A box of random items, a few hours of ideation and two days to make a business. A pretty impressive feat for the 2025 cohort for Bachelor of Applied Management at Otago Polytechnic!
We had the pleasure earlier this week of stopping in on the Applied Management students for a workshop as part of their Business in a Box challenge - keep reading to find out how it all went down!
At Startup Dunedin, we are big fans of the lean canvas, and we have recently revamped it to be easier and simpler than ever!
If you're currently working on a solution or have an idea, it's a great idea to take a look at a lean canvas to help you plan and focus on customer validation and problem-solution fit. Our new blog is here to help you do just that - take a look below.
The energy in the room at last night’s Audacious showcase was buzzing, with our Ōtepoti startup ecosystem coming together again to celebrate the amazing work from this year’s cohort of hardworking Audacious students! This year, a massive 72 students from all areas of study at Otago University and Otago Polytechnic were involved in Audacious. With drinks in hand and the best spicy tortilla chips in the world (quote us on that - go on), we took our seats to cheer for the hard mahi, pivots, reworks, and new beginnings of our Audacious participants.
3 top tools to help prioritise your time and give you more headspace when starting a business.
The first thing to remember is that the best way to reduce your time money and resources is to focus on validation.
Validation can be seen as three parts of a Venn diagram; where all three parts overlap is the “sweet spot” that indicates the best chance of a successful business. The three parts of the Venn diagram are Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility.
Kia ora to our vibrant and ever-growing Startup Dunedin community! You might have noticed a little bit of change around the Startup Dunedin space lately. As our General Manager Rachel Butler has begun her parental leave, we’ve welcomed some friendly new faces to the team.
So, as we prepare to say goodbye to 2023 at the end of this month, we reckon this is a great time to introduce (and reintroduce) the dedicated individuals you’ll meet with - or run into at Strictly Coffee - behind the scenes at Startup Dunedin.
A box of random items, a few hours of ideation and two days to make a business. A pretty impressive feat for the 2025 cohort for Bachelor of Applied Management at Otago Polytechnic!
We had the pleasure earlier this week of stopping in on the Applied Management students for a workshop as part of their Business in a Box challenge - keep reading to find out how it all went down!
Startup Dunedin is lucky to have a board made of people who really go to bat for Dunedin and our entrepreneurial community. We’re stoked to have some awesome new faces on our Startup Dunedin board; including this week’s spotlight on Janine Kapa!
Janine brings with her a passionate involvement in Māori education spanning 30 years, with leadership roles across compulsory and tertiary education sectors, both locally and nationally. Keep reading for more about her and her journey.
At Startup Dunedin, we are big fans of the lean canvas, and we have recently revamped it to be easier and simpler than ever!
If you're currently working on a solution or have an idea, it's a great idea to take a look at a lean canvas to help you plan and focus on customer validation and problem-solution fit. Our new blog is here to help you do just that - take a look below.
Jo Kirkwood sits on the Startup Dunedin board as the Otago Polytechnic representative. With a background spanning policy, academia, and governance, Jo brings some really unique experience and a background supporting student entrepreneurship in Dunedin.
The Christmas period can be a minefield for those of us with a long list to buy for! If you’re looking for some awesome gifts for your friends and whānau, why not support Ōtepoti Dunedin and shop local this time around?
The good news is that there’s loads of options from Dunedin businesses to tide you over - here’s a list of some of our top options for 2024.
Note: This list is by no means exhaustive! There’s far too many amazing businesses, startups, and organisations in our city to count - a great place to start for further research is here: https://www.dunedinnz.com/
This week, Startup Dunedin popped along to the Young Enterprise Scheme (YES) Regional Finals to cheer on the latest secondary-student-led startups coming out of Ōtepoti!
Your tech stack is the set of technologies you use regularly. It can include how you keep track of your accounts, manage business operations, projects, collaborative tools, comms platforms, asset management, and more.
