Pollenizer: Building and Investing In Australian Web Startups

In “Premiree- More Premium, Less Free” Mick wrote that many startups hit trouble by aiming to deliver a free product and delivering something in which the value matches the price. But why do so many startups choose free as a price? What happens in a competitive market if you choose not to price your product [...]

I’ve been a web product manager for what is beginning to feel like a long time, perhaps somewhere in that history there are some helpful experiences I can share with other product managers. Product management consultancy Brainmates was kind enough to invite me over to lead their second “Product Talks” event next week. Product Talks [...]

A friend and ex-colleague has just started in a new role building a team to run social media for the Obama administration. One of their most interesting initiatives is to ask the community to contribute questions to an online town hall in the US tomorrow. So far, 41,306 people have asked 42,126 questions and cast [...]

You remember the future we were promised, right? It had flying cars, robotic housemaids, one-piece shiny suits and meals in convenient pill form. We don’t live in that future because the people planning utopia fell in love with their own beliefs about what consumers wanted. They missed the gross and subtle cues that consumers use [...]

Sometimes in the startup phase of a business, you’ll wrestle with the big issues for months at a time until you think you’ve nailed them. You feel like you’ve finally solved one of the great problems of our time. You get the big issues implemented in your front-end, announce it to your users, and sit [...]

You may have noticed us mentioning a product called mixin in our social media lately. There’s a good reason for this: we’ve been scoping out a relationship with the company that goes beyond the usual ‘hired gun’ deal most consultancies offer web startups. As part of our due diligence around the deal, we’ve been using [...]

My name is Alan Jones, and that’s been a heavy burden to bear for most of my adult life because of the notoriously tetchy radio personality and F1 race driver of the same name. Now Pollenizer has an Alan Jones of its very own. And that Alan Jones is me. This week I’ve joined Pollenizer [...]

Critical UX insight (and pirate eraser!) Since we got back to work on Trippything a few weeks ago, Elliot’s been busy getting the back-end code base into a whole new, improved shape, which will allow him to spend less time building stuff from scratch which has already allowed us to make faster progress on the [...]

The phones are running hot at Pollenizer this week, not because we’re flogging Christmas specials, but because our latest clients are the team who’ve built messmo, an Australian mobile application. messmo is an interesting product because it lets users send free SMS messages to each other, send picture messages, send/receive email, update their Facebook status [...]

It’s easy to get journalists to write about you; it’s just hard to control what they write. We met with a startup CEO recently to take a brief on marketing. The conversation turned to which marketing tools they were currently using and which they had plans to use. As a PR person and journalist in [...]