Mike88

Mike Nicholls Australian Inventor + Entrepreneur working with a small team of engineers building prototypes from Inventions including two medical devices. Publishes Startup88.com and has assessed/reviewed +500 inventions and +200 startups in the last 3 years. Mentors Sydney Startups via Incubate and other incubators and helps members of the Australian Startup Community via the Startup88.com website with free publicity and advertising. Experience in numerous industries including Digital Publishing, Cloud Computing, Apps, Hardware, Aviation, Real Estate & Finance and Health/Medical Devices.

Complex Startup Business Models , Charlie Munger & Occams Razor

Daily Startup Tip

After a few crazy conversations about convoluted business models in the last few months I felt compelled to write this post….

Ocaams Razor

Occams Razor is a theory ascribed to a 1300th century Philosopher which paraphrases (the original was in latin)

“When two alternatives produce the same result always choose the simplest alternative”.

That is its always better to aim for simplicity instead of complexity.

Too often I see experienced and new entrepreneurs making things more convoluted than they have to be, failing to take the simple path and I wonder why.

Unnecessary Business Model Complexity

Picture this,

  • New cloud based technology+
  • Needs to be integrated with Hardware +
  • Its own App (iOS and Android) +
  • Content Licensing issues with 100s of owners
  • Multiple Parties wanting to cash in on advertising
  • 4 other parties in the commercial negotiation all with valid reason to stop this working or make it commercially unviable
  • Tenuous connection to an advertising business model
  • Its not clear who pays and who is the customer

What could go wrong?

I see this a lot with inventors and inventions as well, in my day job I have to review a lot of inventions and patents (over 500 in last few years), the moment I see multiple parties in a complicated relationship where its not clear who pays or who’s problem it is, Im out.

If you can’t explain clearly who really needs the solution, how you get paid when you are in idea stage, its not going to get better when its a startup.

Solution in Search of a Problem

You might recall my approach to startups and inventions is to make a decision whether I believe the problem is real and who really cares about it. If it’s not real then you are already headed in the wrong direction.

I believe these complicated models occur because the would be entrepreneur has developed an interesting (to them) technology solution in search of a problem.

To make this solution work, entrepreneurs invent a customer usage situation to try to force fit the solution into a problem somewhere.

That there is a tenuous connection to reality is irrelevant, that no one can think of a situation where a user would find the capability compelling also doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

With every man and his dog making an IoT device or solution I hear a lot of talk of selling advanced analytics to their customers about all sorts of shit.

They mistakenly believe customers will actually pay any attention to a set of convoluted analytics, let alone pay for them.

I purchased a Fitbit and a Jawbone over a year ago (did a bakeoff) and wore them both for months. The only thing I paid attention to was the number of steps.

Same with Apple HealthKit, the only thing I check is distance covered and steps. I might want to see data for a few weeks, but I certainly don’t want anymore detail than that.

Most people really only buy products and apps for a few key capabilities, dozens of additional features and complexity hurt your solution not enhance it.

Your product and business only has to do one thing really well.

Most people want the key measurement at a glance or key functionality executed well and thats it.

I know Fitbit has a stack of detailed measurements and other health related parameters you can input, but I lack the attention span to spend an hour looking at detailed stats for my wearables.

Adding complexity to the product doesn’t help and creating a complex business model to fit an imagined problem is nuts.

An Example

There is a product called Intercom.io, it looks great and I want to use it, I have seen the functionality used well on other sites, I have heard their CEO on a number of interviews and read their books on software product management (which I recommend), I have mentally purchased the product, however their pricing model stumps me.

They have 5 different packages with pro and standard for each package combined with a per user count, but I cannot for the life of me work out which one(s) I need, after looking at all the packages with various overlaps I think I probably need them all, but I feel like they might have easily helped me and said you need it all.

To quote the CEO in a recent podcast “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks they sell”.

There are about 8 dimensions to this pricing model and it makes me feel dumb because I don’t know what to do.

It would have been much better if they just made it 1-2 packages with a per user count and I would probably be a paying customer by now.

