StartupCamp Australia is on this weekend in Sydney and the team are charged with the ambitious task of getting 20-30 people together to create a web startup over a weekend.

With that in mind, I was blown away by Melbourne-based Jason Brownlee and the Mayhem team when I heard that they are well along the path to creating 4 web startups in 4 months with only 4 people. (am i missing something about the importance of 4 here, guys?)

I had a quick chat with Jason to ask him the how and why of the process

 —————————

Tell us a bit about you guys. 

We call our team “mayhem” (after the reference in the film Fight Club to project mayhem) and are comprised of 3 developers and a UI guy (myself, Craig Baker, Cameron Taylor, and Matt Milosavljevic respectively). Our strategy is pretty damn aggressive; we are taking on four micro web startups consecutively over four months (for now). We are treating the process like a one-team incubator (ycombinator style), mitigating some of the startup risk and hopefully increasing our chances and/or opportunities. And we’re having a blast!

Where are you getting your money/time from?

We are all self-funded, with some of us switching out to contract work if and when it is needed to address personal financial situations. At any one time, there has been two or three of us full time on Mayhem.

OK, so talk us through what you’ve done so far.

Spicy Elephant (July) is a self-study webapp with flashcards that uses a sophisticated scheduling system (called supermemo) such that you only need to study at the point of forgetting. The market was filled with arcane offline software and lightweight web solutions, a space we felt we could dominate. The site has been live for a month now and doing well by our measures of success. The numbers are low, although we use a freemium/premium model and are covering server costs. This blog post describes the formation of the team and development of spicy, and this post recounts the crazy time we had after its launch. We got some good tech press (including making the front page of Reddit), and a few offers for partnerships and third party involvement, which we are still considering.

Screen Sponge (August) is a tv show and movie management webapp that connects you with the shows you want. Right now the focus is tracking your shows and requesting/sharing shows between friends, although the grander vision expands this to all channels of consumption (cinema, tv, dvd, rental, etc). We felt this need was not being met in the market, apart from standard players such as guides, imdb, flickster. The app is monetized with amazon adds on the show pages, given what we feel is a clear intent to purchase. The Launch was the 31st of August, and was soft, so the interest and user base have not ramped up yet as they have for spicy. This blog post recounts the process of arriving at screensponge in its current form, quite a roller coaster!

And what are the plans for September?

We are currently focusing our efforts for September on the enterprise web rather than the consumer web, inspired by DHH’s talk at startup school this year (which we have all watched many times on youtube), and his so-called “fortune 5 million” - the long tail of small to micro businesses.

OK, I better let you guys get back to work…thanks for your time.

Thanks. Hope we can help inspire others to get out there and do it.

————

Wow - Mayhem is the right name for the team. I’ll update you after the September launch and also to let you know what the plans are for October.

Sydney-based Tjoos.com, one of the world’s largest online coupon sites, has launched its Merchant Portal, allowing online stores to add their store information and coupons directly to the site.

Typically, online coupon sites act as pure aggregators of discount/sales coupon information from all over the Internet. Adding the merchant portal allows Tjoos to formalise the coupon distribution process and will no doubt help them to create stronger relationships with the retailers who provide them.

Tjoos plans to leverage these relationships into exclusive coupon deals by providing incentives, such as a home page feature and ongoing premium listing, for those retailers who offer exclusive coupons for Tjoos’ visitors.

Bart Jellema, co-founder of Tjoos.com says “We are excited to connect with merchants and give them a place to get the word out about their coupons while at the same time help our users find excellent value deals.”  

Tjoos.com has the Internet’s largest collection of verified online coupons and gets around 250,000 unique visitors a month. The company was founded in 2007 with the mission of making online shopping easier and more transparent for consumers and merchants alike.

The merchant portal further helps Tjoos position itself as a quality service leader in the sometimes smutty world of traffic-hungry coupon sites. This focus on quality of service (you can read more about why they’re different in an earlier post we did on them) will no doubt help them continue their stellar growth.

You can check out the Merchant Portal here - http://www.tjoos.com/Merchant-Portal/ 

An amazing thing happened today - Sydney OpenCoffee - the tech meetup that spawned TechNation Australia, had it’s 400th member sign up. Amazing, because when it first started I wouldn’t have believed we’d hit 40, let alone 400, members.

