As a student, I would finally go through my school bag every few weeks and retrieve newsletters, permission slips, and other assorted materials for my parents to read. Remembering to get my parents to write me an absence note in a timely fashion? Forget it.

While printed newsletters were all the rage in my day, schools these days are embracing tech tools to help them communicate more effectively with parents.

One such tool is The Skool Loop App, founded by Australian mum Sharlene Barnes.

“We know that children aren’t reliable when it comes to carrying messages between teachers and their parents, and it’s not realistic to expect a five year old to be responsible for that,” Barnes said.

According to Barnes, the startup carried out research that found 76 percent of Australian parents feel that the overall level of communication between parents and the school community could be improved, with 72 percent of parents feeling they are missing out on major events at their child’s school.

The figures weren’t exactly a surprise to Barnes, who was finding it difficult herself to stay on top of her kids’ school schedules.

“I wished I had an easy way to see what events were coming up and one spot to store all the school related information. My one problem was that I couldn’t work out what form the idea should take. The technology just wasn’t there,” she said.

The lightbulb moment came when Barnes’s son introduced her to smartphone apps. Having recovered from her second round of treatment for melanoma, Barnes decided the time was right to bring the idea to life.

“[I] knew I wanted to make a change. It sounds really cliched but I realised life is short. I was working in sales at a publishing house and while I loved my job, I had this burning desire to run my own business. I took my chances and just went for it,” she said.

This decision and drive didn’t make the process of actually developing the app any less daunting, however; Barnes admitted it was “equal parts fascinating, frustrating, and hard work”.

She explained, “The biggest challenge was communicating to the developers what I wanted. They were really encouraging but trying to get the picture out of my head into the developers coding was a real challenge. We got there eventually and I have learnt how to communicate with them in a way that works for all of us.”

The Skool Loop system works by providing schools with their own dashboard, through which they can add permission slips, newsletters, notices, and messages with push notifications.

“Some schools are sending messages out three times a day, for example in the morning they might say, ‘It’s going to be hot today, don’t forget to bring a bottle of fresh drinking water’; then at lunch time they might say, ‘The bus is running five minutes late today’; and in the evening it might be, ‘Don’t forget it’s bake a cake day tomorrow’,” Barnes said.

“For a parent, it’s about having all the school related information in one place and receiving these push notifications on their phones so they can easily see stay up to date. They can also sign permission slips and send absentee messages so there’s less chance a student is going to forge their parents’ signature.”

As Barnes put it, the pitch to students was fairly simple.

“For the last 50 years, schools have heard from parents that they’re not getting the information they need, and parents are missing important events, and kids aren’t properly prepared for events like swimming or cross country,” she said.

“I’d let them know how simple The Skool Loop app makes it to communicate with the community, and tell them it’s totally free.”

The startup’s initial focus were public primary schools and rural schools, with Barnes finding rural schools in particular had the need for alerts because of distance.

Bringing on schools was crucial to completing the initial development of the app, with Barnes needing $80,000 in funding; she decided to go about raising these funds through advertising from the community.

“Once I had a school on board, I would look at the local community and parents who had businesses and I’d start there. For example if there’s a parent at a school who runs a pizza shop, it makes sense for them to advertise on the school’s app,” she said.

“I’d let them know that the local school had asked us to provide them with The Skool Loop App and this was the way we were going fund it, through the ad content. It’s a win win for everyone really, because the advertisers receive bang for their buck by reaching the local community, and the school receives a free app.”

There is competition in the school/parent communication space, with paid offerings Skool Bag and Snapp among the big names in the space.

The Skool Loop App, meanwhile, is in use at 700 schools around Australia, with Barnes’s goal to bring on 5,000.

“Our main goal is to keep letting schools know about The Skool Loop App and what a convenient mode of communication it is. There are also more bolt-ons we can add, so we will continue to develop the app and take feedback on board from the schools who are using it.”

Car, job, and real estate listings were the so-called ‘rivers of gold’ that kept the newspaper business thriving for decades – until the internet came along. While the fortunes of newspapers have headed south, the likes of Seek, Domain, Realestate.com.au, and Carsales, the one-time disruptors, have soared.

It would be easy for these players to perhaps rest easy now, knowing they have up-ended an industry and changed the way many people now buy a car, or search for a property or new job – but having had a front-row seat to watch the demise of the print newspaper business model, these companies are all too aware that it could one day happen to them.

As Carsales chief information officer Jason Blackman put it, the online automotive classifieds business approaches the idea of innovation and competition with what he calls a “healthy paranoia”.

