February In Review: What have I been doing!

February might be the shortest month of the year, but February 2019 felt like a whole year to me! My life is noticeably different then it was on February 1st, and I don’t just mean because of the passage of time! So what’s been happening?

MIT Bootcamp

I am sure people are sick of hearing me talk about it. But the week I spent at the camp was an intense experience. I certainly feel like I packed a few months worth of learning into a long, 18+ hour week. I am glad I took the opportunity offered to me. It was a blast!

I am now slowly but surely trying to revive Virgo 19 using the 24 steps. I am in the middle of generating 108 ideas. I am in no hurry, and that’s good because I want to do this right!

Abide Gets Into Impact Boom Elevate+

As soon as the MIT Bootcamp ended, I got the opportunity to apply what I learnt in the context of Abide and the Impact Boom Elevate+ social enterprise accelerator. Our paired mentor for the program, Tobias Speck of PWC, is a more on the lean startup side but that’s okay. We are not a methodology purist, and we know we have to show results within a short period. So we will use whatever methodology we need to get our startup going. But my co-founder and CEO, Andy Smith, is finding the Disciplined Entrepreneurship as insightful as I do!

JOSARI Gearing-up to apply to Collider

I will write a post explaining JOSARI, it’s a video based micro-consulting platform, and my involvement with them soon! But for now, I am excited to be working with them to apply for the Collider accelerator. Watch this space for updates!

Not continuing with Your Happy Place

Not everything that happened in February was positive through addition. I have posted about Your Happy Place a couple of times before, the first post being in November. My contract with them was to get an MVP of the people, personality and places concept out in a usable format. I was successful in achieving this goal: Your Happy Place the app, is available for download from Google Play Store. However, Your Happy Place is not the right fit for me going forward. But the concept remains as viable and interesting as ever. I hope to see Your Happy Place be a resounding success as it goes on. However, from my point of view, I think this is positive through subtraction for both myself and Your Happy Place.

Hospitals, hospitals and more Hospitals!

To finish off this update on a more personal note. I physically crashed badly after returning from the MIT Bootcamp. I later found out this is because my blood iron had dropped to dangerous levels again. I am getting an iron infusion this coming Sunday, and my doctor thinks after the infusion I should be able to relax for the next six months.

In addition to my health woes, my poor niece also suffered. She came down to Brisbane from Townsville for what was supposed to be a week-long vacation. However, she ended up staying for two weeks, with the last week hospitalised from a mysterious virus. She got out less than 24 hours ago, but she has mended enough to be back to her happy self. So I am glad we are leaving the medical drama behind in February and starting March on a fresh note all around!

Fishburners Pitch Night: Health Tech

I am writing this on a Sunday night, and it’s been a very long week from last Sunday to today. This time last week, I was at the Lady Cilento Children's Hospital emergency room with my three-year-old niece. At the time, she wasn’t admitted into the hospital, and we thought it was all done and dusted. We were wrong. She was admitted on Thursday, had surgery on her knees on Friday, and she’s still there! My brother and his family live in Townsville. So they don’t have their cars here, so I have had to help out with logistics, so a lot of late night driving to pick-up or drop-off my sister-in-law. So it was fitting that my first ever attendance at the Fishburners Pitch Night was themed Health Tech!

Friday is my day at JOSARI HQ, so I wasn’t planning on attending. But everybody at Josari was keen to see what the Pitch Night was about and were looking forward to the food and drink, so we went together as a team. Fishburners Pitch Night is very different from River City Labs pitch events. River City Labs allows anyone to pitch. But you have to pitch without any visual aid, and you only have two minutes. River City Labs is about promotion, and there is no judgement. The Fishburners’ events did have judges, the startups pitching are drawing from Fishburners members, you do get to have pitch decks, plus the pitch is for five minutes. So it was very much a formal event, while the River City Labs events tend to be more informal.

The first pitcher was Sortal: Legacy, who were an offshoot of Sortal, and use the machine learning technology of Sortal to create memory banks for patients suffering dementia. It’s a great concept, but it’s only starting, the technology works but whether families will use it for people with dementia needs to be seen.

