Rising StartUps - A new podcast series about Startups, for Startups, byStartups on ..... (you guessed it) Starting Up

I live & love startups. Like the small of a new car, every new startup has their own unique appeal. A (hopefully) needed possible answer to a real-world problem, or a new market not yet identified. Each founder like a wide-eyed child with their vision of the future, and their startup a part of changing their part of the world.

And every new founder, whether first time out, 'up-at-bat' again, rookie, or experienced professional, is going to have some challenges; actually, lots of them. More than they can yet imagine.

When I broke free from a corporate career in 2004, there wasn't even a startup eco-system in Australia. Now, we have one that is burgeoning, but the stories that I hear are from overseas imports or from long-time-ago successes, most of whom that are way past the early days of their first hires, the challenges of early-stage funding, finding great mentors, and trusted advice, of connecting with co-founders, and mistakes, and bootstrapping and........, ok, you ge the picture.

So way past, that the stories might not yet (and might never) be of much help to the many people who are about to, thinking about, or have just started. (Though they are often inspirational, which is why I continue to go to select meetups to hear them.)

But mostly, I wanted to hear the stories of my peers; their challenges and successes, their gains and pains, their learnings and yearnings. But these stories didn't seem to exist. 

Which is why I started 'Rising STARTupS'.

At Tim Reid's suggestion (yes, Small  Business - Big Marketing -thanks Tim), and inspired by Nathan Chan of Foundr, I decided to try my hand at interviewing. After all, how hard could it be for some-one whose done a few startups already?

And what I found out is, that apart from having 'a good head for radio' (and a reasonable voice for it), it was a natural fit for my style of conversation. 

Before cutting the first of them, we agonised long and hard about the questions, trying to determine just what could draw out the greatest of responses. And I wanted to use a consistant format & questions, so that you, the audience, can compare the answers of each person, and take from each, just what you need.

We've already taped 14- (and have a another 36 planned for this year) which we will be publishing next week.

The first four so far (each with links to twitter) are:-

• Justin & Andre of Vinomofo 
• Troy & Martin of Care Monkey
• Barry Nguyen of SolarX Car Company
• Julie-Anne Black of Be Brilliant Now

And I have to say, they are each unique, all brilliant, packed full of tips, gems & advice; timely, relevant, and helpful.
As well as the 25 min interviews with each founder, we've added a special topic, relevant to the content of each interview, and a review of some of the key points. As well, there will be links to some bonus downloads, cheatsheets, upcoming events and other startup news and views.

So subscribe (above) to this blog and we'll give you advance notice of the podcasts as soon as they are ready to go to air.

And one special request - if you like the interview series, tell your friends (whether by social or word). 

And if you have ideas about how we can improve, or know of a great Rising STARtup whose story is just begging to be told, tell us (there should be links on the right for both).

The smartest startup decison that I never made

Back in late 2010, immediately following the collapse of 2 concurrent startups, I started the discovery process on a startup idea in the Financial Services industry, which was built around the impending FOFA reforms.

It was an interesting arbitrage process in financial services, that we could bootstrap through to substantial growth, before expanding to include additional services, or sell to one of the dealer channels that would've been our customers. It  (the idea) had all the hallmarks of a successful idea; a scalable business with a compelling need, accessible market, viable value proposition, a low investment trajectory, an immediate path to customer revenue, deep-domain knowledge and market expertise, with a market willing to pay. In short, a 'unicorn'.

The compelling need was caused by a change to Financial Services legislation by the-then (Labour) Federal government, with an original start date of July 2013. It centred on whether Financial planners were authorised to give advice to clients (which they are), on matters pertaining to tax advice related to the FP advice (which they are generally not).

My co-founder, who apart from being a Chartered Accountant, had a long & successful entrepreneurial track record. He had recently gotten married, and had started working together with his new wife in the Financial Services industry as Financial Planners & Tax Advisors, which was how we had identified the opportunity.

After 6 months of customer discussions, problem identification, and solution design, things looked good to start scoping out the platform & service.