You’ll find a list below of the different tools and technologies used by the startups who came along to our Distiller Incubator founders’ breakfast recently! Keep reading for our founders’ most-used tools.
In the ever-evolving landscape of startups No/Low Code website building platforms are proving to be a game-changer; they put the power to create snazzy business pages and apps in the hands of everyday founders through intuitive graphic interfaces. At Startup Dunedin we're passionate about equipping entrepreneurs with the tools they need. So today we’re checking out the No Code world and passing on some starting points for you to consider for your business idea!
The energy in the room at last night’s Audacious showcase was buzzing, with our Ōtepoti startup ecosystem coming together again to celebrate the amazing work from this year’s cohort of hardworking Audacious students! This year, a massive 72 students from all areas of study at Otago University and Otago Polytechnic were involved in Audacious. With drinks in hand and the best spicy tortilla chips in the world (quote us on that - go on), we took our seats to cheer for the hard mahi, pivots, reworks, and new beginnings of our Audacious participants.
Here is a list of government departments and where and how they can help you on your startup Journey! We will start with the most commonly shared resources and then briefly talk about others and why you would check out their websites and potentially get in touch with them. This is not a full list so we always recommend doing your research.
3 top tools to help prioritise your time and give you more headspace when starting a business.
The first thing to remember is that the best way to reduce your time money and resources is to focus on validation.
Validation can be seen as three parts of a Venn diagram; where all three parts overlap is the “sweet spot” that indicates the best chance of a successful business. The three parts of the Venn diagram are Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility.
Kia ora to our vibrant and ever-growing Startup Dunedin community! You might have noticed a little bit of change around the Startup Dunedin space lately. As our General Manager Rachel Butler has begun her parental leave, we’ve welcomed some friendly new faces to the team.
So, as we prepare to say goodbye to 2023 at the end of this month, we reckon this is a great time to introduce (and reintroduce) the dedicated individuals you’ll meet with - or run into at Strictly Coffee - behind the scenes at Startup Dunedin.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A round of applause for student entrepreneurship, please, Ōtepoti. We know that The University of Otago and Otago Polytechnic students have the edge but it’s always the best time of the year, seeing it in action.
This week, Startup Dunedin sat down with our wider ecosystem together for drinks, nibbles, and a big group-congratulations. We’ve watched all the hard mahi our Audacious students have put in over the last months, and it’s been quite the adventure. Some have pivoted, some have re-worked, some have validated, some have started all over again from scratch; but all of them have something to be seriously proud of.
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.
One of Startup Dunedin’s core values is that innovation requires success and failure.
That failure part? Turns out it’s pretty important. In fact, failure can be just as much of a success as, well, success. The lessons you learn, the skills you pick up, and the connections you make can be the spark that ignites the next big flame.
For Cameron Templer, who founded the npw-closed startup Yezmac, the journey has just begun.
We sat down with Cam for a quick Q&A on the ups and down that came with his entrepreneurial journey and the decision to close Yezmac.
Dunedin's startup scene just got a major power-up.
The newest startup welcomed into Startup Dunedin’s Distiller Incubator is Aftergame; an app designed for tabletop gamers to track their plays, share their results, and enhance their gaming experience. Team members Eric Poulin, John Brent, Eli Labes, and Chalene Scott are on a mission to revolutionise how we experience and remember our favourite board games - from Catan, to Monopoly, to everything in between. We caught up with the brains behind this venture for a very quick chat - here’s what we learned!
Perspectives and learnings from local female founders at the second ever Electrify conference.
Recently, three women currently in Startup Dunedin’s Distiller Incubator had the unique opportunity to attend Electrify Aotearoa, presented by the good folks at Ministry of Awesome. Conferences like Electrify are a part of that solution. Just as a series of amazing wāhine took the national stage to share their wisdom, we’re excited to see how our local startups take that knowledge and turn it into real and tangible progress here in Ōtepoti.
Let’s recap some of that wisdom!