A few points about complexity

  • A validated user problem stated simply, cuts out a lot of crap
  • Simple beats complex most times
  • Most people can execute on simple, they just can’t work out what simple should be.
  • People have a tendency to introduce more complexity, they struggle to say no to features.
  • Simple is harder to define but is easier to build and implement
  • Simple is easier to explain to everyone, investors, team and most importantly customers.
  • Complexity prevents you acquiring customers, if you have to personally explain a complex business model for a customer its a surefire conversion killer.
  • Customers have bullshit detectors as well and subconsciously vote with their feet if it doesn’t make sense.
  • If multiple planets/moons have to align for your business model to work, you probably won’t get paid.
  • There is nothing wrong with a simple business model, i.e. we sell stuff or we charge for a service.

Don’t Believe me? Listen to the Billionaires

Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger sum it up best,

Simplicity has a way of improving performance through enabling us to better understand what we are doing.

If something is too hard we move onto other things.

People underrate the importance of a few simple big ideas – the chief lesson is that a few big ideas really work.

25 Tips For Creating An Email Marketing Machine For Your Startup

Daily Startup Tip, , , , , ,

Regardless of what you think about email there is one thing certain, email is not dead.

For years people have been saying email is dead as a means to reach your clients and prospects.

1000s of (self promoting) Social Media marketing gurus have pronounced the future of marketing is Social Media and that email is loosing its effectiveness.

Don’t listen to them. They are dead wrong.

Email is still the best way to communicate and have a direct relationship with your user.

Other methods of communicating with your clients such as social media are either too noisy or the social network controls you and demands you pay to access the very customers who follow you.

It impossible to reliably, consistently deliver your story or message to users via a social network.

It’s estimated that most Facebook Pages have an average post reach of 5%. If you want to get it any higher than that you are going to have to pay Facebook to get access to the people who have already liked you page.

Im not saying don’t use social media, you should, it can be a great method of massively cheaply accelerating prospect acquisition.

But once a visitor comes to your site its your job to convince them to let you start a conversation and turn them into a client.

An Example

I started this blog 28 months ago. We now have had about 1700 people on the email list and gaining 100 a week.

However I really only started collecting email addresses about 15 months ago and started getting serious about it a few months ago.

When I first started my daily signup rate was around 1%, by experimenting I have increased that to a ~2% subscribe rate.

I have had approximately 170,000 visitors since I started writing, if I had been focused on collecting emails from day one I would have double the subscribers, probably more.

There is a multiplier effect that happens when you communicate meaningful actionable stories to your prospects regularly.

The more they engage and open your emails, the more they click through, the more people they refer and the more social media traffic they generate for you so the growth rate of the email list actually accelerates over time the more active your comm activities.

One of the largely unmentioned benefits of increasing email traffic is an increase in Search Engine Traffic.

It is generally accepted that Google uses traffic stats from their Chrome Browser and various plugins to measure a sites popularity and direct traffic.

When Google can see increased email or direct traffic they assume that the site has something worth reading and therefore they give your domain more authority which results in more natural search traffic.

Start With Email Not Social

Most Newbie entrepreneurs think that Social media accounts and marketing is the first thing they should spend their time on when launching a new startup, I know I used to.

Whack up a Facebook page and a Twitter account and tweet all day and you will have users flocking to use your product.

The truth is when you first start on social media you will be yelling into a vacuum chamber.

No one will be listening, no one will be following, so you can yell as loud as you like but unless you have a truly engaged social following (which most new entrepreneurs don’t) or some amazing content very little will come of your social media efforts. You will struggle to get above noise level.

I see 100’s of startup pitches a month, when I check their twitter accounts very few have any level of following.

Even more amusing we get pitches for Social Media Marketing Tools who have virtually no Twitter followers.

Few startups are really newsworthy, most don’t get picked up by major media sites. Most startups are not that interesting or fully developed.

You can build traffic to your site using social media but you should always try to turn that visitor into an email.

The email is the first step in getting permission to start an ongoing conversation with your prospect.

If you can afford to use paid advertising you must turn that visit into an email you just can’t afford to pay to attract the prospect to your site and not start a relationship.

Email really is the best way to consistently capture and nurture a relationship. You can’t do it with Twitter Followers or Facebook Fans.

