successful brand. By not making the above mistakes, you have a higher chance of avoiding the fate of many failed businesses and, with adequate passion, ability and foresight, seeing your small business grow into a large and successful company is very achievable.

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The Top 50 Women Entrepreneurs Under 40 List of 2015

March 8, 2015, 5:11 pm

≫ Next: Deckee is essentially TripAdvisor for boating

≪ Previous: Growing from a startup to a large company. Where startups go wrong in the process.

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Unlike other lists of this nature we use a wide set of metrics in putting this list together, this means that although financial turnover or capital raised by the entrepreneurs business is a factor we look at is is not the primary metric. In addition to revenue our team looked at social influence, the entrepreneurs own industry influence, the overall importance of their company mission, the current traction of the company rather than the age of the company and of course being a startup focused publication the list has a bias towards technology based business founders. In fact all women on this years list have utilised technology in some way to scale their venture.

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Deckee is essentially TripAdvisor for boating

March 8, 2015, 5:52 pm

≫ Next: Here are the 15 most well-funded startups in Southeast Asia

≪ Previous: The Top 50 Women Entrepreneurs Under 40 List of 2015

Deckee

Though Australia is surrounded by water and Australians love nothing more than being out on the water, entrepreneur Mike McKiernan believes that the boating industry has often been left behind by technology. McKiernan, a former designer, said that after five years working in the boating industry where he helped solve the same problems day after day, he began wondering why there was no definitive online resource that compiled all of this information for the community’s benefit. So he decided to make one himself, Deckee. “A wave of consumer internet services have completely changed so many established industries over the past decade, so it was interesting to observe that one of the most popular leisure activities in the country dropped anchor some time in the early 2000s and hadn't budged since,” McKiernan said. “I began to wonder why boating had been left behind, why the process of planning travel and making decisions involving the servicing, storage and repair of boats remained much the same as it was over a decade ago?” Launched this month, Deckee is essentially TripAdvisor for boating: users can find reviews from consumers and ‘Decksperts’ for all kinds of businesses in the boating industry, like boat hire companies, mechanics, and marina maintenance. The platform also provides detailed location guides for many popular waterways. With over a million recreational vessels registered in Australia and over 4000 marine businesses serving them, McKiernan believes there is a huge market for a service like Deckee. “Recreational boating accounts for 7.5 percent - $8 billion - of total tourism spending. The size, demographic and culture of boating in Australia makes for an ideal proving ground for Deckee as a concept and a product,” he said. After taking part in the Slingshot accelerator program last year, McKiernan raised $140,000 from industry investors, signed on d’Albora Marinas as a partner for the site’s launch, and saw businesses like Enviropacific Services, Royal Motor Yacht Club Broken Bay, and Newcastle Cruising Yacht Club become paying customers. Though free on a basic plan, businesses can upgrade to either a $69/month or $149/month plan, which allows access to bonus features like enhanced exposure in search results, the ability to respond directly to reviews, add professional photography to profiles, and hiding competitor profiles. “Deckee will always be free for boat owners and we are focused on making the site as useful and enjoyable as possible and not overrun with commercial noise. This guiding principle will determine how we experiment with other revenue streams and ideas in the future,” McKiernan said. Thanks to McKiernan’s design skills, Deckee is an attractive platform, with a clean and engaging UI. Given both the fact that there's a review site for almost everything you could possibly think of and the size of the boating industry, Deckee should be able to attract users and grow steadily as word gets out. "There are a number of existing websites out there that function primarily as marine business directories, like a niche Yellow Pages. None of them have developed defensibility in the market because there is no focus around community - there are no hooks or features to get people coming back regularly," McKiernan said. “Our primary goal right now is growing an active community of passionate yachties, skippers, fisherman, sailors and industry experts and creating a place online that they can call their own."