I should say at this point that I’m a little hesitant to write about Sydney OpenCoffee because, as many of you know, I’m the founder.

That having been said, the meetup group lives and dies on the participation of community members. As “founder” all I ever did was organise the first meetup and then the rest of the community took it from there.

Had no-one showed up on the first day I would have dropped the idea. But about 10 people came and the group has grown from strength to strength. These days my role is limited to sending out reminder emails and to making sure I go to as many events as possible so I can meet as many of you as I can - but that’s it - so with nothing to gain financially from reporting on the meetup, I think it’s OK (let me know if you disagree)

So what’s so good about OpenCoffee?

1. I believe now that there are 400 members there’s no denying it’s the largest tech startup community in Australia.
2. It’s definitely the largest regular meetup of people in the community  - every 2nd week 25-30 people (often different people come on different weeks) meet in person, not online.
3. It was started when there were no real regular events for people trying to get involved in the tech startup industry in Sydney.
4. It gave people the chance to hear from leading tech industry people for free. For instance: - 
   1. Mike Canon-Brookes from Atlassian spoke about starting up,
   2. Mike Culver Amazon Web Services Evangelist spoke about AWS and took our members complaints and feedback with him back to Seattle
   3. 2 of Australia’s leading VC’s - Mike Zimmerman (TVP) and Mark Richards (Accede Capital) - spoke about investment from a VC’s perspective
   4. Mark Toohey spoke about the legal side of starting up a tech business
5. Word from industry veterans was that OpenCoffee managed to do in several months what other community groups had failed to do in years.
6. It didn’t ever rely on the usual suspects. 2 Thursday’s ago, approximately 30 people showed up at 8:30am in the Sydney CBD to have a chat about tech startups. There was a mix of tech / business/ investment people. It’s not a geek-fest (they definitely have their place though), it’s a place for anyone and everyone who’s interested in the tech startup industry 
7. It led to the Startup Australia Wiki and TechNation Australia - 2 critical resources for the startup community and I’m going to go out on a limb and say it also helped pre-build a community which Elias and the Silicon Beach crew have leveraged to create a vibrant online tech startup community.

The 2 most important things are, though: -

1. It helped struggling tech entrepreneurs meet with other people who were struggling with the same issues.
2. It introduced me to hundreds of amazing and interesting people in the local startup community

There were a couple of key people who drove the group in the beginning - Richard Hayes, Jeremy Crooks, Mark Toohey were critical in the start, and still are. Brian Menzies came on a bit later. Malcolm Lambert did a lot of good work too, including organising Big Coffee as part of the National Innovation Festival. There were more people who were regulars, but these 5 guys gave up their own time regularly to meetup outside of hours and plan what needed to be done to grow the local tech community through the OpenCoffee vehicle.

I should make it clear that I didn’t come up with the OpenCoffee concept. It was actually created by investor/entrepreneur Saul Klein and has been replicated all around the world (now in 83 cities). The purpose was to have a regular, informal event during business hours. No names tags, no formalities, just a regular spot for people to chat but it had to be during work hours to make people treat their startups like a job.

I can’t explain strongly enough to people around the country, in other cities outside of Sydney, how good the format is for growing a local community. It’s easy to set up. You don’t have to call it Open coffee. All you need to do is give it a name and a place, let people know it’s on and they will show.

There’s really no excuse for not running one in your neck of the woods. (tell me if you start one up and I’ll even promote it here on TechNation Australia)

For those of you in Sydney - the next meetup is this Thursday. You can check out the details HERE.

Congratulations to all 400 members of Sydney Open Coffee. You’ve made a massive difference to the local tech startup industry.

This week we’re going to be running a few interviews I’ve done over the past couple of weeks.

Today’s interview is really exciting because it’s not that often that we have someone like Chris Shipley in Australia.

Chris Shipley is an award-winning writer, analyst, commentator, and strategist who has tracked the technology industry for more than 20 years.

She is co-founder of and technology analyst for Guidewire Group and the executive producer of DEMO Conference, an emerging technology conference series.