Kickstart Your Email List

Here are 5 ideas to help you kickstart your product and user base

  • Put up a blog and start writing about your subject matter, this will give you something to share and establish you as a leader in the space
  • Make sure you have an email newsletter list from day one.
  • Use Sumome.com Welcome Mat or List Builder Plugins to drive signups. You may be uncomfortable with popups but get used to them, in my experience Sumome.com plugins has driven at least 10x signups compared to passive signup forms I previously used on the sidebar of my. I have looked at a lot of these plugins and Sumome is my preferred due to the connectivity with outside services such as Mailchimp and Zapier.
  • It takes commitment to write daily, I don’t recommend it initially. It takes a long time to get into a flow where you can produce quality content every day, so my suggestion is to start out with a weekly story or two.
  • Experiment with ways to to get your users to either provide you content or to suggest content topics (asking questions, discussing problems etc)
  • As you go about your daily life, jot down things you learn into a text file, this will serve as a place for you to collect new subjects.
  • Write all your posts in a text editor, this cuts down distraction, only load it to your blog when its ready to publish.
  • This is where you do use Social Media, promote your posts regularly.
  • Use Hashtags
  • Repost on Twitter and other social media regularly. I advise setting up a TweetJukebox.com account and adding your posts to be repeated every few days at different times. Most social media is so noisy that you will get new people viewing this all the time, almost no one will notice you have reposted it.

Key Components

The key components you need are as follow

Capture

Sumome.com – Capture emails and Social Sharing. They have 4 different ways of capturing emails, popups, slideups, normal forms, full screen welcome mats. (Im testing the new Welcome Mat, which is working well).

Example of a Sumome Popup

Example of a Sumome Popup

They also have a great control panel where you can set up and test all of the components while on the front screen of your site.

You may feel uncomfortable with using some of these methods until you see a >10x improvement as I did compared to my original signup form in the sidebar (note you still need one, people often say no to the popup but subscribe later anyway).

You can use the Mailchimp popups but they are just not as good.

Sumome.com integrates and pushes your new subscriptions into about 20 Newsletter and CRM services and it also integrates with Zapier which means you can transfer data to just about any online web service.

Send

Mailchimp and Mandrill (both owned by the same company).

mandrill

If you are doing weekly emails Mailchimp is a nice product. Great templates and designs.

If you are going for daily emails you can still manage it on Mailchimp but its a lot of work to cut and paste the images and blog post.

mailchimp

If you have multiple articles a day you might want to think about setting up templates using Mandrill for bulk email. (there are a lot of tricks to bulk email, get it wrong and you may be dumped in the spam folder forever more, Mandill has a bunch of tools to help keep you out of the spam folder, as well as rock solid delivery capability)

Frankly there is a missing component. If you are publishing multiple times a day but want to be able to customise your sending for example only send the articles you want to send or only send once a day with your own message the choices are pretty poor.

Running a large email list is a topic on its own which I will save for another post.

Blog

WordPress, self hosted. This is the standard. Using Themes and Plugins there are so many ways you can customise both the look and the functionality. Don’t waste time looking for anything else.

Bonus Points

Here are a few things you can do that will really turbo charge your acquisition strategy;

  • Use the Mailchimp Contacts Integration to capture additional details about your new prospects i.e. social media accounts, job details etc
  • Use the Zapier integration to send your contact details to a CRM such as AgileCRM, Streak, Highrise or Insightly
  • Use Intercom to engage your customers and sync the data with Zapier with your mail list or use Intercoms internal mail tool to run your customer communication (more suitable to those building an app or a platform that need to be able to communicate in near real time to their clients)
  • Use Zendesk to take all customer contacts and sync this to your email list

Basically any new contact your site generates should be generating a new email address.

but you absolutely need to do this from day one. If you are already operating, take the time to go back through your company inboxes and dig all the emails out and personally reconnect with them.