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Here are the 15 most well-funded startups in Southeast Asia

March 9, 2015, 6:05 pm

≫ Next: Perth’s Spacecubed partners with Gurney Branding to help startups get their message right

≪ Previous: Deckee is essentially TripAdvisor for boating

SouthEastAsia

When it comes to startups and entrepreneurship, most of the narrative in the past years have been focused on Silicon Valley. 2014 is the year where Southeast Asia proved itself to be a worthy challenger to the lead role, and people are beginning to take notice. [Source: TechinAsia]

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Perth’s Spacecubed partners with Gurney Branding to help startups get their message right

March 10, 2015, 4:22 pm

≫ Next: Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel will be speaking at an event for University of Sydney

≪ Previous: Here are the 15 most well-funded startups in Southeast Asia

Gurney Branding

A lot of startups have interesting products and ideas that could end up changing the way we do something forever. Sometimes, though, startups find it difficult to get their vision across to consumers and, as a result, don’t grow as fast or go as far as they should. Getting the vision across to consumers is all part of a startup’s branding, which includes design, defining the message and the right audience to target, social media, building relationships with the right industry stakeholders, investors, PR agencies and journalists, and more. Getting all of this right from the start is key to growth, not only in order to attract customers, but to attract employees and investors and grow the startup internally as well. However, it can be hard for startups who have so far been focused on perfecting a product or platform to get it right, particularly when many believe that branding and brand positioning is far more relevant to larger companies with an established profile rather than startups. Perth coworking space Spacecubed has partnered with Gurney Branding, a local brand agency, to create the Startup Brand School, a monthly class hoping to help startups get their branding right. “We love working with startups and have always wanted to provide a service for the members of Perth’s startup scene who couldn’t yet invest in our services or didn’t quite understand how branding would help them survive and grow,” said Brad Gurney, founder and creative director of Gurney. “Our hope for the Startup Brand School is to educate startups so their survival rate will be higher and give Perth even more to be proud of on the international business scene.” The classes, which will be held at Spacecubed, will consist of a theory sessions, where startups will learn about an element of branding, and a one hour session where startups will be helped with and receive feedback on their own brands by Gurney staff. With statistics showing that 80 percent of startups fail within their first five years of operation, Gurney hopes that an initiative like the Startup Brand School will be able to help a few more stick around. The first workshop will be held on April 14. Startups can register for a session here.

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Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel will be speaking at an event for University of Sydney

March 10, 2015, 4:55 pm

≫ Next: Stashboard is a cloud storage platform for creatives

≪ Previous: Perth’s Spacecubed partners with Gurney Branding to help startups get their message right

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In an exclusive event hosted by the Young Entrepreneurs Society and the University of Sydney Union, co-founder of mobile technology startup Snapchat Evan Spiegel will participate in a student only interactive session at the USYD campus next Monday evening. At just 24 years old, Spiegel is seen as one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, having built a company valued at over US$2 billion by the age of 21 that boasts millions of individuals all over the world as users. During the one hour session, Spiegel is expected to give his views on entrepreneurship, startups, and give people an insight on the future of Snapchat. The event is exclusively for University of Sydney students only. Industry chatter at the moment indicates that Spiegel and his team are currently working on a new funding round, that when closed will value the company at US$19 billion. Earlier this week Spiegel met with Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al Saud for discussions, with the Prince's investment company putting out a statement saying that the two were discussing “potential business co-operation” between their companies. [caption id="attachment_38839" align="aligncenter" width="780"]

Evan Spiegel meets with the Saudi Prince | Source: Kingdom.com[/caption] Prince Alwaleed is a veteran investor and has stakes in other technology companies such as Twitter, Apple, AOL, and the China based JD.com. These conversations also come at an opportune time for the Prince, as he recently sold his stake in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and is rumoured to be looking at a new media entity to invest some of his billions of dollars into. Snapchat now has more than 100 million monthly users and as a company has grown rapidly outside of the 'messaging' space that it was once known for. Additional features like 'Snapchat Stories' and 'Discover' have been widely embraced on the platform and are a growing source of revenue for the business. To give you an example of the power that in particular 'Discover' (a feature that allows media partners to stream video clips on the platform) has, a recent campaign ran by The Food Network resulted in over 10 million unique visitors to the website in less than 2 weeks. There is no word yet on whether Spiegel is in Australia for reasons other than this talk at the University of Sydney.

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Stashboard is a cloud storage platform for creatives

March 10, 2015, 6:00 pm

≫ Next: Freelancer completes its 14th acquisition; buys assets of Israeli startup Donanza

≪ Previous: Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel will be speaking at an event for University of Sydney

