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 for new startups.
• Keep up to date on new systems, ideas, methods and implement them in our startups.
• Work very closely with product, engineering and design people to create great startups.
• Tracking and measuring everything that moves.

What we’d like to see:

• Must have worked on startups (day 1, creating products, no budget, finding customers, selling)
• 5-10 years online
• Marketing, customer acquisition roles.
• Strong hands on acquisition and Conversion skills
• Strong metrics/data driven person
• Heavy detail person, not big picture/strategic.
• Great people person, leader, manager.
• Great written and spoken communication skills.
• Sydney based (or willing to relocate)
• Able to juggle 5-10 businesses as once.
• Eager to work in high risk, uncertain environment where it’s up to you to work it out.

Key reasons the team at Pollenizer love what they do:

• The challenge – it’s hard to get startups off the ground, Pollenizer constantly challenges you.
• The impact – work a hard day and you’ll see a full days worth of value. Everyone makes an impact.
• The team – you’ll be surrounded by a strong team of passionate people always keen to help.
• The variety – you’ll never get bored. Everyone works on 2 businesses at once and you’ll get to have input into 4+ more.
• The pride – startups are high risk and they don’t always work, but you’ll be proud of the effort and thinking you put into the business to give it the best shot.

If you’re interested, please email your Linkedin profile to info pollenizer com or get a referral via Linkedin.

Unlike other seed accelerators around the world, Pollenizer is a co-founder and hands on teammate in each start-up they build. Not just an investor or advisor.

Pollenizer highlights for 2011 so far include;
1. Group-buying business Spreets sold to Yahoo7! for ~$40m in the fastest, biggest exit so far in Australian tech digital media history. More info

2. Enterprise-grade group-buying platform Dealised, with customers in 10 countries and 100 cities, raises a $5million A round, with SingTel Innov8 and Yuuwa as lead investors. More info

3. iPad publishing platform Mogeneration raises multi-million round investment from ex Hitwise senior management. More info

“It’s been a big year already, thanks to the hard working team and strong support from our network. It’s really setting us up for a solid decade of growth.” Phil Morle, Pollenizer co-founder and lead partner on Spreets and Dealised.

How We Do Things at Pollenizer
New ideas come from strong founders around the world or from the team. By demanding focus, the ideas can be rapidly tested in front of real customers. A lean product is built and launched as fast as possible. The business then turns to driving sales prior to raising angel or Series A capital. The Pollenizer team then transitions out, replaced by dedicated staff to aggressively grow the business towards profitability and returns.

Seed Fund – Pollenizer Ventures
Supporting the process is Pollenizer Ventures, a seed fund with capital from 16 of Australia’s most experienced tech veterans, including Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes (from Atlassian), Ian Gardiner, Matt Dickinson and Domenic Carosa.

This funding helps launch companies like Friendorse (hyper local social search) and Wooboard (game based morale booster for businesses), plus others to launch in coming months.

Pollenizer is currently raising further capital from sophisticated investors and welcomes expressions of interest.

Australia’s Booming Startup Industry
“In the past 5 years the industry here has taken off. A strong community, large investments, big exits and a strong crew of veterans reinvesting time and money. It’s really pumping.”, says Mick Liubinskas, Pollenizer co-founder.

The Australian start-up space is seeing exciting interest from international investors, with Atlassian and 99Designs both taking funding from Accel Partners.

Portfolio
Visit Pollenizer’s portfolio page to see more partner companies, such as:

Stagebitz - global inventory management for the entertainment industry.

Mick Liubinskas gives StartCast the Pollenizer Cliff notes:

To find out more about how Pollenizer works, read this http://www.pollenizer.com/what-we-do/services

Firstly, startups are hard work. New, risky, vague, emotional, financial, complex and constantly changing. In the past two weeks we’ve taken some huge steps forward and at the same time I’ve screwed a bunch of things up. Some big ideas haven’t worked out, a change of approach back fired, a partnership didn’t gel and in all the work a few details got missed. I don’t expect perfection but it still hurts. We’re a young company, applying a new way to kick start new ideas. It’s hard.

Secondly, there were a few things missing. The Pollenizer team is everything. A group of committed, talented, creative, caring people who turn up day after day to deal with the uncertainty, risk and high walls of startups. We are currently working on 6 live businesses and advising 6 others. To think I could even start to do 1/100th of it myself is crazy. Let’s not even start talking about the amazing finance, product, engineering and design work that I can’t even contemplate. (OK, I could probably do the design… just kidding crew.)