Chris was recently in Australia for a series of ANZA Technology Network workshops and took the time to chat with TechNation Australia

———————

Tell us a bit about your background / projects you’ve worked on.
I’ve been covering the personal technology industry since 1984, as a reporter and editor at a number of publications, then in the early 90s as a content manager for a number of online services.  I joined DEMO in 96 and then in early 2004 co-founded Guidewire Group to focus on and help accelerate early stage companies and emerging markets. 
        
You’re in Australia for a series of ANZA Technology workshops. How have they gone?
Outstanding!  The companies represent a range of industries and technology market and are often at very different stages from one another, but all have compelling business propositions and have been tremendously receptive to the workshop.   The skills they honed in the workshop will serve them well as they explore and move into the US Market.

You’ve been out to Australia a few times now. What changes in the local startup scene have you noticed over the years?
Companies are increasingly aware of their global market opportunity and generally have a very solid understanding of what will be required to capitalize on the opportunity.   The expectations are “right sized” for the market opportunities they are pursuing.

Are there any good qualities which you are consistently seeing in Aussie startups and startup teams?
Lots of great qualities, and at the foundation a sincere passion for their technologies, their products and their markets.  Smart entrepreneurs – no matter where they are located – are receptive learners, listening to feedback and incorporating appropriate input into their thinking and planning.  For the most part, the Australian entrepreneurs I’ve met are well-focused on building and improving their businesses.

What are some of the most common mistakes you see aussie start-ups making?
They tend to underestimate themselves and their opportunity, and as a result, they undersell their capabilities.  In these workshops, we talk about the differences between US and Australian cultures, markets and entrepreneurs, and the most profound difference is the Aussie’s humility vs. the American’s bravado.   My advice to Australian entrepreneurs is to over sell themselves; as outlandish as it may feel to them, it will still not match the level that an American entrepreneur talks about his business.

Do you think Australia has the potential to become a global tech hub or are we always destined to lose our best people to the US, Asia and Europe?
I’ve met a lot of people on this tour who have come back to Australia after time in Europe or the US, so it seems pretty clear that Australia doesn’t lose people to other markets so much as it lends people to them for a time.
Australia may continue to grow as a development hub, but because the vast majority of customers are outside of Australia, the business development center of companies will remain the US, Asia or Europe.  Businesses must be present in the  location of their customers.

How are the current US economic woes affecting Silicon Valley?
Silicon Valley tends to be a bit immune from economic ups and downs, because one can argue that an up market is the best time to start a company and then just as easily argue that a down market is the best time to start a company.  While many in Silicon Valley are concerned about economic issues, most still see information technology entrepreneurship as the path to greater economic value creation.

How do you think that will filter through to the global tech startup scene (including Australia)?
Companies will have to be extremely capital efficient, which will mean they must be more careful on spending and more demanding for value in return.    The economy may slightly slow the pace of business, but in the long run, those who can continue to act quickly will be at greatest advantage.

Technology oughtn’t be gender specific but it seems that the tech industry is very much a boys club. How tough was it, as a woman, to make it to the top in the tech world?
I’m not sure I’m at the top of the tech world…
Honestly, I really gave very little thought to my gender relative to my career.  I can’t say that this is true for all women, but my experience is that the IT business is, by and large, a meritocracy.  People tend to be rewarded for their achievements.  So I just try to stay focused on delivering value to my client and colleagues.

In Australia we have some really good networks of women in tech and many of our leading tech startups and blogs are run by women. Despite this, women are still underrepresented in the industry. What do you think needs to be done to get more women into positions of seniority in the tech scene both here and overseas?
More women need to want to get into those positions.   Women tend to have rather non-traditional careers, a portfolio of jobs over a period of time, often with breaks taken to have and raise kids, etc.,  Interestingly, that’s not that unlike the career of an entrepreneur who works intensely on a business, experiences some exit or reaches some milestone, then goes on to start something else. 
I think, though, that many women (and men) still see a career as a straight, upwardly moving line.  And when a woman stops out for a bit, she sees that as slipping back down that line, she sees a need to start over, rather than an opportunity to step into something new and advancing.

How did you become involved with the DEMO conference?
I first attended DEMO in 1994 with a company launching a product there. I then attended in 1996 as an advisor to a client who was launching a company.    But I really rather lucked into the job of Executive producer. After the 96 event, I had lunch with Stewart Alsop, the founder of DEMO.  Amid a wide-ranging conversation, I gave him my feedback on the event and ways I thought it could be made even more compelling.  He invited me to consider the job on the spot and the rest, as they say, is history.
 