Stashboard

There are a number of easy to use cloud storage and productivity platforms readily available online, but two Sydney creatives have launched a new platform called Stashboard in the hopes of helping others in their industry work better and easier. Al Spiers, co-founder of Stashboard, said the idea for the cloud storage platform came from his years as an art director, when he would have to carry around a portable hard drive full of his creative assets like vector illustrations, high-res textures, and photos. As the trusty hard drive began to give way to cloud platforms like Dropbox for storage, Pinterest for inspiration, and Evernote for productivity, Spiers wondered why there wasn’t a platform that did it all. “These are great services, but that's a lot of passwords to remember and the cloud sharing has limitations. Also, none of these services really catered for creatives and their daily needs. We wanted to create a virtual replacement for our old creative hard drives. One place for storage, organisation and collaboration, a secure place to ‘Stash’ all your creative stuff, and from there the idea of Stashboard was born,” Spiers said. “We also felt that cloud storage and productivity facilities were a bit boring and devoid of personality especially for creatives. We thought, why can't we make organisation and productivity fun?” So Spiers and his co-founder, designer Thom Davy, came up with Stashboard, a cloud storage platform where creatives can easily store and keep track of all their work and tools. Users can collaborate with others, present their work, and transfer files through the platform. There’s also a Chrome extension which allows users to take and store - or stash - things they find online. The pair first began to build the platform with the help of developers in Nepal two years ago. After getting Stashboard to its beta phase, the pair approached a New Zealand development agency to help build the platform into the product it is today. The founders believe that while the other cloud platforms mentioned above are popular with millions of users, Stashboard will be able to compete by targeting the creative niche. “Against the speed, complexity, and scope of our creative work, email, external drives and multiple services are no longer up to the task. Figuring out what needs to get done, getting on the same page creatively, and finding the right asset for a job or reference to present to a client to win a pitch is inefficient,” Spiers said. He believes that while platforms like Evernote and Dropbox are great at what they do, they weren’t designed with the creative process in mind. Though he sees Stashboard having a broad appeal in the long term, Spiers believes the first to embrace the product will be the creative industry. This creative industry the startup is targeting is estimated to be worth $121 million in Australia, with the common budgeting assumption being that 10 percent of a marketing budget in the creative, entertainment and leisure industries is directed to initial concepts and ideation, including tools to create, design, build and store. Initial growth has come through the team getting word out among creatives by running workshops at design agencies and contacting universities and colleges to get users at the start of their careers. The free basic subscription, offering 2GB of storage, will surely help get people on board to at least trial the platform which, given that it was created by a designer and an art director, is beautiful to look at and easy to use. Paid plans start at $10/month for 10GB, going up to 200GB of storage for $14.99/month, and 500GB at $19.99/month. Spiers and Davy have high hopes for Stashboard in 2015. As well as creating a mobile platform so Stashboard is accessible on every device, the team will be listening carefully to user feedback and re-prioritising features and functionality accordingly. They also hope to grow Stashboard into a global business with over 250,000 users by the end of the year.

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Freelancer completes its 14th acquisition; buys assets of Israeli startup Donanza

March 10, 2015, 7:02 pm

≫ Next: Airpocket wants to be more than a product; it aims to be a customisable technology play

≪ Previous: Stashboard is a cloud storage platform for creatives

MATT-BARRIE-PRESS

This morning Freelancer made an announcement to the ASX that it has acquired the assets of Donanza, a similar service marketplace based out of Israel. Donanza was founded in 2008 by Ami Dudu, Liran Kotzer, and Gil Pal, and aggregates and consolidates freelance jobs published across the web and matches them with over 360,000 freelancers it has in its database, based on criteria such as skill sets, expectations, and budgets. The company received $1 million in funding from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavours fund as well as other investors in 2011, but essentially folded in July 2014 due to running out of money and not being able to work out the 'profit' equation that businesses like these rely on. Regional Director at Freelancer, Pete Cooper, said about the acquisition, "[Donanza] is a really nice fit for the business, [Donanza is] a services marketplace like Freelancer and although they had product market fit, they didn't have the profitability equation solved, which Freelancer has solved, so it's very efficient for us to load up those customers and make a special offer to onboard them." Freelancer now operates in over 247 countries and has over 14.6 million users. The Donanza technology will be rolled into the existing Freelancer platform. None of the founding team will join the Freelancer team as part of this asset acquisition, in fact all have moved on to other businesses. The team has updated the current Donanza splash page with this morning's news: [caption id="attachment_38854" align="aligncenter" width="900"]

The updated announcement on the Donanza website.[/caption] The funds for the purchase will come from existing cash reserves at Freelancer. Cooper has told Startup Daily that the integration of the technology into the platform has already begun. Even though Freelancer is a stand alone platform, the type of technology that Donanza had as an aggregator is a powerful new tool for the company. Essentially it is not too dissimilar to the way in which job site Indeed works, which is one of the fastest growing companies in the world right now. It will be interesting to see how Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer, and his team will utilise it.

