Student startups at the Young Enterprise Scheme Regional Finals 2023

Last night, Ōtepoti gathered together to uplift and celebrate local secondary school students working on new ideas at the Young Enterprise Scheme Regional Finals. Startup Dunedin came along and celebrated with a full table this year - with our founders, Distiller Incubator & Audacious alumni, and Startup Club president in attendance!

For those of you who haven’t crossed paths with them yet, Young Enterprise is is an experiential programme where year 12-13 students in New Zealand set up and run a real business. 

The regional winners will get flown to Wellington to participate in the national finals - something that Dunedin has become pretty familiar with over the last two years as Dunedin students - Abalro Health and Sole Haircare - have won the national title two years in a row!

Albalro also took the stage tonight, as alumni and speakers. Co-founded by Abby Green and Alex Livingston, Abalro took out the top prize two years ago, so they had a lot of empathy and insight for the nervous students waiting in the wings. 

Since that day, they’ve taken out the Polson Higgs Premiere award at Audacious, and are now one of the teams in Startup Dunedin Distiller Incubator.

Want to hear more about the awesome pitches? Keep reading!

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Abloom Tea -  Bayfield High School

First across the stage was Abloom tea, which aims to create a stress-relief tea with Ayurvedic ingredients and eco-friendly packaging. Their destress tea is infused with Cardamom and cinnamon, it's 100% organic and features passionflower, chamomile and Ashwagandha. You can find Abloom tea at Dunedin's very own Taste Nature stores!

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Cloud 9 Hydrations - Otago Boys High

Next up were Cloud 9 Hydrations from Otago Boys High. The team was dedicated to tackling a pretty big, and pretty common problem: low mood, motivation, and mental health challenges that affect many people. Dopashot is the solution they came up with - a natural mental health and well-being drink in a ‘shot’ formula.

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EmpowHer Mind - Cromwell College

Anthea Husein has created beautiful, ethnically diverse children's storybooks that encourage young girls to pursue STEM (science, tech, engineering and maths) careers, which are generally male-dominated.

With every 5 books sold in NZ, one is then donated to children living in Fiji. By doing so, EmpowHer mind are helping with bridging the educational gender gap in the Pacific Islands, and will be joining the regional winners in Wellington this year to receive a special prize.

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Rejura - Otago Girls High

This team are solving a problem after they noticed issues with something they themselves use every day - mascara!

Rejura is a natural mascara removing oil designed to be gentle on the eyes, and focus solely on the eye area. Rejura even gave us a live product demonstration - which was enough for two people sitting at the Startup Dunedin table to purchase it, immediately. 

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Wavea - Otago Girls High

Wavea have created a versatile, sustainable, and stylish solution for the under-explored beach-wear market, and found a way to support their community in water-based activities at the same time. Their product, the Skash, is a towel that can triple as a cute skirt, a seat cover, and a picnic blanket. 

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This year, the quality of the pitches were just amazing - every single team had put in some serious hard mahi to get their businesses out of pen & paper and into the real world. 

Want to know who took out the big prize? Drum roll, please… Abloom Tea! 

With such an impressive pitch, a thorough go-to-market strategy, and careful consideration for what their product target market was looking for, the Abloom team can now give themselves a huge pat on the back -and get ready to represent Dunedin on the National stage in Wellington!

Congratulations to all the amazing tauira on what they’ve managed to achieve in just the space of months. We really can’t wait to see where this will take you all next.

Assumption Mapping- one of the most important startup tools.

Assumption Mapping is one of the most useful tools for people setting up a project or looking to build a startup or new venture. It helps prioritise your time by identifying and focusing on the core assumptions you are making about your idea so that you can then isolate each one and test it so it becomes a validated assumption (a ‘known’).

When you think about or talk about your idea think about all the times you say ‘I think’ rather than ‘I know’.  For example: “I think my customer is mostly using Instagram rather than Facebook”.

These are called assumptions - they may come from anything related to the idea such as your customer, where to reach them, what their problem or issue is, how you are solving the problem for them, or your solution.

You can list these assumptions out and plot them on an assumption map with the axis known/unknown, and how important it is to your business. It is useful to list your assumptions and place them on sticky notes so that you can reposition them as you continue to validate your idea and assumptions.

Once you have plotted your assumptions onto the axis, you can prioritise your efforts in the section that has important, unknowns (top right). Figuring out these “important unknowns” helps you de-risk - making it safer for you to keep building your startup. 

Next, you can choose something to derisk, and isolate a singular assumption to validate. By separating each assumption out, you can then think of a mini experiment or test to validate that thing.

Whether that's through doing a few more customer interviews, creating a prototype to observe how someone uses it or using a fake door test. You could also try using Test cards to help frame these experiments.

If you are looking to startup your idea or get stuck- head to the Meet with us section of our website and book a free 15-minute chat and we can help you with some useful next steps.