The next pitch was from Our Care Journal, and it interested me a lot because it’s almost beat for beat the same as Carers Connect/Caremate, which is a startup I am helping set up. But Our Care Journal is ready to download, while we are still building our app. But I am not worried because the market we are targeting is huge, so there should be enough pie for all of us to have a piece.

The third pitch was from Hearos App, which is a serious game that helps people with Cochlear implant to learn or relearn sounds. It was by the far the easiest understand in terms of what problem they were addressing, and what their solution offers.

I can’t remember the name of the last startup that pitched. But it was a meal prep startup and was an example of why I am not worried about Our Care Journal. They have a lot of competition, as do all diet and food-related startups. But no single one of them has been able to corner the market. My brother and I went in for the Prepd Colors Lunchboxes, which comes with a recipe app. We are waiting for the boxes but keen to try the Prepd system. I also use Noom, for which I recently bought a subscription for a recipe module. So there are a lot of competitions, but the market is so big, that there is always room for someone to try and take a slice of the piece for themselves.

Overall, I enjoyed the pitch night. I will consider attending again!

Abide part of Impact Boom Elevate+ cohort for 2019!

The last time I spoke about the inter-generational cooperation platform I am working on with my co-founder and CEO, Andy Smith, our startup was still called Koostoo. But the name didn’t play well with audiences. So we have renamed the startup Abide, we even have a website now!

Abide took a big and important step this year by being accepted into the Impact Boom Elevate+ social enterprise accelerator. Elevate+ is funded by the Brisbane City Council, and we were selected from a competitive field of startups draws from across Brisbane City.

Brisbane City Council is the largest local government in Australia because way back when, we merged a lot of small town councils into one super council. We do this a lot in Queensland.

So while a city like Sydney is bigger then Brisbane, they don’t have one big city council that covers the entire city. What that means is that Brisbane City Council can do a lot more then the other city councils. So they have a economic development unit that supports initiative like Elevate+.

Andy, Tom and I, at the Impact Boom Elevate+ cohort 2019 welcome event

The Elevate+ cohort for 2019 was announced last Tuesday, the 5th of February, and even though I was in the middle of the MIT Bootcamp, I was able to take some time to make an appearance at the Brisbane Social Enterprise Drinks & Networking, meet Tom Allen, the CEO of Impact Boom, in person. Before rushing off to the MIT Bootcamp networking event. It was a very busy night.

Getting accepted into Elevate+ was very important for Andy and me because we are both working on sweat equity for now. So it would be very easy for us to let Abide slip by the wayside. But now we have a target to work towards because the graduating cohort of Elevate+ gets to pitch in front of the Lord Mayor, and other at The Triffid on the 6th of June. Along the way, we have a set time during the week where we get to take time and work on the startup.

The first session took place the Tuesday just past, the 12th of February, at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, South Bank Campus. The first module that goes with the session is also now available online to complete. I am looking forward to using this opportunity to develop Abide further, making something of an idea that enjoyed strong support from QUT, which has to date put in $3,000 in seed funding, and the community at large!

MIT Bootcamp Completed!

I did it! I completed the MIT Bootcamp! It was tough because we were working from 8 AM to 2 AM from Sunday to Thursday, with a solid eight hours to begin with on Saturday and finishing off with 4 hours of pitches on Friday. The long days started to take it toil, but I am happy to say that my team and I stuck to our vow to follow the process of disciplined entrepreneurship. I am happy with what we accomplished during the week, and whatever happens from now, I’ll always be a Bootcamp Alumni! But let’s start from the beginning!

Day 1 - Saturday

Day 1: I look so fresh!

The first day started with all the Bootcamp members gathering for a late afternoon tea, meeting each other and alumni from previous iterations of the Bootcamp.

We had a brief opening ceremony featuring speakers from QUT, MIT and the Government. The highlight of the opening was the welcome from the Nunukul Yuggera Aboriginal Dance Company. I didn’t take any photos, but there are plenty on social media for those who want it!

There was a change in how groups formed this year. The alumni tell me that in previous years they had to pitch their ideas to each other and recruit team members, which is what happens at Startup Weekends.