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Airpocket wants to be more than a product; it aims to be a customisable technology play

March 11, 2015, 5:55 pm

≫ Next: Health Writer Hub aims to help freelancers develop expertise in writing about medicine

≪ Previous: Freelancer completes its 14th acquisition; buys assets of Israeli startup Donanza

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Airpocket is a new type of carry on bag that has been designed to fit in the back seat pocket on planes. It has multiple compartments that organise all your essential travel items in front of you such as your iPad, phone, passport, magazines, makeup case - everything you use while in transit. The product, which launched on Kickstarter this week, was created by Canberra based Trish Smith after she observed a common occurrence waiting for a flight home from Brisbane to take off. "I was sitting on a plane a few years ago coming home from Brisbane, I was sitting in my seat and there was this young woman with an enormous handbag standing in the aisle by her seat rifling around inside and pulling things out and throwing them on the seat," said Smith. "Behind her was a large queue of people forming because she was blocking the aisle with her carry on and everything, as I watched, she finished tossing everything onto the seat, put her back in the overhead locker and then moved everything from the seat to the pocket, [then] at the end of the flight she repeated the whole process in reverse". It was upon seeing this that Smith thought to herself it would be great to have something that would not only hold all those items passengers needed during a flight, but would then also fit neatly into the back pocket. [caption id="attachment_38878" align="aligncenter" width="754"]

The Airpocket | Image Supplied[/caption] Smith, who works in the recruitment industry, set about trying to turn her vision of this product into a reality. She contacted a woman on Etsy that also happened to be in Canberra that had made custom bean bags for her daughter's birthday and asked if she could help turn sketches she had drawn of the product into a physical product. At that point in time, the product material used was felt. The first few iterations were completed by this woman until her Beanbag business on Etsy began to take off and she could no longer dedicated time to the product that is now known as Airpocket. To date, Smith has taken on various mentors to help her grow the idea into something that is commercially viable. Mentors like Mick Spencer who is the founder of Canberra based OnTheGo has helped out with introductions to source agents and others have put Smith in contact with industrial designers. This has allowed her to refine and tweak the product, and source a place for manufacturing in China. Right now the material being used for the product in neoprene. What makes this interesting is, unlike felt which was originally used, neoprene is completely customisable. This means it will be easy to have the Airpocket product in multiple colours. There is also the ability for neoprene sublimation (custom printing) where if you wanted to have a picture of your cat on the product you could do so. This is where the technology opportunity exists for Smith, and where she would like to see the company get to over the coming years. "Customisation, where people can design their own Airpocket is exactly what I would love to be able to do," says Smith. "It's another of the reasons that I decided to go with neoprene because you can print anything on it". Customisation is most definitely on trend. Australian startups like Shoes of Prey, Style Rocks and Mon Purse are currently doing well in the market. It is worth noting that all of these startups have multiple SKUs, whereas Airpocket, at least for now, is just a singular product. This does not mean however that it will struggle to reach scalability - in fact the opposite could be true. Melbourne based company Keep Cup is also a single product company and in addition to other avenues to market, it allow users to customise their product. In its first 18 months, Keep Cup had revenues of over $3 million. In the same way that Keep Cup has gone to market using multiple strategies like online customisation, physical stockists and corporate partnerships, Smith believes that Airpocket also has the ability to do that, and is already having preliminary conversations about licensing. However, the first phase of this is determining product-market fit, which is what the Kickstarter campaign has already proved. Only a few days in and Airpocket has more than doubled its fundraising goal and in the process has sold about 600 units - this has given Smith the confidence to move forward and begin having serious conversations with manufacturers and shipping companies about setting up infrastructure for the future. In terms of challenges that may be waiting ahead for Smith, copycat product presents a very real threat. Although the company name and product as well as particular features of the product like the pocket layout have been trademarked, the product itself is not patentable. This means that building a brand name and following like the Keep Cups of the world is of paramount importance for Smith, so new customers proactively seek out the Airpocket brand when looking for a product of this nature.

