We spent 2011 in talks with a number of media companies and explored all kinds of models. They all seemed too hard, and pulled our process too close to how media companies work today. A direction, we felt, would compromise our ability to succeed.

In the middle of 2011 we started discussions with the team at APN and found our ideal partner for prototyping a new model for corporate innovation that works. We have now announced our pilot projects.

First, APN has invested in Friendorse, our business that helps local people find what they need in the places that they live. This strategic investment will bring startup speed and agility to the APN portfolio to develop a new channel in their local markets. It helps us grow the business at a crucial time in its life and gives APN access to a new asset before it gets crazy expensive.

Second, we will launch a new business with APN. This is terrifically exciting because we have found the model in which to do it. Simply, it is no different to any entrepreneur that works with us. We co-invest and Pollenizer provides the execution team needed to validate the new business. We accept the power of what we each bring and begin our partnership focused on the pursuit of value. That’s all that counts.

This feels like an important step in the development of our ecosystem. Traditionally, large corporates have not contemplated work with early stage businesses. There are various reasons for this, including the following paraphrases:

“Any deal we do, large or small, needs full due diligence and costs tens of thousand in legal fees. So we don’t do deals under $2 million in value.”

“For GST reasons, we need to own the company fully so that we can avoid charging GST on media contras.”

“Anything we do, we need to do properly” = big study, full team deployment including usability team, focus groups, etc

“It needs to move the dial on our EBIT line before we can look at this.”

All these and more, gently shut the door on early stage entrepreneurs.

The problem is, the internet economy has changed. Two people in a lounge room with a wifi connection and a laptop each can launch a real business for less than a large business spends writing a scoping document. I don’t need to go over the reasons for this. You know. Powerful tools and libraries mean most of the hard software engineering stuff is done, people spend money on the internet like never before, the global market is ours for the taking, mobile web use has overtaken browsers (and people pay on mobiles) … by the time Goliath looks up, David has eaten his lunch.

We startups know how to live in this place. We work fast, we learn, we are happy to be a bit scrappy if it gets us to the next proof point faster. If we stuff up, we dust ourselves off and get back into it rather than face a media backlash about our big corporate failure. We don’t over-think things. We just do it and measure what happens. We can materially help big companies make new assets.

We startups have reached a new level of autonomy but let’s not get cocky. If our business model needs more than a few thousand users to get traction, we need help. As our startup evolves and needs to become a company (more than a validated idea), we need help. If our business needs a sales team to test selling new products nationally, we need help.

We are very excited about this new partnership. We help each other to pursue value using the tools that we each have and together we are stronger.

It was a huge process. Working on a startup is tough in the most ideal contexts, but a geographically displaced team from another culture made this harder. We knew we could not do this casually and we needed to make an investment. We worked closely with the Jugs to:

• grow the right kind of engineers (attitude, experience, career path) around a senior team who knew our platform and companies well
• implement scrum for rapid iteration and speed of learning
• implement a training program (Pollenizer University) to train new recruits before placement on a business
• commit to a single development platform (PHP/Zend) and a core framework of tools for rapid development of Pollenizer projects
• implement processes for dealing with language barriers and requiring clear, proactive communication via Jira and Skype.

The transformation over the three years was substantial and inspiring.

In mid-2011, we re-configured the Pollenizer model around the idea of “pods”. Pods are small, cross-disciplinary startup teams that sit together in our Sydney office. They use our methodology to conceive, launch and validate new web businesses in tight 4 month cycles. The Sydney team started to move faster and the overhead of international communication and late nights for the team became unsustainable.

With regret for the guys in India, we decided to move our entire operation to Sydney. Now all of our platform engineers sit inside the pod.

The economics of web businesses mean that we need to be pragmatic. We need to find some way of getting it done. 4 engineers in India can cost less than a single engineer in Sydney and this is helpful for an entrepreneur with limited resources. It is the difference between doing it or not doing it.

Pollenizer India has become X-Minds. If you need a way to get things done offshore with a group of engineers you can trust, I’d drop Jugs a line (jugs AT x-minds.org) and have a chat.

It won’t be a perfect experience. You will be frustrated with the timezone difference and struggle to communicate sometimes. But it might be the difference between doing it or not doing it and I always opt for the former.

• Techrice
• Technode

Both are published in English while being based in China.

We have asked around our network and there are people travelling from far and wide to attend. It may be a great opportunity for you to get the DEMO experience (for a fraction of the cost of the US) and introduce your business to Asian investors and media. Also a very efficient way to mainline your way into the community from across the region.

See you in Singapore at the end of February?

I just spoke at Sydstart (#sydstart) and and we were giving away Matto Rochford’s terrific startup tees. Here are the designs.