Thank you team for making Pollenizer what it is – an amazing engine trying our best to produce great web businesses.

The big one missing is Phil. Typically we are joined at the hip on things like this but for some reason they picked me out. Maybe because I’m the ego of Pollenizer doing talks and workshops around the country in an attempt to placate my failed drama career. For whatever reason, to miss Phil is to miss not just a limb, but a heart, brain and soul.

I try to thank him as much as I can, but even with Wooboard I couldn’t do it enough. But lets face facts. He’s an ex theatre director, philosophy student who taught himself to build websites for money. Then he takes a crazy job at Kazaa as CTO and just keeps going. Then he has the audacity to think he can also do business deals by starting this thing with Dean called Spreets and sells it in 13 months. But it doesn’t stop there. He rolls the IP from Spreets into Dealised and raises $5m. CTO’s aren’t supposed to do that. He is a true entreprenerd and he’s completely nailing it. I’m working hard just to keep up.

Phil brings process, discipline, big thinking, integrity, openness, and relentless hard work in the face of intense, obscure adversity. He continues to blow me away with his ability to get things done and I’m starting to think his capability is limitless.

We refer to each other at times as our other wives. So a big thanks to my startup startup wife Phil, for putting up with me and lifting me up with you. I’m proud to be in the trenches with you.

Pollenizer co-founder Mick Liubinskas said he hoped to have invested all the money by June next year, with investments between $10,000 and $100,000.

A key difference from other venture firms is that Pollenizer joins as a co-founder, working directly on developing and building the web businesses the company invests in.

Pollenizer has successfully built up high-profile portfolio of 16 companies including mogeneration, Posse and 99 dresses. These companies together employ more than 60 people across Australia.

Pollenizer co-founder Phil Morle, said Pollenizer Ventures would only invest in early-stage ideas with strong commercial growth potential. “We’re looking for businesses at a very early stage, that can be validated quickly,” Morle said.  “We prefer transactional business models rather than be advertising based. We’ve learnt through solid experience that these are the companies with the best chance of success.”

Liubinskas said the fund comes at a time when the Australian technology sector is experiencing unprecedented growth and investment.

“There’s so much uncertainty in other sectors, that investing in growth in private companies is very strong,” he said. “We see the fund as another vote of confidence by the market, in the Australian technology sector. We thank the Pollenizer team for its dedication and the investors for their support. Most importantly, we thank the entrepreneurs we work with for their unending passion and hard work.”

The $500k seed fund is made up of some of Australia’s most experienced technology veterans including:

Scott Farquhar, Atlassian
Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian
Matt Macfarlane
Stuart Richardson, Adventure Capital
Adrian Vanzyl, Adventure Capital
Matt Dickinson, Growth Angel
David Cooper, Deloitte
Mark Greig via Elevation Capital
Adam Broadway
Rob Antulov & Nick Gonios via 3eep Ventures
Chris Hitchen, Getprice.com.au
Alan Jones, The New Agency
Domenic Carosa, Dominet Digital
Phaedon Stough, Mitchell Lake
Tony Faure

Next steps?

Pollenizer Startup Process

Pitch your startup idea to Pollenizer

The idea is to be able to quickly and succinctly tell the full story of the business without thinking about it too much.

You get 5 seconds per slide. Just finish the end of the sentence.

As founders ourselves and working with hundreds of other entrepreneurs, we’ve found there are a lot of conflicting skills, principles and characteristics that it helps to have. Here are a few, add your own.

1. Big vision and brutal focus.
2. Deep empathy and benevolent dictatorship.
3. Daily flexibility and arrogant stubbornness.
4. Unending patience and constant change.
5. Respect of the past and belief in the future.
6. Collaborative management and decisive leadership.
7. Left brain creativity and right brain spreadsheet joy.
8. Super lean, frugal cost control and willingness to invest in growth.
9. A love of technology, processes and systems and a love of people, emotions and feelings.
10. Supreme confidence and openly admitting you’re regularly wrong.