And then something weird happened; the spouse of the business co-founder suddenly started making demands on my co-founder, around our involvement together, which seemed completely at odds with the process of 2 people starting a venture. Without having a clue why (and I'm not considered to be socially inept), we had gone from having dinner parties at each others homes, to my co-founder telling me that I couldn't call  outside of business hours, lest his wife hear that we were talking together.

By this time, I had my own personal family challenges, so I made the critical decision to shelve the project, and put it down to a learning experience.Though to this day, i still have no understanding of the cause of the  'disappearing act' of my friend and co-founder. And perhaps I never will, but the process taught me some valuable lessons.

As it turns out, due to this week's announcement that the (now Liberal) Federal government has permanently shed the FOFA reforms, it would seem that I saved myself 3 years of hard work and effort in developing a startup through to being enterprise-ready. As I had previously developed a startup that turned out to be on the wrong side of government legislative changes before (which was around the National BroadBand Network), this meant I could apply an important valuable lesson, that I previously learnt.

So for a range of reasons, deciding to build that startup, was probably the smartest decisions that I never made.
However, as we get closer to our first seminar to support experienced professionals, - part of the first stage intake of our  new venture accelerator program  (StartUpFoundation.com.au) -  my take-aways from it, and the value and that I can pass on to other prospective entrepreneurs far outweighed the price I paid for the learning.

I make the observation specifically around these key areas, because as entrepreneurs (me included), so often when we have 'the solution', we just want to get into motion, and 'get it done'.  Doing so might cost you and your co-founders years and many hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses and opportunity costs, without getting some things clear first.  I am proud to say that I have never lost a dollar of investors’ money, perhaps because ideas, resourcing, team-building and execution have never been a problem for me.

Before you get to your ‘Go/No-Go’ decision point, here are some things that you must address.

• Get your life in order - which includes making sure that the life partners of any participants in the venture understand where you are going, and how long & what it will take to get there.
• Have a plan for when the life of your co-founder (or you) goes 'pear-shaped'. It will likely happen, so having those open discussions early, will help set the tone for open and considerate conversations in more difficult times.
• Not doing so is probably the biggest unsung 'killer' of most early stage ventures.
• Know what your 'stop-loss' strategy is at every point. Just as you do with your share portfolio, know what your entry & exit points are, especially if you aren't hitting all your milestones.
• Getting the right types of mentoring & accountability guidance & is especially critical here, as is continuing the the conversation & involvement with life partners.
•  Make sure that your exit or contingency strategies address the challenges of governmental or legislative risk. If you are building a model contingent on the economy, or governments doing "the logical thing", you could be in for a nasty surprise.

o    There are many things that stay the same when governments change, but ideologies or political philosophies aren't amongst them. Just because the government-of-the-day thinks 'A' or 'B' is a good idea, doesn't means their successors will.

And finally, you might need to grow up (occasionally)- unicorns don't really exist, except perhaps in our dreams. ;-)

What did you learn from your last startup?

If you want to work out what you have learned from each of your startups, you should first review in summary what you did & didn't do, so that you can extract the lessons from each of them. By the way, if you don't yet have a journal, get one.
Let's assume that for every project of yours that didn't work, it is automatically assumed that you didn't know enough. The same is equally true of all my projects. But that in itself isn't enough.

You can start to determine what you experienced, and therefore what you learned, by outlining the external factors & events around each of your startups, such as

• What stage did it get to?
• Who was involved and in what roles?
• What were their skills? their motivations?
• Who did you engage to support the project?
• What research did you undertake?
• Did you have a plan? If so, did it guide you or confine you?
• How flexible were you in deviating from the plan?

These will lead you to the important factors, like:

• Why it didn't work,
• What you still have to learn,
• What you did learn, and
• What can you do differently next time.

Next, just as I have done, list in any order you like, every 'startup' that you've worked on. For the sake of the exercise, you can include those projects 'owned' by others.
We'll come back to the learning in part 2.