However, this year, we were assigned groups with the criteria that every group had a woman, and there was as much mix of nationalities and background as possible. My group consisted of,

• Pascal Seibold - From Germany, but he recently moved to Sydney

• Manish Pahwa - From Melbourne

• Maria Susana Benitez (Su) - From Ecuador

• Michael Frangos - From right here in Brisbane

I loved my team, and we had a lot of fun. We didn’t have big arguments or fallout. I hear that without storming groups often fall short of producing their best work. Maybe that’s true but we came to the Bootcamp to learn the process of disciplined entrepreneurship, and I think we learned the process better because we weren’t at each other throats. The week was stressful enough without interpersonal drama.

Day 2 - Sunday

Saturday was supposed to have an early stop at 11 PM. But we went overtime by two hours and that extra time spent in the lectures took an early toil on me on Sunday when we started the program in earnest. Our day started with lectures from Bill Aulet himself during the day, followed by teamwork from dinner until 2 PM. My team agreed that we would follow the process and not get caught trying to fast track the tasks. So, on Sunday, we spent considerable time generating ideas, taking time to vote for ideas to narrow down our list to three, before conducting the “five whys” exercise with the top three.

The easiest to wrap our head around idea was one about shoes. But our coach suggested we should pick something a little more abstract so that we were forced to undertake the process. So instead, we choose a very abstract problem related to productivity, and our problem statement ended up being,

Young professionals are not productive and struggle to focus; they are frustrated at their lack of control. They experience 7 interruptions per hour, this results in 58% of the entire work day being spent on interruptions. To deal with this, these young professionals currently use productivity apps such as trello, brainFM, Pomodoro, Microsoft project, etc. despite the fact that these “solutions” are adding to the disruptions.

I was struggling a lot as the night progressed. So my team kindly let me go home early. It was only a few extra hours of sleep but it set me up for the rest of the week!

Day 3 - Monday

We again started with lectures from Bill. It was also the day we had our first guest speaker, former South Sydney Rabbitohs Player Trent Young, who is the current CEO of Young Guns. We had more team time on Monday because we had to go out and talk to humans to do our primary market research. We then compiled our research into a persona we wanted to target. Our persona did change during the week, but that’s a good thing.

I am happy to report that for a change, I stepped out of my comfort zone, and did some interviews too! In previous Startup Weekends, I stayed in my corner and opted not to talk to humans. But if there is one thing I learnt from the weekend, to ensure you are solving problems for paying customers, you do have to talk to humans. Speaking of which, I am yet to finish reading the book “Talking to Humans”, but I will!

Day 4 - Tuesday

Our second guest speaker was Alison Price of Soilcyclers, who had an interesting and different entrepreneurial journey. She started the company to get work for her husband, then her boyfriend, and it grew from there.

Tuesday was also the last day we had with Bill Aulet, and for me it was a bit of joggling act because I was down for two networking events, one for the MIT Bootcamp and the other for Impact Boom Elevate+ (more on that in a different post). Tuesday was also the first day my team did our elevator pitches. So that was also something I wanted to be there to support. There was a lot of Ubers involved but in the end, I managed to be everywhere I needed to be!

Day 5 - Wednesday

Eleanor Carey, Steve Corlett and I

Wednesday started early with a fancy sit down breakfast with the Alumni from previous Bootcamps. Most of them were locals, but there were a few who flew in to attend. I think that shows the power of the Bootcamp network.

I found the discussion with the alumni very illuminating. I was intrigued to find out the even when the alumni didn’t start their own business; they were able to apply the process of disciplined entrepreneurial to their everyday jobs.

Our guest speaker for Wednesday was the very inspirational Eleanor Carey, who rowed the ocean as part of an all-female crew. Her’s was also the last guest lecture I attended as I opted to skip the morning lecturers on Thursday on account of having a client meeting at lunch.

Wednesday was also my turn to be the CEO, I should have mentioned that the role of CEO rotated among all members throughout the week, and I marshalled my team away from cake and alcohol to deliver the customer acquisition strategy and the associated cost calculations. We were one person done because one of my team members was in intense pain, and so we sent them to the hotel early!