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Health Writer Hub aims to help freelancers develop expertise in writing about medicine

March 11, 2015, 6:11 pm

≫ Next: The mergers and acquisitions round up

≪ Previous: Airpocket wants to be more than a product; it aims to be a customisable technology play

Michelle Guillemard

Much to the chagrin of medical professionals, the internet has allowed people from all over the world to self-diagnose and easily get information that should most likely be coming from doctors. Having specialised in health writing for ten years, Michelle Guillemard has long been passionate about providing readers with content that can help them. As the internet exploded with both health-related content and writers wanting to produce it, she saw the need for a service to help people write about health properly. As a result, she created Health Writer Hub, a resource for health and medical writers. It’s full of training courses and modules, advice, mentoring opportunities, and job listings. “I strongly believed in the concept of a niche community about health and medical writing. Writing about health and medicine isn’t like writing about other subject matters. I don’t believe you need a medical degree as such, but I do think you need a solid understanding of health and medical terminology, diseases, conditions, and issues. Also, clients and employers prefer to hire and recruit writers who have specific health/medical writing-related expertise,” Guillemard said. “I feel health writing is largely about social responsibility and understanding that people will make extremely important choices after reading the content you produce. It’s a profession that blurs the line between writer and adviser, which is why ongoing training, development and keeping up to date with the industry is so important. Ethics and ideology also play a massive role.” Guillemard funded and built the site herself on Wordpress, and now has several revenue streams including including advertising, membership, courses, and other products. “Initially I marketed my business where my target audience was: online communities, social media, and medical writing associations. Now, I have a strong and growing email list and online presence so people who search for related topics find Health Writer Hub via our blog posts as well,” she said. “While it seems like my market is a niche, it’s actually broader than one may assume. I made the decision to go global immediately and most of my users and members are based overseas.” With every second person on the internet starting a blog or posting essays on Medium and calling themselves writers, it has never been easier for people to go online and find something to read. However, it can often be difficult to find writing that contains accurate, researched information and, when it comes to a topic like health, accuracy is key. As a result, outlets will pay for properly researched pieces that can actually help and inform readers. Though there are dozens of online writing courses available, a platform like Health Writer Hub will continue to grow as writers find it’s worth investing to learn how to write for a niche topic. Guillemard adds that medical students, researchers, and health professionals have also joined the platform in order to learn how to write for an audience. The goal for 2015 is to continue to grow the site steadily and put together new products. “I’m constantly looking at new ways I can grow the site and enhance the offerings. I’ll be launching new courses based on what my members want.”

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The mergers and acquisitions round up

March 12, 2015, 1:55 pm

≫ Next: Bugcrowd has raised a $6 million Series A round

≪ Previous: Health Writer Hub aims to help freelancers develop expertise in writing about medicine