Speaking to Startup Daily at the recent AWS Summit in Sydney, Blackman said the Melbourne company – which now has a market cap of over $3.3 billion and businesses in countries including South Korea, Brazil, and Argentina – has sought to maintain the startup ethos it set out with upon launch in 1997.

“It comes down to culture and structure,” Blackman said.

“We focus on small agile teams that deliver a purpose to a customer; they have a key focus around a particular customer or customer segment, and then deliver the products for those those customers. We keep those teams small and autonomous so it’s actually a conglomerate of little startups throughout the business.”

With keeping teams close to customers key, Carsales has taken the step of giving its staff complete access to customer feedback; not that it was ever hidden from staff, he noted, but it was “always sort of tucked away in our customer services team”.

Before having them engage with customers directly, the company first implemented a program that saw its delivery teams sit down with customer service staffers to listen in on phone calls to get a feel for customer feedback – no holds barred.

“That includes the good, the bad, and the very ugly feedback customers have given,” Blackman said.

“[People] are very free and easy with language…so the feedback we get is sometimes quite extensive, but quite harsh.”

While one might think that could be somewhat dispiriting for staff, Blackman said the company has found teams are in fact eager to take the feedback on board and have a go at fixing the issue, and take pride in turning negative customers around.

Customers, meanwhile, love that someone will actually get in touch with them to make a change based on their feedback.

“It might be a colourful conversation, but what they’ll do is quickly iterate on it, and then within a few days or even sometimes within a few hours they release the change to production and the customer will then look at it and say, well I never anticipated that you would be able to respond so quickly to my particular feedback or my requirement,” Blackman said.

In keeping with its startup roots, like realestate.com.au parent company REA Group, Carsales also holds regular internal hackathons through which new products and features are developed.

One of the latest is Cyclops, an image recognition tool that scans and categorises photos uploaded by users according to the angle, or what part of the car they display – this was once a manual process for staff, who had to sort and categorise the 20,000 images uploaded per day.

In making the decision to take an idea from a hackathon further, Blackman said staff work as a group to decide whether it has merit, with those who are interested in working on it then encouraged to form a team around it and develop it through to the proof of concept stage.

“That gives everybody the opportunity to step up and participate in innovation, and that’s key to our culture,” Blackman said.

The proof of concept stage is the real test, with the company at this point evaluating the customer and commercial value of the project to the business before deciding to keep going or shutting it down.

“We will kill things early if we feel that they either have arrived too quickly and the market is not ready for it; it might be a great idea, but the market was just not prepared for it for whatever reason…we’ve shut down probably at least 10 or 12 things in the last 18 months,” Blackman said.

“Or we might decide, actually, the idea isn’t too bad but it’s not really relevant to our business, it’s sort of ancillary and we don’t really want to make it core, so we might sell it and give somebody else the opportunity to take it as a startup and do something with it.”

And how does Carsales evaluate whether the market truly isn’t ready for something new vs giving the market something they don’t yet know they want?

“That’s where we’ve got a really good product management team to help establish that dynamic with our customers, so that they are effectively the voice of the customer. They will do a lot of road trips and a lot of customer engagement pieces to try to get an understanding for the customer and what the customer doesn’t know,” Blackman explained.

Two key areas of focus for the company now are blockchain and AI (“as they are for every business in the digital space,” Blackman said). Carsales is looking at applying these technologies to secure transactions and the exchanging of assets through its platforms, with fraud detection and prevention a particular focus.

“A motor vehicle can be the second largest asset someone can buy after they buy a house, and because it’s mobile it’s ripe with opportunity for people to defraud others, so we make sure we’re trying to create a safe and secure environment for people to work online.”

Image: Jason Blackman.

From stylist to fashion designer to reality star and best-selling author, Rachel Zoe’s career has pivoted more times than a cat has lives.  Made famous the world over thanks to the Bravo reality show The Rachel Zoe Project, the fashion icon is passionate about living a life of style.

Her successful business ventures include The Zoe Report, a chain of salons under the DreamDry moniker, plus her own ready to wear fashion line. With 2.7 million Instagram followers under her belt, to say Zoe is an influencer, is an understatement.

Speaking at a keynote at Suiteworld in Las Vegas, Zoe explains everything she does is motivated by passion.

“Everything I’ve done has always been driven by passion.  [When I was a stylist] I loved what I was doing more than anything,” she says.

When it came time to transition from solo operator to a full-scale business, Zoe believes this passion stood her in good stead.