Words Of Warning

  • You need to make sure you are complying with appropriate Spam laws.
  • Legal issues aside your newsletter or hosting provider will just shut you down if you get too many spam complaints or place heavy restrictions on your sending
  • Make sure you setup all the Mandrill requirements for DKIM & SPF which are means to ensure your domain is verified.
  • Make sure you keep sending regularly, only hitting your email list every few months will mean people will forget you or the list they signed upto and mark you as spam.
  • You will get bounces, rejections and spam complaints. It goes with the territory when you send large amounts of email, in some cases the ISP will be doing this, sometimes its an individual. You need to remove these from your mail list, keep it as clean as possible. Mandrill has some tools to help with this, use them.
  • Double Opt in or Not. There are arguments on both sides, I prefer single signup, a lot of people forget to do the 2nd confirmation or don’t realise it has to be done and your successful signups will be cut significantly, on the plus side some newsletter companies use this as a quality indicator and will give you more privileges such as higher sending rates.
  • Make sure your Unsubscribe Link is Working. I had a lot of trouble with my Newsletter Provider/Hosting/Sending company not recording unsubscribes, drove me crazy for weeks and resulted in a bunch of pissed off people and spam complaints. Turns out one of the links wasn’t working, but on top of that it seems like the there was a conflict between the Newsletter plugin and the mail sender. Test your signup and your unsubscribe links at least once a week.

Conclusion & Actions

Hope this has been useful, if you are starting out you need to implement a way to capture emails, if you are already going, going back through your emails, personally reach out and start the dialogue again.

I started getting serious about sending daily emails about 2 months ago and during this time I have learnt a lot and made a bunch of mistakes, but now it is making a big different to engagement and traffic, if you have a particular question please feel free to drop me a line.

sdk.finance

SDK.finance – Software Development Kit for Online Financial Services

Pitch your Startup

Ed: Really like the look of this

 

Startup Name SDK.finance
What problem are you solving? Every time you start a new business, the problem of a quick start of the product emerged. You can spend up to 1 year building your first prototype. One day we found out that in every new FinTech product we solve the same problems and spend lots of time on it.
That was a day when we came up with the idea to help FinTech entrepreneurs around the globe build their products in the fastest way. We applied all our experience and the best ideas in this product.
In 2014 we launched the first version of SDK.finance – a “helper” software product for FinTech entrepreneurs.
It has proven to save entrepreneurs tons of time and money.
What is your solution? Here are the major products and services that may be built with SDK.finance platform:
• Loyalty programs
• Gift cards
• Prepaid cards
• Billing
• E-wallet
• Currency exchange
• Payment processing
• Bitcoin based services
• mPOS acquiring
• Payment systems
• Mobile payments
• P2P money transfer
• Lending platforms
• Card’s transaction router
Any FinTech product can be built using SDK.finance as a back end software in the shortest terms. Companies usually spend about a year working on the prototype. By using SDK.finance that time can be cut to as little as three months.
Target Market SDK.finance is a “helper” software product for FinTech entrepreneurs. Our target audiences are startups, CEOs, CTOs and other business level people who are looking for a solution to build new FinTech product. We also offer a bundle of modules for developers of FinTech products to help them to save tons of time developing new product. SDK.finance is also an opportunity for FinTech businesses that are looking for level up audit.
How will you make money? We have 2 business models: Saas and lifetime license. Depends on business model we offer different pricing plans and opportunities for our customer.
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? Our mission is to assist FinTech entrepreneurs to focus on their value added and clients while we take care of the technology.
Business is like a Formula One World Championship with two competitions: one for drivers, one for constructors. A business owner is a pilot of a Formula One Car. SDK.finance is the engeneering team that can design a Car and make a “pit-stop” support during a race, helping you outpace competitors and accept new challenges.
Founders Names Alexey Malyshev, Pavlo Sidelov
What type of funding has the company received? Self Funded
If you have a press kit or image gallery please provide a link (optional)
Website http://sdk.finance/
Twitter Handle @sdkfinance
[lc-response-form id=1]

Lead generation for pipeline success – Event – Sydney – 7th Oct 2015

Events/Seminars
Event Name Lead generation for pipeline success
Event Details Learn about how the fastest growing companies in the world, LinkedIn, DropBox & Twitter, build the pipeline to succeed while giving you plenty of opportunities to get the tips that will help you in the office the next day.
Address (Address, City, Country) General Assembly Sydney 56-58 York Street Sydney, New South Wales, 2000
Date 07/10/2015
Organiser (person, company, org) SalesHacker – Andy Farquharson
Link to Tickets https://www.eventjoy.com/e/sales-hacker-series-sydney-3491590
Twitter Handle or Hashtag @andy_farq
[lc-response-form id=2]

12000 People Need Your Help – Please Support Operation Skippy

Community

From Mike Nicholls, Annie Parker, Frank Arrigo, Kate Carruthers, Silvia Pfeiffer, Anne-Marie Eilas, Gordon Carr-Gregg and Mark Pesce

Operation Skippy

No one is immune to the compelling images from the Syrian refugee crisis.