Yahoo!7 acquires Spreets – leading Australian and New Zealand online Group Buying
company

SYDNEY, Australia, 20 January, 2011 – Online media company Yahoo!7 today announced it has acquired leading Australian online Group Buying site, Spreets Pty Ltd, including its New Zealand operations.

Spreets (spreets.com.au and spreets.co.nz) was the first Group Buying site in ANZ having been in operation for almost a year with 500,000 members and more than 274,000 vouchers purchased since inception.

The Yahoo!7 business delivers a new audience to the Spreets site through distribution on the Yahoo!7 Network as well as access to the benefits provided in Australia and New Zealand through its joint venture partners Yahoo! Inc. and the Seven Media Group, including marketing and promotions.

The acquisition helps Yahoo!7 to deliver on its Local and Social strategies as well as providing further diversification of revenue streams outside of display advertising.

“After carefully reviewing the market it was clear that Spreets is a market-leader in what is becoming a highly competitive and fast growing market. The Spreets management team in Dean McEvoy and Justus Hammer come with strong expertise and experience in the Australian Group Buying market,” said Rohan Lund CEO of Yahoo!7.

“At its core Spreets is about leveraging insights to deliver the best local deals through an online social experience, and this maps perfectly to the Yahoo!7 Local and Social strategies. The acquisition of Spreets means we can bring the best of Yahoo!7 to grow the business even further,” he said.

According to Dean McEvoy, CEO of Spreets, the Group Buying model has rapidly evolved over the past year delivering cost-effective marketing to small businesses and addressing an unmet and growing demand from consumers for online coupon deals.

“Australians and Kiwis love an amazing deal and Spreets has seen significant growth delivering over $40 million in savings to consumers over the past year. We’re proud to be an Australian born company leading the market in this rapidly evolving space,” he said “We’re thrilled with the acquisition by Yahoo!7 as we see the huge potential that one of Australia’s leading online media companies, which has huge momentum in the market, will bring to the Spreets business.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Media Contacts:

Amanda Millar
Trade Marketing and Communications Mgr Yahoo!7
Tel: 8288 4758
Mob: 0407 454 229
Email: millaram@yahoo-inc.com

About Yahoo!7

Yahoo!7 (yahoo7.com.au) is one of the most comprehensive and engaging online destinations for Australian consumers and advertisers. Formed as a 50-50 partnership between the Seven Network Limited (ASX: SEV) and Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), Yahoo!7 brings together the successful Australian internet business, Yahoo! Australia & NZ, and the online assets and television and magazine content of the Seven Network, one of Australia’s leading media companies. The company also combines the strengths of Yahoo! search and communications capabilities and its global internet network, with Seven’s rich media and entertainment content and marketing capabilities..

/media release

Congrats to Dean, Justus and the hard working Spreets team for really driving hard at this incredible new space for the last twelve months. Big congratulations also to the Pollenizer team, particularly Oliver, Jon, Fleur and Phil, for their enormous contribution throughout the year. A massive effort and a job well done.

Today’s deal in Sydney – $90 for $181 at Jordons Seafood Restaurant.

Tomorrows deal? Sign up!

News Coverage

Yahoo!7 Acquires Spreets: Leading Australian and New Zealand Online Group Buying Company – Yahoo!7 Advertising

Yahoo!7 buys online deals site Spreets - Sky News Australia

Yahoo!7 buys only deal site Spreets – The Age

- Sydney Morning Herald

- Herald Sun

- Brisbane Times

- Perth Now

Yahoo!7 buys only deal site Spreets – Australian Financial Review

Yahoo!7 buys only voucher site Spreets – news.com.au

Yahoo!7 acquires Spreets in $40m Deal – AdNews

Yahoo!7 buys group buying site for $40m – B&T

Yahoo!7 buys Spreets for $40m – mUmBRELLA

Yahoo!7 buys group buying site Spreets – iTWire

Yahoo!7 buys Spreets for $40m – Delimiter

Yahoo!7 snaps up Spreets for $40m – ZDNet

Spreets sold for $40 million in the biggest and fastest group buying deal of the year so far – Anthill Online

Yahoo!7 invests in retail – Inside Retailing

Yahoo!7 acquire Spreets for $40m – Startup Smart

brandsExclusive Congratulates Spreets and Yahoo!7 – brandsExclusive

Spreets acquired by Yahoo!7 for $40 million – Dynamic Business

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 more focused exploring. We can’t build it and hope.”