Does it frustrate you that the TechCrunch50 team couldn’t find another weekend to run their event?
It frustrates me that TC50 made a deliberate choice that confounds the opportunity for entrepreneurs.  Even while DEMO and TC50 are differently focused events, we share some of the same audience, and now that audience must choose how to split its attention, which may mean that at either event, the companies and products that should be the centerpiece of attention may not get their full due. 

Do you think there’s scope to do a DEMO conference in Australia or is the industry still too young?
DEMO is a product launch event and the question we’d want to consider is whether the local market needs an event such as DEMO to identify new products, or whether there is an opportunity to bring more Aussie companies to the global stage, supporting their world-wide go to market strategy.
 

If you could give every startup one bit of advice what would it be?
Focus and commit.  (which might be two bits of advice.)

——————

And there it is - a big thanks to Chris for taking the time between continent jumping to speak with us and to Kathy Drask for making the interview happen.

Below is a Guest Post written by Scott Middleton. Scott is passionate about creating easy to use web and mobile software.

———————

Last Thursday I made a pitch to the guys at Geeksville on a real-time local mobile search service (similar to buzzd). We’ve got a provisional patent on a particular method and believe there is an exciting opportunity to use our technology in the local Australian market.

Whilst I’ve made pitches for various things, internal projects/change initiatives, sales pitches and pitches to get people interested in my idea I had never pitched with the intention of getting financial commitment.

I went into the meeting with the view that no matter what happens today I win. I either a) walk out with the backing that I wanted or b) walk out having learnt a huge amount about making a pitch for investment.

Interestingly I think I walked out somewhere in the middle.

Here are the lessons I learnt:

1. MAKE SURE YOUR NUMBERS ARE OFFERING THE SIZE OF OPPORTUNITY YOUR POTENTIAL INVESTORS ARE LOOKING FOR. My feeling was that these guys are looking for something that goes profitable in the first 12 months and breaks even that year or the year after. I went in aiming a bit low and my numbers reflected that. I should have aimed higher. Which brings me to my next point:
2. Aim high, have a big vision but be realistic. I should have looked at the larger opportunity, I focused primarily on Sydney and then later in the first 12 months on Melbourne. I should have said “Hey let’s tackle Australia, then NZ and then parts of Asia.”
3. Get your cost of customer acquisition as low as possible. Understand how much each customer is worth to you over a year, I only looked at over 5 years (way to long). Then look at how you are going to acquire each customer, how much is that going to cost? My costs were probably too high.
4. Don’t be on the bleeding edge, be on the leading edge. This is somewhat related to number 3. My marketing strategy involved an expensive campaign that was partly focused on educating customers. This drove up my cost of customer acquisition and made it hard for me to be profitable. I need to cut these costs and find an innovative way to raise awareness and service use.
5. Understand who you are pitching too. I should have spent much more time than I did in understanding who these guys were and what each company in the Photon Group does. In particular which ones, when combined with our offering could find substantial leverage.
6. Explain your assumptions and your financials. I didn’t spend enough time explaining why my financial projections looked the way they did.
7. Present alternative paths. With a service that doesn’t yet have signed on customers it just makes sense to present alternative paths. E.g. if we tackle all of Australia at once it will cost X and we can expect revenue of Y and a profit of Z. If we tackle take a staged approached going city by city it will cost X2, we can expect revenue of Y2 and a profit of Z2. These alternative paths should also be used to answer the question “how much do you need?”.
8. Just when you think you understand as much as you can about the market - learn more. I backed up most of my arguments and discussions with relevant reports, studies and statistics however I still think I said “I’m not sure” too many times. Just when you think you understand your market, start learning more about it!
9. What is unique about you? Make sure you can clearly articulate why you are unique and why you are the man/woman/team to do the job. At the end I stumbled (at least thats how I view it) into our strong background in technology/telecommunications and the provisional patent we have.

So now I’m going to incorporate everything I learnt last night into my next pitch, the service and future pitches.

I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.

