Shared Learnings
Easy measures to cope with extraordinary traffic surge
Photo Credits: BenJTsunami - See original here. From time to time one of our portfolio companies gets to be featured on a prime time TV show (A Current Affair, Today Tonight...). This has obvious benefits for the business in terms of publicity, but it comes at a price...
read morePollenizer: Investing in 10 Web Startups This Year
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...
read moreStartups: Signing NDA’s and Protecting Your Idea
Signing NDA's is impossible for Pollenizer given that we see about 20 new businesses a month. We certainly keep all information confidential and never, directly chase a new idea brought to us from someone. Pollenizer's integrity is and must be on public show and our...
read moreWhat to do with results of customer development?
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...
read morePollenizer Podcast 6: New business models for journalism?
This week's Pollenizer Podcast is a little different, where I talk with the Public Interest Journalism Foundation's chairman Margaret Simons and Secretary Melissa Sweet. I am also on the board, which you can read a little bit more about here The Foundation was set up...
read moreStartups and Babies: Guest Post by Chris Hitchen
This is a guest post by Chris Hitchen, CEO at getprice.com.au in celebration of Mick's new son, Samuel. Startups and babies... The launch date is never certain and often late It doesn’t come out the way you expect it to It costs much more than you think There are lots...
read morePollenizer Podcast 5: The Plexus edition
In this week's podcast I talk to Mark Pesce, one of the co-inventors of VRML. Mark and I chat about what drives him to take an idea and see it through to completion. What's more important for success, the person or the idea? We also, chat about his new project Plexus...
read moreProject/Product Manager position at Pollenizer
Pollenizer is looking to hire a Junior / Mid-weight Project/Product Manager. Woohoo! Is that person you? See below. The lucky winner will have to do stuff like: Spend half of his/her day in Jira and/or wire framing cool products Spend the other half in meetings and...
read more99% Finished Is Normally About Halfway There
"We're 99% there," says the very excited entrepreneur. "Fantastic, well done. Only 50% of the way to go," responds the veteran advisor. We often laugh at this at Pollenizer. It's something we hear lots of people say when they are starting a new web business,...
read morePollenizer Podcast 4: User Experience for start-ups
This week in the Pollenizer Podcast we chat to the fabulous UX consultant Lisa Herrod, also known as @scenariogirl. We talk about UX in terms of start-ups and Lisa has some great tips for budding web entrepreneurs out there. Read Lisa's great blog post on Lean...
read morePollenizer podcast 3: The steak knives edition
So this week we chat about the newly launched Pollenizer Bootcamp. Since we're selling our own wares we decided this would be called the steak knives edition. My cold also gives me a great infomercial lilt to my questions. There is some useful info in there though, so...
read moreDeveloper Founders Have to Be Salespeople
A short story about the difference between belief and experience to encourage developers to get out of their comfy chairs and go and talk to your customers. At Lean Startup Circle Sydney, a number of the people were concerned about having to go talk to customers as a...
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