Read the media release below for more info:

Group buying site Spreets receives $2 million investment and joins forces with brandsExclusive in new billion dollar industry

Australia’s first group buying site Spreets (www.spreets.com.au) has received $2 million in funding, with backing from two major European investors, Klaus Hommels and Oliver Jung.

Hommels, whose investments include Facebook and Skype, and Jung are currently concentrating their efforts on group buying sites around the world.

This new type of venture uses the power of social networks to offer significant discounts to consumers, while promoting local businesses. National deals start today with an offer from hip noodle-house Wagamama. Buy a $7 Spreets voucher and get $20 to spend in the restaurants. Groupon (www.groupon.com) in the USA is the world industry leader, valued at more than $1 billion after just 18 months.

Leading Spreets are some of Australia’s most respected entrepreneurs, Dean McEvoy, Phil Morle and Justus Hammer. McEvoy’s first business, Booking Angel (www.bookingangel.com), a restaurant booking system, was voted #7 in the BRW top100 web 2.0 businesses.

Previously CTO of music-sharing site Kazaa, Morle is now director of web venture incubator, Pollenizer (www.pollenizer.com). Pollenizer is renowned for its ability to bring focus to ideas and help develop them into successful businesses.

Online marketing expert Justus Hammer, who helped build GetPrice (www.getprice.com.au) into Australia’s leading shopping comparison site, gave up a senior position at Google to join the Spreets team. “I called Google up on what was meant to be my first day and told them I had a better offer. Spreets is a once in a lifetime opportunity”

Today, Spreets launches with a new design and announces an ongoing partnership with shopping club brandsExclusive (www.brandsexclusive.com.au). brandsExclusive’s 350,000+ active members quickly benefit with instant access to Spreets offers nationwide. “We offer premium fashion and lifestyle products at up to 70% off,” says founder Daniel Jarosch. “So when we came across Spreets we knew it was the perfect fit”.

Spreets has offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, with plans to open in Perth already underway. “In this competitive and fast-growing space we’re not just about daily deals, we’re about helping busy people discover things they never knew they loved,” says McEvoy.

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We’re now looking for passionate individuals to join the team in Trivandrum, Kerala. Are you a Javascript junkie or a Ruby on Rails diehard. You may love product design or be the best system architect that is seeking new challenges. We work across the spectrum of web business building and continue to hone and improve our agile processes.

One day you could be working with a large organisation like the BBC and the next with a founder of a new company with a very small budget who wants the minimum viable product for their idea in a matter of a few weeks. You’ll be working with a results oriented team and must love growth and change.

What are we looking for.

• Self starters
• Passion for all things web
• Hardcore development skills
• Entrepreneurial Attitude
• At least 3 years of experience in your field

Specific positions we are hiring for include.

• Ruby on Rails developers
• Zend PHP developers
• CSS/HTML and JS developers
• iPhone developers
• QA specialists with a passion for TDD
• System Admin Gurus with skills in AWS and/or CI

Click here to Apply

One of the challenges that we see regularly is people working on startups for far too long. If you’re working on it on the side (which means 9 to 5 – but 9pm to 5am) and you don’t have any partners or external people putting pressure on you, then you can take just as long as you want – which means forever. But you’re just guessing until you get it into the hands of a real customer.

One way we’ve found successful in pushing people to get a minimal viable product out is to pick a deadline for demoing. It’s an artificial date, but by announcing it to the world and inviting people, then all of a sudden there is an external reason to get it done.

To help people do this, Pollenizer is offering it’s office to you to run your demo. You give us the date, and we’ll invite some of our team, our partners and maybe even some of our investors, to hear your pitch and see the product.

Here is what you need to do;

• You must be a web (online, internet, mobile, ipad) business.
• Pick a date within 6 weeks from today – earlier the better.
• Write a copy of your web startup executive summary one pager.
• Email the date, the 1 pager, and a 1 minute video if you can to mick pollenizer com
• We’ll confirm the date, add it to our events section, and invite some people that we think will like to see the product.
• You chuck out as many features and bits you don’t need to demo. It’s OK and even preferred if it’s pretty ugly. We want to see wow value.
• Come and demo. 10 minute demo, 20 minutes of questions. Show your product quickly, then talk to us about your plans.

Looking forward to seeing your demo!

I’ve come across a few interesting situations which made me reflect a bit about the correlation between a widely recognised coaching matrix for individuals and how could this be extended to organisations as a whole.

Let’s first start by looking at the goal of an Agile coach:

Your goal is to a grow a productive Agile team that thinks for itself rather than relying on you to lay down the Agile law. “Agile Coaching” by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, 2009 Pragmatic Programmers.

Considering that one of the founding principles of Agile software development is that “the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams” (and also that this seems to be common sense, right?) enabling teams to think for themselves seems like the natural progression.

Now, in large (and small) organisations, the traditional “command and control” method of management has eroded this principle. In particular in software development, the more common approach is to see “development” as one of those steps that happen at the end of a chain of events that starts with clever executives in strategy meetings devising products based on tons of dashboards and metrics, then sending that to a team of business analysts to come up with large functional specification documents, which are then in turn handed over to rooms full of coders to implement them. We have seen over and over again that this mechanistic and believed-to-be-repeatable approach doesn’t work.