jack-dorsey_reuters

Another Friday means another mergers and acquisitions round up. Catch up on all the moves here: Twitter acquires Periscope Periscope, a live video streaming startup, was quietly acquired by Twitter for a just under $100 million about a month ago. According to The Wall Street Journal, Periscope is Twitter's most expensive purchase and demonstrate's Twitter's desire to introduce live video streaming capabilities. This comes as no surprise given the popularity of 'live tweeting' amongst Twitter users. Interestingly, Periscope has been acquired prior to its public launch. TPG to acquire iiNet TPG has announced that it will acquire the remaining shares of iiNet. Currently it owns 6.25 percent of the ISP, and will be paying $8.60 per iiNet share to complete the acquisition. This values the acquisition at approximately $1.4 billion. The acquisition will increase TPG's broadband customer base to more than 1.7 million. News Corp acquires VCCircle News Corp has acquired the Indian media company VCCircle Network, which runs business-related sites like VCCircle.com, Techcircle.in, VCCEdge, VCCircle Training. Its 100 employees across India will become part of News Corp’s India team. News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson said of the acquisition, “This important investment is a sign of our faith in India’s future and our enthusiasm for working with and building up emerging talents in the country. India is an increasingly meaningful part of our portfolio, which is itself increasingly digital and global.” P.V. Sahad, founder and CEO of VCCircle Network, said, “For the past decade, we have built a strong franchise with proprietary data, information, content, and networking capabilities around India’s digital business world. Being a part of News Corp will now allow us to accelerate our already aggressive growth plans.” Softonic acquires AppCrawlr Softonic, a site allowing users to compare desktop software, has acquired AppCrawlr, a service which compares apps according to things like features, price, and what it helps users do. TechCrunch reports that AppCrawlr will continue running as its technology is built into Softonic, which has 100 million monthly users, while its two founders will also moving to Softonic. AppCrawlr founder Joel Fisher told TechCrunch that “to grow globally and to apply the technology to its full potential, it was very compelling for us to join a larger company that has both the resources and the shared vision to make a much bigger impact.” PayPal acquires CyActive PayPal has confirmed its acquisition of CyActive, an Israeli malware detection startup, which will play a major role in its new security centre in Israel. James Barrese, chief technology officer and senior vice president of PayPal, said in a statement, “The acquisition of CyActive will bring great talent and immediately add “future-proof” technology to PayPal’s world-class security platform. With CyActive, we’ll have even more ways to proactively predict and prevent security threats from ever affecting our customers.” Leaked reports have valued the acquisition at around $60 million. Percentil acquires Kirondo Spanish startup Percentil has acquired German startup Kirondo. The two companies both sell pre-owned clothing that kids have barely worn or outgrown - basically, they deal with hand-me-downs. TechCrunch reported that the deal will see Percentil acquire all of Kirondo’s stock, as well as its website and brand. More than 20 staff will stay on, including two of its founders. SugarCRM acquires Stitch Customer relationship management solution - and Salesforce competitor - SugarCRM has bought out Stitch, a kind of virtual assistant app for salespeople. Jason McDowall, co-founder and head of product at Stitch, said in a statement, “We’re very excited to be part of the SugarCRM family. We’re proud of the work we’ve done, applying intelligence at the intersection of CRM, email and calendar data to make people more productive. We share the same vision as SugarCRM, and by combining our teams, we’re uniquely positioned to help shape the future of customer relationship management.” SugarCRM has announced that future releases of Sugar will be enhanced with Stitch capabilities. Lamido merges with Lazada Rocket Internet is closing its Southeast Asian consumer marketplace Lamido, merging it with its other ecommerce store, Lamido. Maximillian Bittner, CEO of Lazada Group, told TechCrunch, “Lamido was a Lazada venture originally set up to offer a consumer marketplace platform separated from Lazada. Over the last year, third party sales have become the dominant driver of Lazada’s sales explosion with the share of third party sales growing from less than 10 percent, at the time of Lamido’s launch, to 75 percent today. With the rapid growth of both Lazada and Lamido marketplaces, we have experienced an increasing overlap between the customer and seller bases across the two platforms.” He added that integration will give buyers and sellers a better experience. iPortal acquires ThinkOfLiving The Malaysian iPortal Group, which owns property listing sites from across Asia, has acquired Thailand startup ThinkOfLiving. According to TechInAsia, the acquisition consists of a base payment of about US$4.6 million, as well as $1.5 million in newly-issued shares and a variable component dependent on the financial performance of the business. ThinkOfLiving will continue to operate as it has. Square acquires Kili Technology Kili Technology, a Canadian payment processing startup, has been acquired by financial services company Square. A statement from Square on the acquisition read: “The payments landscape is changing faster than ever — from EMV to NFC. That’s why we’ve acquired Kili Technology, a company that has developed silicon, electronics, and software that simplify and optimize payment processing.”

Featured Image: Jack Dorsey, Founder, Twitter: Source: Reuters.

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Bugcrowd has raised a $6 million Series A round

March 12, 2015, 4:54 pm

≫ Next: Uber vs goCatch: We Put Taxi-Tech to the Test

≪ Previous: The mergers and acquisitions round up

casey-ellis

Yesterday afternoon, crowdsourced security testing startup Bugcrowd announced in a blog post that it had closed a $6 million Series A round of funding. This brings the total amount of funds raised to date to $9 million since the company was founded in 2012. The round was led by Costanoa Venture Capital with Rally Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Australia's Blackbird Ventures also participating. Bugcrowd has announced that it will be using the funds to expand its operations staff such as sales and marketing personnel and its world class team of security researchers. The funding will also help the startup further accelerate its growth and match the high demand for its services. Right now the Bugcrowd platform claims to have 15,300 security professionals that have been fully vetted and bring a wide gamut of expertise and knowledge to the platform's 'crowd'. The company which was part of Australia's Startmate program when it began, has been working hard over the last couple of years to bridge the gap between skilled security researchers and clients that need security testing. Bugcrowd boasts a strong customer acquisition rate counting some of the world's largest brands as customers including Microsoft, Google and Facebook who have been integral to the success of the 'Bug Bounty' program that runs on the startup's site. In the aforementioned blog post Bugcrowd mentioned that some of its most notable pre-Series A successes includes:

11.3x revenue growth rate year over year from 2013 to 2014
Bugcrowd has seen swift and strong customer acquisition and currently has run over 160 programs to date.
Some well known customers include: Western Union, Pinterest, Barracuda Networks, Silent Circle (Blackphone), Indeed and more.
Significant growth of security researcher “Crowd” from 3,000 in September 2013 to more than 15,000 to date.
Key additions to the Bugcrowd team include security industry veterans such as Kymberlee Price and Jeremiah Grossman who will be joining us as an advisor.