Dunedin ❤s Startups!

How our awesome ecosystem supports founders.

There is no place like Dunedin for innovation and entrepreneurship.

This chilly, bright, eclectic, awesome little city has such a thriving ecosystem around it - one that embraces and supports startups and small businesses anyway it can.

Join us to take a deeper dive into how Dunedin has become such fertile ground for startup founders, with three inspiring cases that demonstrate the city's commitment to entrepreneurial success.

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Case one:  Nutriblocks

Where better to start in Ōtepoti than a gaming startup? There’s been a lot of buzz in our neck of the woods lately in the gaming sector, with Dunedin firmly in place as the best place to start up in gaming in the south island - Stuff even called it “absolutely, positively, almost, the gaming capital of NZ”. There’s no doubt about it - it’s a sign of great things to come. 

Nutriblocks is one of those gaming startups - and they’re aiming to change the way that nutrition education is taught. Founder Claudia Leong’s vision is to “help build healthy futures”; thus, their first product is Nutri-Islands, a nutrition video game targeted towards 7 to 11 year olds, with a school subscription model.

Claudia Leong

In 2020, Claudia Leong came through Startup Dunedin’s student entrepreneurship programme, Audacious, which helped her in beginning to find a market for Nutriblocks, refine her problem statement, and get her product ready for the next step.

That next step? Securing funding from the Centre of Digital Excellence (C.O.D.E).  They’re part of an industry-wide drive towards a $1BN interactive media industry in Aotearoa, aiming for a sustainable game development ecosystem right here in Ōtepoti. 

The journey for Claudia then took a left turn - it was time to come back through the Startup Dunedin doors! Gaining acceptance into the Distiller Incubator in 2021, Nutriblocks began to take shape, and Claudia went on to take part in a national HealthTech accelerator, and create a successful prototype. 

Want to see what they’ve been up to since then? Take a look at the Nutriblocks website for all the information on their current offerings, contact details, and more. 

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Case two: Timeclock 

Another great example can be found in the story of Loic Joachim and Cameron Hill, founders of Timeclock.Kiwi. These founders have developed a time management solution that makes tracking employee hours way, way easier. 

Cameron Hill

Loic Joachim

Loic and Cameron were inspired to create Timeclock.Kiwi after noticing that existing time management systems just weren't cutting it.  After months of in-depth research and development, Loic and Cameron began working on a clocking-in Kiosk, which they’d found to be the main pain point for customers. They prioritised making sure that their Kiosk was both visually appealing and user-friendly before moving on to design a filter system that allowed for easy tracking of employees, and a simple user portal, taking inspiration from Gmail's early days.

To support their final stage of development, in came O'Brien Group Benchtops, located in Mosgiel, Dunedin. O’Brien Group are not just Otago, but New Zealand's largest benchtop manufacturer, and this partnership really helped to iron out any issues that hadn't become apparent in testing.

With the backing of such an established local business, Timeclock.Kiwi is being rolled out across all eight O'Brien Group factories in New Zealand, and it's already making a huge impact. We’re really looking forward to seeing where this one goes.

Curious? You can learn more about this awesome Ōtepoti startup at Timeclock.kiwi.

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Case Three: Jeenks Group

Lastly, we’ll take a look at a startup that provides an IoT sensor based device for grain bin and grain silo management - and this device is set to be a real disruptor in the grain storage industry!

Jeenks Group was founded in 2019 by Paul Amezcua. Paul had previously worked as a digital technology professional across a super-diverse range of organisations, (and even published a book titled ‘Skills to Back Yourself’ - in 2020!), and had previously founded and co-founded multiple digital tech businesses. With this experience and wisdom under his belt, his Grain Crawler idea was a fresh, new, and definitely exciting step along his journey.

Whilst in incubation with Startup Dunedin in 2022, Paul managed to create a working prototype of his grain crawler robot, which might have been the coolest moment of our year that year. Watching his project make it through some challenges, fail, break down, then succeed and come to life was a really awesome experience - for Paul, for us, and for the community watching on.

After making it into national accelerator Sprout Agritech NZ, Paul needed to dive into testing the feasibility of his prototype, in the hopes that it will be able to beat his competitor’s 1-metre depth restriction. To get over this hurdle, he began working alongside a local oat company, who enabled him to conduct those tests on real product, in a real business setting.

Stay up to date with the team at Jeenks Group (and their grain crawler robot!) here.

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Want to make a case for yourself?

We can help. You’re not alone - Ōtepoti can provide new startups with a range of support systems, from robust support networks, to access to funding opportunities, and collaborative partnerships. Our favourite city has firmly established itself as a hotspot for innovation and entrepreneurship. 

Anyone with any idea at any stage can touch base with us for free, and figure out where to go next. Just click here or email us at hello@startupdunedin.nz!