Founder: “Yes, we really have never known what our starting point is. What our X-Factor is?”

Mick: “Mmm, I’m not sure it’s an X-factor. That says that it’s one thing that when we add it in makes the difference. I think it’s more the right mix. There are 1,000′s of variables with any idea. There is no one right combination, but lots of wrong ones.”

It really made me think about the sequence of a startup. Here are some options.

1. Think about something, work on it and never launch it because it’s never perfect.
2. Build something, get an average response, try to grow it, have an average business.
3. Build something, get an average response, change the mix, get an average response (or worse), change the mix, get an average response (keep going until…), change the mix, get a great response, try and grow it, have a great business.

Clearly I’m cheering for option number 3, but the key point is ‘change the mix’, not ‘add in a new feature’. More features just add more complexity making it harder for customers to like you and makes you slower to move.

WDYT?

Babies born, dresses worn, new team members, bootcamps, founders, began Pollenizer Ventures…. Fantastic!

Here’s a few ways we’ve contributed to the economy in the past year…

Number of jobs created: 60

Tax paid: Just the right amount.

Investments made: 4 totaling $165,000

New companies formed: 8

Highlights of the year for us;

• Great growth in Spreets with 10,000+ daily deal vouchers sold across Australia
• Mogeneration‘s Oomph platform taking the iPad publishing world by storm
• Posse.com raising capital and driving ahead
• Some great new ventures – Tizzet (now selling Michael Buble tickets in Sydney) TravelCandy, Waysact, Palmasher.
• Pollenizer Ventures investment from 17 amazing investors
• The team growing to 18 people in Australia and 52 in India (WOW!)
• 80 people attending Startup Bootcamps
• 281 new business pitches
• A great Christmas party with the Silicon Beach crew.

We failed a lot…. succeed a lot more… and had a massive, shiny bucket of fun.

Highlights of the year from our friends and peers:

- Future of Crowdsourcing Summit 2010 Newspaper Extinction Timeline Crowdsourcing Landscape SMETechnologyForum.com CrowdsourcingResults.com NewsScape Map of the 2010s Future of Global Media Driving Forces of Change: The Cloud

- Set up The Women’s Investment Club. Introduced the brand to the market

- Discovering Silicon Beach :)

- Android coming of age

- Setting up a great new office in Surry Hills. Landing Red Bull as a global customer for Wunderkind Pro. Launching the Wunderkind video recruitment platform with Malibu Rum. Getting the opportunity to apply for Australia’s first Y-combinator style incubator – StartMate. Getting Rob Antulov to join me with my new company GiveSmart.

- Starting at IPitch! – Bringing on 5 New IPitch Partners!

- Android (open) overtaking iOS (closed).

- Joined this Meetup and met a bunch of people. Started two new business ventures that are very promising. Asked Jackie to marry me and she said YES

- Launching: iQuoteThat.com LetusInnovate.com Split.ly Meeting so many entrepneurs at networking events such as ACES, Silicon Beach, Anthill YENO, Entourage networking events and Unconvention. Having our first meeting with an Angel Investor from Sydney Angels.

- Australian Ballet @ penrith stadium free

- Running numerous events, especially 2 x Social Innovation Sydney. The feedback after was awesome. Presenting to the future female leaders and to the IT departments of AMP on Social Innovation. Working with the great team at Pollenizer.

- The launch of a new partner site of Pressyo

- Meeting some amazing and insirational entrepreneurs!

- Great meetup circle groups

- Starting at The Project Factory

- Building sydneybuses.info and our product pretacloud winning the AIIA egoverment innovation iAward for NSW

- Re-branded our gaming network to MMGN.com.

- Getting funding for Digital Sydney Leaving the government

- Working on eCommerce solutions on the Magento platform Watching the rise of Pollenizer Growing popularity of location based apps and subsequently launch of facebook places

- Growing from going nowhere to the first steps of a promising entrepreneurial career Being vice president of ACES UTS and helping grow it to Sydney’s most active student-entrepreneur society; Becoming President of ACES UTS; Working with The Entourage on the Sydney & Melbourne Unconvention; Being featured on the SMH.com.au frontpage and live on The Morning Show; Being proven right when I predicted that Facebook would move into location based services and that it would become a popular feature.