Last week I introduced the first few steps in initiating contact with AusIndustry and starting the application process for a Climate Ready R&D grant. To make it for the first round I needed a detailed draft application by this week but as the deadline approached I was overtaken by the flu which means I’ll miss the first round and will now aim for the second round which opens at the end of October. I suppose these setbacks are part of the real-life experience of people working towards making their venture a success.

A disadvantage of a delay in submitting a grant application is that any money spent on R&D before an application is accepted by AusIndustry can not be counted as eligible expenditure. As the pool of resources is whittled away it means the amount of money sought in the grant becomes less and less due to the necessity for the grant being matched dollar-for-dollar by the applicant. Another disadvantage is simply an extended amount of time before knowing if a grant is successful or not. It takes up to three months from the time the application is accepted to when AusIndustry informs the applicant of their success or otherwise. Any money spent on the project in that time will be matched by the grant only if the grant is successful. It’s a bit like gambling which is lucky as it adds some excitement to the whole process.

An advantage for me in the delay in submitting an application is that I have extra time to address the weaker parts of the application. In particular I need to spend more effort quantifying the level of interest in the market place for the product I am developing. Another advantage is that the reader gets to see my posts on this riveting topic for months to come. You lucky things!

Social recruiting site 2Vouch will be coming out of private beta and launching their public beta site on September 1st (i.e. next Monday)

We did a story on 2Vouch last month going through how the site works, but as a quick recap, 2Vouch aims to help employers find “hidden” candidates for vacant positions by leveraging the site members’ networks of friends/associates to drive referrals.

For recruiters and employers, 2Vouch makes it as easy as possible to participate by charging no fee to advertise. Companies only pay when they hire or place someone and there is a 110% money-back guarantee if the candidate doesn’t work out within the guarantee period.

For members, the incentive to refer (besides getting your mates a good job) comes from a reward of between $1400 and $2800 which they receive once their referral is hired. As a nice touch, members can put the cash in their pocket or assign it elsewhere, e.g. to charities, through the site.

The business model that allows rewards of that size to be paid is quite simple. Advertisers pay a fee to 2Vouch of approximately 3-4% of the salary offered upon placement of a referred candidate. 2Vouch takes a service fee and the rest is passed on to the referrer. With typical recruitment agency fees being in the range of 8-15% and anywhere up to 25% for executive recruitment, 2Vouch’s model makes them both a price and value play.

Riges Younan, CEO at 2Vouch, has over 12 years experience in recruiting in Australia, North America and the UK, so he knows the game. He explained the value side a little more for us: -

The best candidates come through referrals. So, we make it easy and efficient for companies to use the social networks of our members to get to people who are hard to reach

Many large corporations already know this and have offered referral fees for some time to employees who find friends to fill positions. 2Vouch makes the process more efficient for those organisations and will open up the world of referrals to smaller organisation as well.

Having signed up to the private beta, I’ve had a play with the site and I can say the interface is easy to use and intuitive. If you’ve ever used a job as either a job-seeker or advertiser then you’ll know what you’re doing stright away.

What’s great though, especially as I’m more interested in referring than advertising, is that the referral process is very easy. I don’t want anything to get in the way of me racking up $1.4-$2.8K payments and there is nothing I can see that will (short of a few employers who refuse to hire the randoms I refer )

All in all, I’m glad the site is finally out of private beta. It’s time to test the concept out on the market.

Having been on both sides of the recruitment fence over the past few years I know that there is a real need for this service and my prediction is that it will be a hit with other leading job sites creating me-too sites or building referral functionality into their offerings. The real test for 2Vouch (and we’ll be revisiting them from time to time) will be how they go then.

The team at leading Aussie news aggregator Plugger have updated their site with even more goodies to keep you coming back.

Plugger now monitors even more news including Politics, Technology, Sport, Entertainment, World and Travel news with dedicated channels also available to chose from. By default, all members are monitoring Business, Politics and Technology news but you can turn those, and other, channels on and off in your profile.

In addition, they’ve added a couple of share market tools.

The first is searchable ASX Announcements as they come off the wire.

The second is various charts including ‘Price’, ‘Price vs Index’, ‘Volume’ and an Australian 1st ‘Volume vs News’ chart.

Finally, they have taken this and other market information and presented it all on listed companies’ company pages. Check out BHP Billiton’s page to see what I mean.

If you haven’t had a look at the site yet, head over and check it out.

