Breakfast with the QCE & Brisbane Innovate

Wednesday was a very busy day for me. I started the day having breakfast with my Impact Boom Elevate+ cohort mates. We were hosted by Leanne Kemp, the Queensland Chief Entrepreneur, and Craig O'Kane, the Director of the Queensland Chief Entrepreneur office. It was a great experience, I got an update on where everybody is, picked-up tips from the Leanne and Craig. The food was great too!

After the “Founders Breakfast”, almost all of us, plus Leanne, hoped on a maxi-taxi and crossed the river to attend the Brisbane Innovate 2019. Brisbane Marketing organised the half-day event to bringing together businesses and residents to collaboratively solve city-wide challenges.

This year, the summit focused on will focus on 1) Amplifying small business growth; 2) Innovating for effective, sustainable construction; and 3) Engaging out of town students.

I was in the Amplifying small business stream. There was a lot of ideas generated. Being an idea-vampire, I took pictures of all the idea boards. I also put my name down on a few boards that I was interested in and let’s see if there is enough interest to take those ideas further.

Finally, being a Wednesday, I was able to buy lunch from the Brisbane City Markets, which was great fuel ahead of my last meeting for the day. Wednesday was a good day!

Another RCL Pitch Afternoon!

Team Josari took advantage of the River City Labs open day to work from RCL last Friday. Naturally, that meant we ended the day taking in some pitches while eating chips! Okay, the rest of the team was drinking. But I, of course, don’t drink anything harder than coffee and even that is usually drowned in milk and sugar! But I digress.

I am not going to go pitch by pitch. But I am going to highlight two pitches. Firstly, it was great to hear once more from Anne-Marie Walton of Kids Wantu. She’s in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign. I have already pledged, which acts as a pre-order for her family activity app Kids Wantu.

I cannot wait to get the app, so I can use it to do activities with my niece and nephew. My niece is 4 and spends at least 3 days with me. But at the moment she spends way too much time watching movies and tablets when she’s over. My nephew is under 2, and it would be great to be able to be prepared to entertain him as he grows older!

The other pitch I wanted to highlight was from Joshua Savage about his two cannabis-related businesses. I have noticed an absolute explosion of cannabis-related startups. I like Joshua’s approach to the explosion because he’s on the support side. His two companies are helping growers and consumers, grow and consume good quality cannabis. I think that’s a smart approach. His two businesses are 1) Australia Cannabis, and 2) Disruptive Industries.

Finally, there was a pitch on the night that was for a consumer-facing app. The pitch made me realise that we need to stop thinking of users as the product. We live in a post-Cambridge Analytica world that’s already drowning in data. I don’t believe this is an environment into which we should be launching another app that tries to make money by monetising user data.

Especially as there are movements afoot to force companies to share the revenue generated by selling user data with said users, I don’t think selling data is a viable business model for new ventures. For long term success, I think it’s time we moved beyond treating our user as the product. Maybe I am wrong in this. Only time will tell!

OQCE Events: Leanne Live! & Write Well

Last week I was signed-up to attend two events hosted by the Queensland Chief Entrepreneur’s office. The first was Leanne Live! Investment and Capital Raising hosted by Leanne Kemp, and the second was Write Well. I made Write Well but I ended up following along with Investment and Capital Raising event on Facebook Live. The video from the event is still available, which is great because I can see myself revisiting the video from time to time.

The panel for the Investment and Capital Raising consisted of,

Kris Trevilyan- Angel Investor

Marcus Simpson - Head of Global Private Capital, QIC

Lisa Siganto - Board Director, QUT Blue Box

Stewart Glynn - Partner, Transition Level Investments

I have attended a few panels were investors give their perspective. The common theme is always, 1) do your research, 2) don’t ask for money in the first interaction, 3) cultivate a relationship because the best ideas won’t get funded if the investor has no confidence in the people trying to take the idea and make hay out of it. But it was great to get a Queensland-centric view of the investment landscape. Also, I am glad to here that there is a shift in the investment landscape, with an increasing emphasis on profit with a purpose businesses such as Abide!

I am not seeking investment at the moment. But I will sooner rather then later and so now is the time to up my knowledge of the process. Which is also why Write Well was a great talk to attend. I missed a good chunk of it on account of running late and having to leave early. But I didn’t miss the tips sections, and that’s the most important part!