So we assume that everyone will be producing better products, delivering more value faster and having more fun doing it just by changing a few things. Constructive-developmental theories, of whatever sort, introduce a few fundamental ideas one of which is that not every change represents development, which is where our job as coaches become very interesting. Change is just the first step towards development :)

Getting back to the point I was trying to make, when introducing changes as a coach, there is a model for individuals based on the skills and will of the people being coached, some call it the “High Low Matrix Coaching Model“. This coaching model states that depending on the motivation and skills of the coached person, you should adapt the coaching style to one of either “direct”, “advise”, “motivate” or “delegate”. I heard about this model a few years back from my friend (and my manager at the time) Didier Elzinga while we both worked together at Rising Sun Pictures (awesome VFX studio BTW). It’s very useful when you are working with small teams or individuals. What happens when you are coaching larger teams and you need to have a coaching style based on the organisation level of maturity (skills and will)?

So, I set myself to read more on organisational maturity (yes, CMMI and the like, which I was already somehow familiar with), as well as psychology of coaching. I was trying to find out if there had already been some research on the topic. It’s hard because when you google for “organisational maturity and coaching models” you get (apart from the suggestion on the american spelling of “organizational” ;-) ) quite a few results around the organisational maturity as referred in the CMM models, which is not really what I was after. I couldn’t find any direct correlation that would help me validate this theory of mine.

In the next few engagements, and some of the ongoing ones, I shall be using this line of thinking and report on the findings.

We live in interesting times! Full of opportunity to do things better!

Some quick thoughts on one of the hardest things to do as an entrepreneur (or intrapreneur) – holding both a big vision and a brutal focus in your mind at the same time. They sound like contradictions and in many ways they are the endlessly feuding families of a new venture. You need to make them happy neighbours though.

You need a big vision.

To quit your job, convince your partner, convince your friends to give up some cash, to recruit great partners and team members, to nail the first pre-sales, to get the cheque from the investor and to continue to get out of bed four hours after you got in there with a big smile and energy in your veins – You. Need. A. Big. Exciting. Clear. Daily reinforced. Vision

But….

You can’t get to your vision in one step.

What if Microsoft said that we’re going to try and put computers on every desk straight away? You wouldn’t build an operating system and supporting applications.

What if Facebook wanted to be the worlds most active social network in one move? They wouldn’t have limited their first version to Harvard Students.

What if the USA said they wanted to get a man on the moon in a year? They’d just put someone in a plane and shoot them up there to see what happened.

You get my point. Big visions, like long journeys, take many small steps, a lot of time and plenty of meandering.

So you need to be focused. You need somewhere to start. Somewhere so small that you can deliver it with one person, part time and with $485 in your ‘spare cash’ fund.

And you’ve never done it before. Probably no one has ever done it before, so you’re going to get it wrong. And get it wrong. And again. And again and again and again. Then, but only then, are you going to nail it and explode. In order to do this quickly it needs to be really small. Tiny. Microscopic. Focused.

As Steve says in this post business success is a lot about momentum which equals mass times speed. You can’t win with mass (you don’t have any) so you have to do it with speed. The smaller, the more focused the less weight, the less distractions, the faster you move.

So you need vision AND you need focus.

How do you do it? Welcome to the challenge. :-)

OK, some thoughts from me.

1. Cultivate your vision. Spend time up front to paint it big and exciting. Something you’ll remember in the deepest depths of the startup rollercoaster and something which will guide your every little decision around focus without having to run it through ‘the mainframe’ to check.
2. Trust your vision. Once you have it. Trust it. Don’t pull out the plant to check the roots. Not even if people challenge it everyday (which they will). Have faith.
3. Have guts. Being focused takes courage. Picking one thing to focus on means saying no to at least 100 other ideas and options you have. It’s hard. It’s always hard. It gets harder the more successful you are because you know what you’re capable of and have more money to play/pray with. Make a choice and don’t look back…. for at least a year!
4. Externalise. You’re going to be in the pressure cooker day in day out. Your vision and your focus will both be beaten, pushed, shoved, blocked, mocked and distracted. Find ways to put both of them in an external mechanism where the discipline doesn’t rely on your emotions. Find someone you love and trust not in your core team and pre-book quarterly breakfast/lunches with them with just two questions.
   1. Are we going towards the vision?
   2. Are we really being focused enough?

Good luck with your arm wrestle of vision and focus. Please share your stories of challenge and success with me.

I want to share this with you guys not as a finished thing because it will always be moving, but as a first stab at describing the structure of a Pollenized project. We’d love to get your feedback on it.

It all began when Mick scribbled something on a whiteboard in Sydney. Eventually it turned into this in Zurich with Amir:

And now it is this:

If you know us, does this describe what we do? What is missing?

If you don’t know us but you run a web business, are we speaking your language?

The picture of his taskboard is absolutely fantastic! It conveys an enormous amount of information in an aesthetically pleasing way, has all the metrics up there, on plain sight. I think we can learn a lot from it and from there, see how we can apply it to our work with our partner X-Minds and our clients. Remote working is very different and we can learn and do something new and innovative :) It’s a completely different ball-game when your team is widely distributed and finding out what works in co-located teams is a very valuable experience on which to build.