Bugcrowd was founded by Casey Ellis and Chris Raethke and was originally based in Australia until 2013 when it set up base in San Francisco to take advantage of the market over there. It still counts many Australian companies as customers though, having run 'Bounty' campaigns for Google locally and other tech companies based here like BigCommerce, Coles and POLi Payments.

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Uber vs goCatch: We Put Taxi-Tech to the Test

March 12, 2015, 4:55 pm

≫ Next: ‘Australian businesses are drowning in data’ and SurveyMonkey’s new Managing Director wants to help them make sense of it

≪ Previous: Bugcrowd has raised a $6 million Series A round

UBER-GO-CATCH-770x447

Global giant Uber and Aussie start-up goCatch are the two dominant players in taxi-tech in Australia, battling it out for supremacy in our capital cities. We put the two big players, Uber and goCatch, to the test to see how they stack up. [Source: TheHipPocket]

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‘Australian businesses are drowning in data’ and SurveyMonkey’s new Managing Director wants to help them make sense of it

March 15, 2015, 1:32 pm

≫ Next: Moneyball lets sports fans put their coaching skills to the test against friends for cash

≪ Previous: Uber vs goCatch: We Put Taxi-Tech to the Test

SurveyMonkey Team copy

Almost a year ago, globally leading survey platform SurveyMonkey opened its doors in Australia - the company's first base in the Asian-Pacific region. At the time, the platform had around 830,000 local users and Australia was the third largest market in the world for the company, based on penetration per capita. The last 12 months have been strong for SurveyMonkey as far as growth in Australia is concerned and this morning it officially announced the appointment of former Microsoft and LinkedIn executive Tony Ward as the company's first Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand. Ward's responsibilities include continuing to build the local team and driving strategy to capitalise on the traction that the company has seen since launching its Sydney office last May. Up until that point, the only 'players' that had a physical presence locally (that is, the top end of town) were Newspoll, Galaxy and ReachTel. But SurveyMonkey, who already had a strong list of foundational clients in Australia such as the WA Public Transport Authority, Open Colleges, Insurance Australia Group and the Australian Government Department of Industry, used that as leverage to continue building and acquiring new businesses. “We are in the process of democratising research and insights to help companies make better and faster business decisions with data,” said Tim Maly, COO & CFO of SurveyMonkey in a statement sent out to media this morning. “We’re thrilled to have someone of Tony’s calibre driving this vision. In particular, his understanding of the needs of marketers and creative agencies in Australia will be critical in continuing to grow SurveyMonkey’s partnerships in this sector.” It's worth noting that Ward is first and foremost an extremely accomplished marketer that has been using the SurveyMonkey suite of products since the early 2000s. Ward told Startup Daily that what he finds interesting about the product now is that it has really transformed from being a tool to a platform that is geared towards helping companies, including the business-to-business space. Right now Australian businesses spend about $35 billion a year on marketing. As a former Chief Marketing Officer, Ward says he is well aware that the joke of the industry is 50 percent of all marketing budgets are wasted, but marketers can just never tell which 50 percent. "Businesses are drowning in so much data that it's hard to know what numbers are actually moving things forward. Our goal is to give businesses actionable, quality insights at speed, not add to the noise. Speed is the new currency of business," says Ward. One of the key challenges that Ward will be tasked with is strengthening SurveyMonkey's relationships with local agencies in hopes that the two will collaborate more. While it could be claimed that the platform is already pretty popular in this space, it is important for the company to obtain market dominance in this niche in order to position itself as an enterprise level solution. To give you insight as to why that is so critical and also why SurveyMonkey is such a disruptor to the existing top tier players, we just need to look at the pricing structures. Right now, the cost to run an 'average' campaign across SurveyMonkey using its 'Audience' tool would set a business back about $3,500. In comparison, a survey of the same size with one of the aforementioned brands playing in the same space would cost a company about $7,500. The cost savings are clear - about 50 percent. What SurveyMonkey needs to get right (and has been doing a good job of so far) is positioning itself as a premium and trustworthy product for collecting and collating data. The collection and compilation of data is a profitable market; and considering one in 10 Australians are personal users of the service, it would be fair to assume that decision makers within larger corporations would be familiar with or are currently users of the product. "Audience is giving agencies the power to go to their clients with actual data to support what they want to do," says Ward. "They can use the SurveyMonkey Audience platform to find out what the market says, and back up their hypothesis. It breaks the stalemate when everyone clings to a different view or gut feel; now they are actually able to find out what consumers think".