- The company grew from 10 to 20 teachers stopped advertising as the word of the mouth became enough finished MA- graduated with distinction moved to AU learnt how to make a fish stew

- Website set to launch before year end!

- Our website is planned to launch at the end of this month!

- Becoming part of an amazing ecosystem, meeting hundreds of amazing entrepreneurs, and getting them to buy me beer. Also building a network of close to 2000 university students interested in entrepreneurship (so far).

- Concept development of www.mmmule.com – a social travel network which will change the way people travel & interact

- High Court of Australia website launching last week and eating some amazing health foods.

- Surviving

- The growth of the Australian industry this year. 2 big exits, 2 big raises, lots of small raises, a shitload of events and a huge amount of activity. Awesome.

- iPad being a game changer to tablet computing despite people not liking it initially.

- Sale of Tjoos :)

- The highlights of my year were: becoming portable, the opportunity to work in Canberra for a few months, paying off debts, UX Australia, Singularity Summit, my holiday overseas, finding my happiness again, and finding myself in a position of choice.

- Skitch 1.0.1

Finally, thank you to everyone who attended the Silicon Beach end of year drinks at our office.

A big thank you to our sponsors for the night.

PB Web Development

Atlassian

mmmule

MMGN

GiveSmart

Elevation Capital

Delimiter

Have a safe and very merry festive season. See you all in 2011!

I hated listening to your talk at SydStart

Here is what it said;

Hi Mick,

My name is Kevin Lippy and I founded a company called Brokepacker.com, a booking engine for backpackers offering discounts and value adding deals on accommodation, experiences and travel. I pitched yesterday but unfortunately it was after you had had to leave. If you want you can read about Brokepacker here http://www.tnooz.com/2010/07/23/tlabs/tlabs-showcase-brokepacker/.

I really loved your talk yesterday and I agreed with pretty much all of what you said… but I found it absolutely grating to listen to because it seemed like i’m doing the exact opposite in a lot of ways at the moment. For example;

1. Don’t start by protecting an idea because you won’t get it right the first time anyway. – I did, and it cost a fair bit of time and money.

2. Manual testing –  I actually did do this by moving into various backpacking hostels for a while, which gave me an awesome insight into the viability of the concept and it also got me some great sales. Every backpacker sold, absolutely loved it (and why wouldn’t they… it’s cheaper for their needs and wants). However I’m not sure if that really proves the concept as an ‘online booking engine.’ Is this the correct manual test?

3. Need to just go out sell –  I  may be wrong but I honestly think with the model we are using there is a definite risk in doing this. The model requires operators to continually list products each month, so we have to ensure that we provide them value. (This is different to group buying models like Spreets, Scoopon etc). If it we don’t deliver we may lose the operators in the long run.

If you have some time i would more than appreciate catching up to discuss these points and the project in general and perhaps getting feedback as to whether you think the model will work. I want to focus, but I also want to make sure that I am focusing on the right strategy.

Much appreciated,

Kevin Lippy

Brokepacker.com

T:

F: http://facebook.com/brokepacker

Ha! I love it. I’m glad I impacted someone. Yes, focus! If I got one guy to move one centimetre to being more focused, then I’m glad I went.

Here is my reply to him;

LOL.

One of the best email subjects I’ve seen for years Kevin – thank you!

Honestly, I hated hearing my talk too. The reason is that I know it now, but I didn’t know it until I worked on 5 businesses over 8 years. Ouch! It was always something else.

Here is a list of my bad excuses;

“We didn’t raise enough money.” – WRONG – more money, means more features, less urgency and less focus.

“We were ahead of our time.” – WRONG – it means you couldn’t actually solve someones problem.

“Our marketing wasn’t strong enough.” – WRONG – more potential customers into a shop that doesn’t sell anything anyone wants to buy doesn’t bring more sales.

“If only we were all in Silicon Valley.” – WRONG – having the wrong core utility and going slow doesn’t work anywhere in the world.

Yep, tough lessons.

Congrats on getting started at all. I like where you guys are going.

We’d like to chat to you. First step is always a pitch. http://www.pollenizer.com/services/pitch-sessions/

Are you after a potential partnership or advice?

Are you OK with me blogging your email and part of my response? I’ll take out personal info of course.

Thanks,

Mick Liubinskas

The Sydney Startup community is so exciting right now. It’s just great to be a part of it.