It only took one visit to make it one of my favourites and every now and then I still find some cool tool or function that makes me appreciate the site even more.

For many of us, filling in government forms is a necessary, yet loathsome, part of doing business. In some cases, like the ATO’s e-tax, technology has been used to make the process simpler. In many other cases, getting business done still requires a pen and paper or, in my case, papers, as even the simplest mistake means having to start all over again.

Chris Carpenter (you may remember him from a previous stoy we did on Widgely) thinks he has a solution to this issue and I tend to agree.

“The power of the Internet is being embraced for things as diverse as social networking, dating and playing games, so why not use it to make a boring task like filling in forms, that little bit better?” he said, “I was getting frustrated with having to handwrite onto printed forms before faxing them off - not only is it inconvenient but when your handwriting looks like mine, you really wish for another solution.”

That solution? Recreate the most common ASIC forms on a website where members can save their progress, fix mistakes in seconds and download the completed form whenever they are ready.

The website, Australian Business Forms provides subscriptions if you need to complete multiple forms a month, but also individual purchases for just a few dollars each.

Chris explained a little more about his plans - “I wanted to offer something for just a couple of dollars - something that could save people an hour or more of their time. There’s a large and growing number of entrepeneurs and small companies in Australia, but the majority of ASIC forms still need to be handwritten, some of which are in excess of 11 pages. We are offering something that’s easy and cheap … but much, much better.” he said.

Membership at the site is free and allows people to fill in forms, save their progress and see how the system works. Members don’t need to pay anything until they want to download the form for submission. Chris explains that “… we wanted it to be easy for people to try out our system.”

Compared to similar sites, like Incorporator, which focus solely on automating forms for forming a company and charge $150 in the process, Australian Business Forms is a bargain.

What makes the technology even more interesting is that are a whole bunch of other applications for it outside of ASIC. Already I can think of all the Insurance and Banking forms I’ve had to fill in lately. I asked Chris about whether or not he’d be moving into those markets and he said that solutions to those and other use cases “will actually be released in a different application - based on the same tech, but not just limited to business forms. Again, this will be a commercial application though this time with a “freemium”/subscription payment model.”

Devlopment for this ”different application” is underway and on schedule to launch in the middle of October.

Could this finally be the end of annoying forms?

Here’s hoping.

Just in time for the end of the olympics, the team at sports focused social networking platform, 3eep, have launched their own sports community social networking site, SportsPassion.

Powered by 3eep, SportsPassion will provide sporting teams with access to a free social network designed specifically to offer them a range of online team management and collaboration tools.

3eep’s traditional distribution model has been to partner with organisations such as media companies, advertisers and sporting codes. This has already seen them strike deals with distribution partners in Europe, North America and Australia.

SportsPassion complements 3eep’s existing distribution partnerships, and will enhance future partnerships, by acting as an innovation lab for new technologies and learnings, the most successful of which will be built back into the 3eep platform’s offerings.

In announcing the launch, 3eep’s COO, Nick Gonios said that SportsPassion will remain in beta for the foreseeable future and demonstrates 3eep’s support of local sporting communities around the world

Rob Antulov, CEO of 3eep, believes SportsPassion extends the company’s global distribution model and will assist 3eep to build on its capabilities in servicing grass roots sports communities via social media technology.

3eep’s business model centres on the distribution partnerships we put in place with a range of organisations who engage directly with their local sports communities.  Launching this new site on 3eep’s technology platform will enhance the services, insights and expertise we offer to all of our distribution partners, and to local sports participants

3eep already has distribution partners in Europe, North America and Australia and the SportsPassion brand will complement these and accelerate the acquisition of members and distribution partners in other geographies.”

I like this move a lot. First of all it shows that 3eep are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Secondly, by testing the waters for new initiatives they remove a lot of the adoption risk for their more traditional B2B partners. Thirdly, by doing what their partners will be doing they’re getting a first hand look at the issues their customers face on a daily basis.

As long as they’re able to ensure they don’t cannibalise their existing partners’ markets it’s a move that will only result in more growth for this already fast growing startup. Smart move from a really smart bunch of guys. Probably explains why they were named in the top 5 Aussie web 2.0 apps recently.

You can check out the site yourself at www.sportspassion.com