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 and money.

To clarify, Pollenizer only ever invests in businesses that we are already a shareholder in.

What do you get?

• A majority shareholding.
• A co-founder committed for two years.
• A team of 15 in Australia and 55 in India across technology, marketing and business at your disposal.
• Experience building over 80 web businesses, in ten countries, 100m users and $100m in revenue (portfolio).
• A network of experts on call.
• Access to our exclusive founders and friends discussion group.
• Connection to Angel investors in Australia, Europe and USA (we’ve helped raised $5m in seed and angel investments in the past 12 months including Spreets).
• Founder minimal viable income (in certain cases)

What does Pollenizer get?

• 20-45% shareholding

Why Pollenizer?

• We have a strong, committed team.
• We have a reputation for integrity, action and results.
• We are uniquely positioned between technology, entrepreneurialism and investment.
• Our companies have already employed over 100 people.
• We have made more than 14 investments, many outlined in our startup portfolio.

What is the process?

1. Starting Up

• You come to a Startup Bootcamp. Held every few months.
• You propose a partnership.
• Pollenizer conducts basic due diligence on you and the business.
• We sign an agreement and are co-founders for two years. (It’s all ‘we’ from here.)

2. Customer Development

• We continue customer discovery and validation until confident.
• We build out a minimal viable product and keep iterating until traction.
• We get the company and ourselves investor ready, including pitch training.
• We pitch the company until we raise capital from the right investors.

3. Growth

• We put the team in place to grow the business towards profit.
• Pollenizer transitions into advisory roles if required.
• Exit or return on investment options are pursued.

Next Steps

If you’d like to talk to Pollenizer about being a co-founder in your next web business  contact us here.

If you’d like to invest in some of our web businesses, please contact us here.

I love this quote. Either you haven’t been through it and it just sounds like any old saying. Or you have been through it and you can physically feel it.

Customer Development when building a new web business gives you exactly this feeling. You set out on a journey with clean and exciting vision and direction, then you end up back where you started, with less energy and less confidence. It didn’t quite work out. You didn’t quite get the results.

But you should be excited. Very excited.

All you had last time at this position was the vision and direction. Now you’ve got vision and wisdom, not much but a little bit. That’s great! Your next direction should be a little bit stronger.

There is no guarantee on better results, it might be worse, but at least you’re trying and learning. What we can guarantee is that you’re first attempt to start a new web business will not work. I don’t care how good you are, how much research you’ve done and how unique your idea is. As they say, no plan survives contact with the enemy (or customers).

So it’s not a question of if you’ll learn, but how fast.

We’ve felt this over the past week on a couple on the customer development projects we are working on and it can cause a bit of anguish and frustration. However, it’s a lot lot lot lot better than spending a big pile of money and taking six months to learn the same lessons and have more anguish. So this post is to myself, our team and our startup partners to be happy where we are and to be excited for another week of creating a new business.

Take a deep breath, and go again.