Megan Avard, CEO and Founder of SurePact gave some great tips with the best one being to actually contact the organisers of the grant or award and talk to them about what they want to see in the application. That way, you know for sure you are answering the questions as asked, and not what you think they are asking.

The other useful tips was around who to talk about in the team section, including mentioning your advisory board to increase confidence in your ability to execute the project for which you are applying for grant money. Also, there were some great tips around targeting your efforts. So all around, a great talk. I learnt a lot. I am looking forward to finding an opportunity to applying the tips, and seeing how I go.

Sydney Launch Festival + Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups

This time last week, I was in Sydney attending Launch Festival, hosted by Jason Calacanis (pictured above with yours truly). I can honestly say that I got more out of the two days then the cost of flights, hotel and meals! The ticket itself was free for me as a founder of Abide.

The free founder pass was a great motivation to go because even though I had to go to a different city, I could take the plunge because for me, at worst, I could have a bit of a mid-year break in Sydney. I didn’t attend Myriad or Qode because the tickets were so expansive. I did attend Startcon but only because I scored free tickets. Would I pay to go to Startcon? No, because the talks at Startcon weren’t anything special. But the majority of the talks at Launch Festival provided enormous value.

One the first day, the best talks were Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra’s talk on “The Product-Market Fit Engine”. The talk was about creating a leading indicator by asking users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the percentage who answer “very disappointed.”, “somewhat disappointed” and “not disappointed”. The way to build a product-market fit then is to focus on the “very disappointed”, figuring out how to keep them. Also, figure out how to convert the “somewhat disappointed” into “very disappointed”. It also means forgetting about the “not disappointed” because there is a good chance that you cannot get to that group without compromising your vision.

I also loved the talk from Shaun Abrahamson on “Reimagining Cities: a Guide to the Future for Startups & Investors”. He used the words catastrophic climate failure in the context that there are already people building businesses under the assumption that we will have a catastrophic climate failure. Whether you believe that we are doomed or not, I am all for cities feeding cities and being more self-contained.

I also enjoyed the panel discussions on both day one and two. I enjoyed the in-depth look at how Masterclass became a successful startup during the fireside chat with David Rogier.

From day two, I learnt a lot from the presentation of Allen Chen of Fitbod who spoke about Growth Metrics that Matter. The talk was about the limits of taking user acquisition and other numbers at face value. Because if someone downloads your app, Fitbod is an app, but never uses it, do you really have a user? This is a simplification. I haven’t been able to track down secondary material on the talk. But I want to!

I also loved the talk from Charles Hudson of Precursor VC on “How Not to Mess Up Seed Round in 2019”. I am not in a position at the moment to raise a seed round with Abide, but it’s always good to be pre-prepared.

Speaking of which, following the festival, I listened to Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups by Jason Calacanis. It was an incredible look at the other side of the startup world. I am not about to become, but hopefully, Abide will soon be in a position where we will need Angel investors. So it’s always great to research ahead and be a bit better prepared.

Back to the festival. Launch also had a demo pit and a competition to get into Jason Calacanis’s accelerator. I enjoyed the pitches and the demo pit. I was able to make a small connection between the Bee App and my cohort mate from Elevate+, Bee One Third. Maybe something fruitful will come from that!

Overall, it was fun. I had a good time, learnt a lot and also got to have a little mini holiday in Sydney and spend some time with my cousin. So all in all, a week well spent!

Abide Completes Impact Boom Elevate+ Program

On the 6th June, Abide completed the Impact Boom Elevate+ accelerator journey. However, the name was too esoteric, so we changed it. As Abide, we applied for Impact Boom Elevate+ in January. We were accepted and officially started our journey on 5th February. So it's been almost six months of intense work and development that culminated into a pitching event in front of the Deputy Mayor, and nearly 300 other audience members drawn from business, startup and social enterprises from all over Brisbane and Australia.

I am going to write a Medium article about our whole experience. We have also come to the end of Abide's involvement with the QUT Capstone program, who lent us a team of four students to help build search and registration functions for our website. So there is a lot of ground for me to cover. So watch this space for details but for now, thank you to Tom Allen of Impact Boom for picking us. It was an awesome experience!