At the suggestion of Annie Parker from Muru-D, we are putting together a team of coders + startup people who want to build apps and systems to help the refugees get to Australia and get resettled.

Our first idea is to work with the Digital Transformation Office to create an API to process Visa Applications for Refugees via Smart Phone Apps.

We aim to allow refugees to submit applications, documents, photos and required data to assist the Department of Immigration in processing these and getting 12000 refugees to Australia and resettled as fast as possible.

Think of it like Uber for Refugees. Press a few buttons on the smart phone and a big Qantas Jet picks you up and flies you to a better life.

If you can code or are fluent in Arabic, are active in Government or just want to help, please let us know how you can contribute register to help here and share the Facebook Page with your friends.

Ideally we can open this code up to any country or team that wants to adopt it for their own countries efforts.

Our First Sprint

We are proposing that the Australian Tech/Startup Community help create a solution to help our 12,000 Syrian Refugees get their applications completed, transported and resettled in the minimum time possible.

If you have Coding or Product Development Skills, Arabic or Government Relationships please volunteer a few hours per week for the next few months to help kick start this project.

Register

Please let us know who you are and how you can help here http://eepurl.com/bzPOCL

First Project

Our initial proposal is that we build Android & iPhone Apps in both English & Arabic that can streamline the Refugee Visa Application process https://www.border.gov.au/Forms/Documents/842.pdf

The Apps should interface securely to an API that receives and securely stores their details for transmission to the Department of Immigration and appropriate Government Agencies.

Ideally the apps will then act as the notification method back to the refugee for their progress as well as allow the refugee to keep the Department of Immigration updated as to change of location.

Please add additional ideas for apps or services to the Operation Skippy Facebook page

Proposed Sprint for this week:

Recruit:
3 Product Managers
5 IOS Developers
5 Android Developers
10 Backend Coders (Stack TBA, leaning towards NodeJS for speed of development)
1 Devops person
1 Github guru
1 Testing Expert
2 Government Relations Advocates

If you know someone who can help please send them our way.

Setup:
Facebook Page – in Progress
Mailing List – Done http://eepurl.com/bzPOCL
Trello Board – In Progress https://trello.com/b/4zGz3dnJ/operation-skippy-working-title

Github Repos
Slack Channel

Govt:
Work with Digital Transformation Office to help us build an API to allow Refugees to make this application form via Smartphonehttps://www.border.gov.au/Forms/Documents/842.pdf

Open Dialogue with Department of Immigration to ensure we meet their requirements for security and process.

Any comments or suggestions or other application or tech ideas please contribute on the Facebook Page.

Thanks

Mike Nicholls, Annie Parker, Frank Arrigo, Kate Carruthers, Silvia Pfeiffer, Anne-Marie Eilas, Gordon Carr-Gregg and Mark Pesce

Images care of US State Department & Wikipedia

Picking a Co-Founder Is Like Marriage Without The Sex

Daily Startup Tip

More than a few times over the last few months I have had discussions with entrepreneurs I mentor about problems with potential and existing co-founders.

A few observations.

It is widely held that businesses with co-founders have a higher chance of success compared to single founder businesses.

It stands to reason that 2-3 people with complimentary skills and temperaments can help each other through the challenges of launching and running a business.

Occasionally when one co-founder might be struggling the other can help them through the difficult times and generally the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

However,

Business partnerships are like marriage without the sex.

They are a very long term commitment.

They are not created overnight and you should expect them to last a very long time, however frequently they do fail and the consequences are almost as severe as a marriage breakup (actually I think both these events are more closely related than anyone realises).

Picking a co-founder is just like getting married.

Most people don’t pick someone they met on the weekend and get married next week.

There is a courtship period where you work out if you are compatible, share similar values and have the same goals and aspirations and are culturally compatible.

