Putting people first – service design with Marc Stickdorn

Blog on November 23rd, 2011 3 Comments

I was lucky enough to attend Marc Stickdorn’s three day workshop on Service Design Thinking. For the uninitiated, service design is a holistic approach to… you guessed it, designing services! In Australia, this is more commonly referred to as user centric design, customer experience design, user experience design and the like, which is typically the domain of products. So [...]

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Capital Development: The Third Kind of Startup Heat

Blog on November 13th, 2011 2 Comments

For a startup, there are three things you need to develop: a product, a customer, an investor. Recently at Pollenizer we had an epiphany. Well, it was more of an observation of what was happening, but it was just as powerful. Like all startups, we have a limited time to get the job done and [...]

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New role: Startup Marketing Lead

Blog on October 16th, 2011 1 Comment

Pollenizer is seeking someone to lead, drive and grow our great team of startup marketing, customer development and customer acquisition peeps. What the role is; Leading a team of 4 customer development/marketing people as they work their butts off to start new web businesses. Build processes and systems to more efficiently and effectively get customers [...]

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Customer Empathy

Blog on July 25th, 2011 No Comments

Recently we did a test of a promotion for Wooboard and we learned a lot. We had a great offer, clear call to action, a good value price – let the cash roll in! Ummm… we forgot to sell the product…. Yes, in our excitement or more accurately our myopia, we had assumed the world [...]

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Startups first test: Does anyone care?

Blog on July 6th, 2011 2 Comments

Part of what Pollenizer does regularly is to reality check new ideas by just putting them out there. It’s the fastest way to find out if anyone cares and what they think. I copped some flack on Friday for tweeting out a link to a site called Noble Village. This was one of those tests. [...]

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Are you looking for an X-Factor or the right mix?

Blog on January 12th, 2011 No Comments

Talking to a founder of a new business they are just exploring right now, we had an interesting thread of conversation. Here is a rough recollection of it; Mick: “There is definitely a vision worth pursuing there, but the fact that we don’t know the first step says to me that we need to do [...]

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Dirty Hacks: Guest Post by David McKinney

Blog on November 2nd, 2010 No Comments

A guest post from David McKinney – CEO/Founder of Jammbox. DIRTY HACKS FOR STARTUP FOUNDERS The aim of the dirty hacks series is to help you launch your startup faster, cheaper & dirtier. Everything is rough, crude, and fast. Just what you need for your startup. Part 1: How to use Facebook to size a [...]

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Pollenizer: Investing in 10 Web Startups This Year

Blog, Promoted on August 24th, 2010 5 Comments

Pollenizer wants to be a co-founder of your next web business. Our goal: Invest our team and money in 10 web startups by June 30, 2011. Pollenizer’s focus is on: Startup, idea-stage web businesses, In Australia, Targeting consumers, Commercially focused, With a committed founder, with industry experience, That need an experienced co-founder to invest time [...]

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What to do with results of customer development?

Blog on August 19th, 2010 No Comments

I saw Steve Hopkins post today on hypotheses based testing and thought I’d share some ideas we’ve been using at Pollenizer. A lot of startups we see and work with are getting better at doing customer development, but they sometimes aren’t quite sure what to do with the results. Very rarely do you finish one [...]

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Startup Lesson: Pulling The Ripcord to Fail Fast

Blog on July 2nd, 2010 3 Comments

Pollenizer was approached Chris Gray in June to run a focus workshop for a web business Chris had founded (working title ‘Pledgespace’). In the first half of the 4 hour workshop we worked on customer discovery (micro-segments, customer values, creating 10 X value). We iterated on this process to create a focused customer development plan. [...]

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