Day 6 - Thursday

I had a late start on Thursday but joined my team as we start team time. But there was some afternoon time dedicated to a panel discussion on team and culture for startups. I should mention that the coaches hosted a number of workshops on things like pitching, business modelling for social enterprises and interview techniques for primary market research. I don’t remember what day which workshop was one. It’s all blending together at the moment.

Once all the workshops were done, it was just full on pitch practice, and pitch deck creation. We also formally named ourselves Hiper! All credit for out beautiful looking pitch deck goes to my team member Su. Manish was the CEO for the last day. He did an excellent job of keeping us focused. We tried very hard to have a strong emotive element to our pitch, but we weren’t dealing with burnout but productivity. That’s more brain and process, and heart and emotion. Our inability to figure out a way to tug at the heartstrings was unfortunate because we knew were going to be up again two very emotive pitches in the finals. But sometimes you do the best with what you have, and not pretend to be something you are not.

Day 7 - Pitch Day Friday!

Pitch day arrived, and Team Hiper did an excellent job if I say so myself. All of us had to do a section. I took our secret sauce section, the team section and the ask. I managed to finish exactly on the bell. So I was super happy with my pacing on the day. We were not among the eight teams selected to pitch a second time in front of a fresh set of judges and a general audience. Nevertheless, we were happy with our performance as a whole.

Our shortcoming was that we couldn’t generalise our solution so that the older gentlemen who judged us would understand why our solution would work with young men of a certain type. That’s an important lesson on messaging. For real pitches, practice in front of as diverse a crowd as you can!

Day 7 - Conclusion

After the pitch, we had a three-course lunch at Howard Smith Wharves. At lunch, every table had previous alumni, and my table’s alumni was Mark Phigram who used his Bootcamp experience to launch the Travelling Dads startup as a side gig. He is not interested in turning Travelling Dads into his full-time job. I think that’s something a lot of us forgot, our ventures don’t have to become our full-time careers. Sometimes people want that, but more often, they are content to have something apart from their 9 to 5.

Drinks organised by the Brisbane alumni group followed lunch. Most of the Bootcampers somehow had the energy to keep partying on! But I ended-up crashing at the hotel. I spent most the last weekend sleeping. But I am recovered now, and since I moved everything I am doing as CTO into Start with Tinni, I am ready to resurrect Virgo 19 as the startup implementing my ideas as CEO.

However, I am going to take my time and do the process. My first task will be to generate at least a hundred ideas before I start filtering the list for ideas that I want to do, can do and for which there is a market. In the meantime, I hope to bring my knowledge to bear for my Start with Tinni customers as we go forward to building viable businesses that make a difference in how we live!

Lastly, even though I am a Brisbane local, I was warned to find a place close to QUT Garden’s Point campus for the duration of the Bootcamp. So, I moved into the Brisbane Sky Tower apartments for the week of the Bootcamp. This proved to be a great decision because I don’t think I would have gotten any sleep if I tried to commute from home. As it was, the ten minute walk from QUT to Brisbane Sky Tower felt like an eternity some nights. The Sky Tower was great for the most part but they are still under construction and low and behold, the two mornings I managed to sleep in a bit, I was woken early by jackhammers. That was not pleasant but I spent so little time in the apartment that it didn’t matter.

Can you spot me in QUT’s video about the MIT Innovation and Entrepreneurship Bootcamp?

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

Extreme Ownership was a book that was originally on the MIT Bootcamp reading list, but I noticed that it was removed from the most recent list. I am not sure why because the book is pretty good. Listening to the book, because I went with the Audible version, straight after Made to Stick was interesting because Extreme Ownership told a lot of stories. But the stories were told with a purpose, and you understood the importance of extreme ownership.

I was going to write a bit more, but I think I’ll let one of the authors speak for himself by putting his TEDx talk. But the big take away is that don’t play the blame game. Take responsibility and act decisively. But that is not to say you have to keep malfunctioning parts around. But it is your job to remove, replace or support to improve members of your team who are not performing. So yes, another book I would recommend!