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.
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.
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!
Earlier this year, Startup Dunedin’s board said goodbye to long-standing member and dedicated advocate for the Otago region’s small business sector, Jason Lindsey.
If you’re one of the rare few in Dunedin who hasn’t yet come across Jason Lindsey, here’s a brief rundown on him and why we were so lucky to have him on our board. In 2006, Jason & Kate Lindsey moved to New Zealand from Los Angeles, both having been working in the Film & Television industry.
Naming a business is hard. Even Phil Knight, the Founder of Nike, struggled. He was one short conversation away from calling his shoe brand “Dimension Six”. Hard to imagine that becoming the household name of a now $34B company!
If you want to read how Phil accidentally stumbled onto his name and logo, you can check out that story here. Otherwise, stick around for one tool and one tip we give founders in our programmes when they’re naming their startups.
It's pretty hard to quantify how massive this year felt. It certainly hasn't been a year of plain sailing - but amidst the chaos, ups, downs, and even bigger ups, 2021 has shown up and the resilience and determination of Dunedin founders has shone through.
Now that the year is over, we're looking back on how far we've come, as a team, as an organisation, and as a community.
Over the 4 years, Startup Dunedin has supported 411 students through Audacious, 233 people in our community with startup basics, and 16 Startups through incubation.
Startup Dunedin is very excited to announce the launch of Coralcone - a new, easier to use, and more sustainable option for all those who menstruate.
Founder Yvette Shum has been working on Coralcone in our Distiller Incubator over the past months, and now has some pretty amazing products available for purchase.
Every year, Dunedinites blow us away with the quality, conscience, scalability, cleverness, and innovation of their ideas. It just keeps getting better, and this is absolutely due to the participants willingness to get outside of their comfort zones, take risks to build their skills, or go out on a limb and launch a startup. Here’s a brief rundown of the results of Startup Weekend 2021 - keep reading to hear who won!
Last Wednesday, 2nd June, Startup Dunedin’s Audacious programme held the final showcase for semester one’s cohort of student entrepreneurs. This group of innovators had completed eight long weeks of workshops, market research, customer interviewing, and a lot of hard mahi, and it was time to proudly showcase this to Ōtepoti Dunedin.
Kaffelogic Founder, Chris Hilder completed Co.Starters in 2017, participated in Startup Dunedin’s incubator programme in 2019 and is taking Kaffelogic to the world this year via a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.
What’s the most valuable asset in your business – or your employer’s business? You might say expensive buildings, vehicles, machinery or stock. But often the most valuable assets in a business are the ones we can’t see or touch – the “intangible” assets. In this article, we’ll look at understanding and protecting one of your key intangible assets – intellectual property.
With Semester 2 of Audacious 2020 drawn to a close, we’d like to take a moment to congratulate our amazing Audacious prizewinners. We were gutted that our tech failure meant we weren’t able to video or live-stream this semester’s showcase, so we’ve decided to make a break-down of the evening for you in blog format.
Tenisha was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) at just seventeen years old. She was told that she was probably going to be miserable, struggle to get pregnant and should lose some weight if she wanted to get close to living a happy, normal life.
After using "Dr. Google" and finding dozens of stories from other women struggling with PCOS she decided that she could make a difference.
Anna Guenther is the founder of crowdfunding platform PledgeMe.
She joined Angus on an audio version of the podcast and shared some of her journey including:
- Why Anna chose "Chief Bubbleblower" as her title.
- How PledgeMe responded when their transaction provider shut them down with no notice
-The commonalities of successful crowdfunding campaigns "The three C's"
Angus sat down with winning Startup Weekend team, team Less 2 days after they won Startup Weekend Dunedin 2019.
Team Less have developed an eco-friendly cleaning solution that drastically reduces plastic waste. On the podcast Sophia and Matthew share their Startup Weekend journey including why they got involved, the highs and lows of the weekend, the progress they made and where to from here.