If you want an actual “Downunderpreneur” shirt and you are at #sydstart you need to you use Pygg to claim it. Go to Twitter and type “I want a shirt @pygg pay @pollenizer $1″

“I am from Friendorse. We help suburban communities find solutions to local problems and help suburban businesses find new customers. We are in week four of twelve and we have spent thirty six thousand dollars. This is what we have done this week…”

We laugh because it sounds like alcoholics anonymous, but this is how our weekly pod huddles begin.

Pods are the small business building teams that dedicate themselves to a new venture. We state the unique value proposition, how much we have spent and how long we have left to hit our targets.

A typical business phase at Pollenizer is 12 weeks long. During this time we expect a product to be built with customers using it in a way that can be measured.  A venture can only survive if it can show evidence of an emerging business.  Something other investors will understand and trust. It needs to do this quickly.

‘Sometimes’, said Arkady, ‘I’ll be driving my “old men” through the desert, and we’ll come to a ridge of sandhills, and suddenly they’ll all start singing. “What are you mob singing?” I’ll ask, and they’ll say, “Singing up the country, boss. Make the country come up quicker.” … ‘So the land’, I said, ‘must first exist as a concept in the mind? Then it must be sung? Only then can it be said to exist?’

Putting something out there, makes it real.

“We are releasing on August 22.”

“I am moving to San Francisco.”

“I am building a new kind of bank.”

Say it out load and something will happen. Don’t say it to yourself, tell everybody. Secrets don’t become real.

When I was a theatre director, I would design the brochure before the show. I would get thousands of them printed and tell everybody that this was what they would come and see in a few months.  Because I did so, I needed to deliver. Because I did so, I defined my focus and something to target. Because I did so, people know what I was working on and knew how to help.

I sung the world into existence.

When we launch new businesses, we put them in front of customers as soon as possible. Normally on the first day. We will sell it to potential customers, run ad campaigns targeting potential users, create landing pages to test value. We start singing and watch the world unfold. Because we do this, we need to deliver. Because we do this, we define our focus and have something to work towards. Because we do this, people know how to help us.

We sing our song and the world starts to take shape.

Today we are a part of an exciting Australian web community that is connected with other networks across the world. This helps us to suggest and explore opportunities to the startups in our community and has seen some big outcomes including major investments from Europe and Asia as well as the opportunity to work with other startups coming into Australia. This time, like never before, we can contemplate growing global businesses, but the missing link for many is the community. I doubt that many Australian entrepreneurs or investors could name an exciting Asian startup (Tencent doeesn’t count) or investor.

So, today we are contemplating a new Hive in Singapore. As with Sydney and India, we will just start. We will start working with co-founding entrepreneurs and start pitching to investors. We think we can help bridge a few communities to help new web businesses be better, more connected and globally focused.

A new home for Pollenizer?

We are frequently in Singapore and we are actively seeking meetings with the following Singapore based people:

• Entrepreneurs: if you have an idea that you would like to test and launch fast.
• Investors: if you are an active angel investor and would like to understand how Pollenizer can expand and de-risk your early stage portfolio.
• Web business builders: if you have experience working with startups as an engineer, marketer, product manager or designer and you want to join the Pollenizer Singapore pod.

Like all our businesses, we will push like crazy to make this happen but will happily kill it if no traction emerges.

We’d love to meet you if you can help us make this happen. Send an email to info@pollenizer.com

Our next trip  is 25-27 July.

We have a demo version of the app running here if you would like to try it out.

It is available as a Creative Commons – Attribution-ShareAlike license and we can’t support you if you get stuck.

There are more great products out there than there are great businesses because sometimes the product design process misses a critical question. Where is the business? Users come to the site, pass through the experience effortlessly, delighting in the aesthetics, knowing exactly what to do next and marvelling at the interaction of the UX. But then what? Who pays? Why?

This is what I love about the principle of customer development that our marketing team and the lean startup (#leanstartup) community in general believe in. How does product design change when the first thing you do is to try to sell something? How does your thinking change when the first hypothesis on customer and value is completely wrong? When we product designers start thinking about how to reach people, how to understand what they want and what value they assign to what we do, our work changes. How do you capture your customer?

Here’s an example:

Uploaded with Skitch!

The pure product design is simple for this main Groupon page. A deal with a great offer, clear messaging and clear link to purchase. While visible, all of that is blocked out to capture the email address of the user. There is a moment of barter where the site is showing something of value that it is prepared to share with the visiting user, in exchange for their email address. They can see enough to measure the value and choose to leave if they wish, or they can provide their email address to engage with the business.

Group buying products would function perfectly well without this. Group buying businesses would not. The purity of the product design would be better without this violation of my pure experience, but there would be no business.

I think we are all getting better at understanding this in the products that we make, but we sometimes forget. In product design, don’t forget the business design.

What do you think?