Building a startup is really hard, unless you have done it you have no idea, it might seem like a life of glamour but the reality is it can be a hardcore grind with constant stress and difficulty. Failure rates are high, disappointment is frequent and the pace is relentless.

You can’t enter this startup life with a business partner that you don’t know or trust.

If you don’t trust your new partner at the beginning of the relationship, its never going to get any better and your partnership and probably your venture has already failed you just don’t know it yet.

Ideally you want to spend 6-24 months getting to know them before getting into business with them.

Ideal places to work out if you are good as a team are either at Uni on group projects, working for someone else in the same team or running joint side or hobby projects in your spare time.

You should have some shared work experience together before you look at getting married to them and the courtship should last more than a few weeks.

In the same way that you wouldn’t marry someone if you felt you had different values, goals or expectations you shouldn’t go into business unless you feel completely aligned and trust them implicitly.

You are going to spend a lot of time with your new co-founder, much more time than your husband or wife so you need to take this decision really seriously.

If you only just met them at a Hackathon then you can’t expect to know them yet.

Take your time and be careful.

Co-founder failure is not spoken about much but the truth is its very high.

If you are already complaining about them or are unhappy with the situation no matter how good the business might look, run away now, fast.

We are looking for more Startup Tips from entrepreneurs or people who help startups message me @mikenicholls88

 

Photo credit Allan Ajifo https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Destination_wedding.jpg

20 Suggestions To Kickstart a 1000 Startups – Open Letter To Prime Minister Turnbull

Opinion

The Hon. Malcolm Turnbull, MP Prime Minister of Australia

 

Dear Prime Minister

Finally we have blast off.

Congratulations Sir, I think I probably speak for most of the Australian Startup community when I say I am pleased to have you as our new Prime Minister.

As far as I’m aware you are the only member of Parliament that has actively been involved in a tech startup that went onto major success and exit and it feels like you are one of the few in Government that understands the difference between a tech startup and a small business.

Some months ago at a speaking gig at Fishburners incubator in Sydney you asked for suggestions on ways we could accelerate the creation of a new wave of startups and STEM based businesses.

You may know I have shouted into the wind for most of this year about how as a nation we could “Let a 1000 Startups Bloom” and how we could create our own moonshot, quests for greatness and domination in particular fields.

I ask that you focus on the end result, that is launching successful STEM based companies rather than the inputs, education and research which generates the most noise.

Australian’s want massive commercial success from their STEM community and our massive investment in Research, but our STEM community is focused on the mechanics of Research and Academia not on commercialising their efforts.

Commercialisation is where we should focus.

Here are my suggestions to help launch 1000 Startups:

Goals

  • Pick 5 top STEM based Nation Building Priority areas for Commercialisation & offer Startups aggressive non competitive funding to attack the problems.
  • Essentially fund anyone to have a shot at these problems.
  • Some suggestions:Renewable Energy, Food, Agtech, Diabetes, Heart Disease, Obesity, Robotics, UAV, Space, Security, Medtech/Devices, Power & Water Management.

Funding

  • Formulate a Mini Budget before the end of the year specifically for Innovation & Startups to enable the following.
  • Create effective crowdfunding laws that mirror the USA, virtually no restrictions on # of investments or size.
  • Extend Early Stage Venture Capital Tax Free Status to Angel Investments.
  • Allow formation of Angel Syndicates with Early Stage Tax Free Status.
  • Extend ASX No Liability Mining Company legislation to Startups. After all Mining Explorers were the startups of our last boom and the no Liability regime has been directly credited to driving investment and growth in the mining sector in the early part of last century.
  • Non competitive grants for equipment, components, lab work and cloud computing time.
  • Free office/lab rent for startups working on the nominated National Priorities for 1-2 years.
  • Create a Startup Living Wage Allowance for 1 year to let entrepreneurs get their startups off the ground (The Raman Wage).