Featured image: SurveyMonkey Team | Source: Supplied

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Moneyball lets sports fans put their coaching skills to the test against friends for cash

March 15, 2015, 4:31 pm

≫ Next: Content marketing survey for startups

≪ Previous: ‘Australian businesses are drowning in data’ and SurveyMonkey’s new Managing Director wants to help them make sense of it

Moneyball - James Fitzgerald Rax Huq

Australians are famous for our love of sport, and given it’s impossible to watch a broadcast of a sporting event without seeing at least a dozen ads for a sports betting website, it seems we love betting on it just as much. While the explosion of sports stats and news sites has allowed punters to make more informed choices about their betting, it’s also seen fantasy sports - acting as a coach or general manager and putting together a team - shift from a pastime for only the nerdiest of sports fans to a regular aspect of sports fandom. Two Australian entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to combine fantasy sports with betting and created Moneyball. The platform, named after the book about baseball’s stats revolution and its Brad Pitt movie adaptation, lets fans put their team selection skills to the test by playing fantasy football for money. James Fitzgerald, co-founder of Moneyball, said that with the growth of betting sites and fantasy sports competitions like Supercoach, it made sense to create a platform blending the two. “We were watching what was happening in the US with daily and weekly fantasy sports, and took inspiration from a couple of exceptionally well performing sites to recreate the experience for Australians, with sports appealing to Australians,” Fitzgerald said. He brings up an interesting point: from fantasy sites run by sports leagues themselves through to those hosted by giants like ESPN and Yahoo, the market is incredibly crowded. However, Fitzgerald said he doesn’t see Moneyball as a competitor to the big platforms. “We are complementary. Other platforms provide excellent products for either tipping or season long fantasy team management, usually as a free to play service. Moneyball.com.au on the other hand offers a pay to play, wagering proposition to fantasy sports, and we offer this over either a single day of games, or at most over a single weekend,” he said. “We actually want people to keep playing the existing fantasy platforms, we love them ourselves and think that due to our different yet complementary formats, we'll help grow each other's business and the category as a whole.” Fitzgerald sees this complementary relationship extending to sporting codes and leagues themselves. “We're all about sports and growing interest in sporting occasions, events and attendance. What's good for the growth of a sporting code is good for us and vice versa, so we are very much about growing interest in teams and events,” he said. After self-funding the development and launch of Moneyball, Fitzgerald and his co-founder Rax Huq recently secured investment to help the site grow in its early stages. They have also secured affiliate marketing partners. “We are also talking with a number of clubs as well as leading media publishers about affiliate models. We also have plans for social and search marketing which will commence soon. With additional capital we will look to accelerate our marketing plans.” Moneyball’s monetisation model sees the site charge users a fee to take part in a contest, which comes out as 10 percent of a contest prize pool. The platform is currently running a number of contests for each round of the NRL with varying numbers of participants, cost of entry fees, and in turn, worth of prize pools. Users can also create custom contests to play with other users they invite. With the site’s launch set up to coincide with the start of the AFL and NRL seasons, the two are the only sports currently available on the platform. There are plans to add the English Premier League in August, A-League and NBA in October, and cricket in November. “We want to grow to a healthy user base for NRL and AFL, and then grow our 'summer sports' from there. We are also very keen to talk to bookmakers internationally about licensing our technology for their markets,” Fitzgerald said. Given sports fans love competition and holding bragging rights over their friends, Moneyball may prove popular with both serious wannabe coaches and general managers, and fans who just want to have a bit of fun with their sport. With entry fees for some contests starting at just $2 and custom contests allowing users to set their own price, the stakes don’t have to be all or nothing, meaning more people may be encouraged to take part. Fitzgerald said, “We see ourselves as less of a wagering service and more of a destination for 'mates' to play their mates a win a bit of cash, and chest beating rights, from them.”

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