Facilities

  • Give us your old buildings to renovate so we can give startups somewhere to launch in each capital & regional city.
  • In particular save the Australian Technology Park at Redfern from being eaten by a horde of Commonwealth Bank workers – Please start by signing Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brooks Petition to save the park here .
  • Provide open access to advanced Fabrication and Bio/Med Lab facilities that already exist and identify shortfalls in other facilities and either build or rent capability for startups.
  • Create an Open Access Scheme to enable entrepreneurs and scientists who are not attached to a University to access the resources and facilities they need to create new businesses.
  • Give us old workshops & depots to create specialised labs for Electronics, Medtech, Biotech, Drones/UAVs .
  • Support Access to a CASA approved airport so the startups launching Drones, Space & UAV businesses have somewhere to work from.
  • Startup Precincts created in every major city and regional centre co-located with University Campuses.

Talent

  • Keep doing what you are doing with CSIRO – They have some promising new Startups including a potential Unicorn.
  • Provide Non competitive Fast Track Founder Visas & 457 Exemptions.
  • Provide Fast Track Visa Grants for Graduates & Post Grads & Inventors.
  • Every Foreign Grad & PhD that graduates from an Australian University should have a Visa stapled to their degree.

Focus & Ease of Doing Business

  • Create a new Portfolio – Innovation & Startups and give it to Wyatt Roy. Yes I know he is young but he seems to get it and is keen and not tied down by existing politics. Launching 1000 Startups is too important to fall between the cracks. Keep Science & Industry separate if you want to launch 1000 Startups. If you don’t believe me that Startups and Innovation are falling between the cracks read the Govt response to Chief Scientist report & see if you can spot the startup strategy. Hint you can’t because its absent.
  • Join R&D and Commercialisation Activities Grants and Rebates together for one cohesive strategy.
  • Standardised docs & terms for spinouts from Universities & Government funded orgs (CSIRO, NICTA, DSTO etc).

These are my suggestions, the startupaus community is keen to do anything which will help drive the creation, funding and growth of startups and we will actively engage with Government to help drive that goal.

Yours Faithfully

Mike Nicholls

 

Double decker bus on Sydney roads

The 389 to Bondi & Losing Great Talent – Startups & Team

Daily Startup Tip, ,

Had lunch with an old friend Michael Derrick (see below) who has been wise counsel and mentor to me over the years.

We usually talk business and got to discussing people and teams.

I made the comment that a running a business and staffing it with a team is like driving the 389 Bus from Circular Quay to Bondi Beach and you as the founder are the bus driver and fare collector.

The 389 winds its way from the city through a whole bunch of hipster (now) suburbs and ends up at Bondi Beach.

People get on the bus, people get off the bus, not everyone is going to Bondi Beach, not every one is onboard for the whole trip and its the same with your business, not everyone is going to the end destination, lots of people will come and go.

I used to use this to analogy to console myself when we lost team members, everyone has to walk their own path, they are not all along for the whole trip.

‘ when Michael made the comment that losing good team members was treated unlike any other asset in the business.

If the accountant lost $100,000 in cash, the auditors would be in, the accountant sacked, could even go to jail.

Likewise if a plant manager lost a $50,000 vehicle or a warehouse manager let $200,000 of stock walk out the door they would all be summarily fired.

And yet every day in our companies and startups, poor management and retention practices results in $ millions of lost talent and financial costs that eclipse any other losses a business might incur.

I thought about this for a while.

The costs are pretty clear, weeks or months without a quality resource in a growing company means you simply won’t achieve your goals.

Hiring costs are high especially if you use recruitment firms ($10,000-30,000). Training costs and time for a replacement to get up to speed could be $10000s and take months or longer. (Im sure everyone has worked for a firm that starts hiring and takes months or longer to make a decision.)

People join companies and they leave managers and it happens every day. Often people get a reputation for burning team members, and losing whole teams.

And yet you rarely hear about anyone doing anything about solving the problem of staff retention.

Just had a great night at Campaign Monitor who have created the most amazing lunch space with its own chefs and breakout space to try to attract and retain the best people to their team.

You would think that staff retention is on top of every startup CEOs todo list and yet its not, except at the excellent startups and I don’t think thats a co-incidence.

Just saying….

Michael Derrick is available on a very limited basis if you need some grey hair and someone who has been round the block a few times to give your some private counsel and help you get through some of the problems that high achievers experience on their path.

Once upon a time he used to close $30m PCs deals back in the early days and has given me fantastic guidance over the years, email me if you are want an intro.