“That is most important when you’re starting a business. Understand what are your core beliefs.”

She says when she first left behind a career as an editor to begin working as a stylist – it was never meant to be a business.

“I just wanted more connectivity to people,” she explains.

Yet Zoe’s flair for fashion was unmistakable and soon she was dressing the rich and famous in her version of Bo-Ho chic. Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan and Mischa Barton were huge fans of Zoe’s style. Thanks to her uncanny knack for being able to get her clients on the pages of Us, more celebrity clientele soon followed.

Then The Rachel Zoe Project came along delivering multiple opportunities for the savvy Zoe. She leveraged her newfound fame to push out a book and launch a clothing line. When the internet and social media finally exploded, Zoe was there to ride the wave. Zoe understood there was finally a way she could have that ‘connection” with her customers that she craved.

“When social media came around, I was so excited by It. I jumped on it and tried to figure it out,” she says.

Not that the journey has been all smooth sailing.

“There have been so many challenges. Everything I’ve learned along the way – mistakes included – have helped me be stronger.”

She acknowledges that challenges are often the growing pains that come with actual business growth.

“We tend to have people in one role doing 50 things and the lines get blurred and crossed. But as we’ve grown, we have learnt to really define roles in the company.”

One lesson she learned early on was to surround herself with an enthusiastic and focused team.

“People are very different,” she muses. “My experience has been the way we approach business today is so different to when I started. I started a business where I work hard, love what I do and hire people that have skills in what I was weakest at.

“My father always said ‘fill the voids’.  Surround yourself with people that are not just great but have different skillsets to you.  You don’t want someone that comes in and is just looking at the clock. You want people who want to be there and are excited by what they are doing.”

She suggests social media has been the biggest game-changer for her brand and businesses.

“I think social media has been the most instrumental and high impact. Starting off I feared I didn’t understand it. But ultimately, I think if you don’t play you really suffer. It’s crossed all aspects of the industry: fashion, content, commerce. The fact I can directly interact with my customers… To immediately impact something and use your voice to impact…” she trails off.

Her advice to business owners is to embrace agility.

“It’s scary and amazing, in the same breath. You have to be nimble,” she says.

She suggests utilising processes and systems are essential to any business success.

“Process is the most important thing as you’re growing a business, and defining rules within a company are vital. Because of NetSuite I get to focus on the thing I love – being creative. It makes it so much easier for the business to be streamlined.”

She says as her business ventures have grown it has been challenging to be involved across all levels. Yet insists she remains true to her credo of ‘live your best life’.

“That’s the challenge that happens when you grow. Sometimes you get a little further away from the things that excited you.”

The most important advice she has for business owners is to “really recognise and know what your strengths and weaknesses are”.

“I don’t believe any CEO can be amazing at every single thing. Be collaborative and work as a team. I think you really grow that way…”

[The author was a guest of Netsuite at Suiteworld Las Vegas]

Kara Goldin used to be a fan of diet sodas – that is, until she realised just what was in them. In an effort to curb her diet soda addiction she tried to swap her fizzy drinks for water. The only problem was, she didn’t like its flavour.

Plain water just didn’t do it for Goldin, so she started experimenting with its taste, adding fruit slices to up the taste. It was 2005 and Goldin looked around for a commercial product and found nothing similar on the shelves in the US. The inkling of a business idea began to form.

“I started out by being a customer of diet soda. I aspired to drink more water, but it just wasn’t happening. I was addicted to sweetness,” she explains.

Goldin realised she wasn’t alone. In the US, 100 million people have type 2 diabetes. One in four, don’t even know they have it.  Sugar addiction is a major problem. It seems Goldin had found a market for her natural fruit infused drinks…

A friend warned her against going into the food and beverage industry, describing it as “pick and shovel work”. Goldin ignored their advice and threw caution to the wind. In less than six months, her new water product, Hint, with zero calories, no sugar, no preservatives, no artificial sweeteners, and no GMOs was on the shelves in Whole Food stores across the US.

Cut to the present and Hint has expanded to produce 16 different flavours of still water, 6 carbonated waters under the Hint Fizz moniker and even a caffeinated product called Hint Kick.

The expansion was rapid, and Goldin says having the right systems in place from the start has helped her scale.

“Early on when we decided to focus on starting this company, I wanted to focus on the right product and brand,” Goldin said. “A friend we trusted said work with NetSuite and make sure you get it right from the beginning.”

While Hint is distributed through Whole Foods across the US, it’s also available direct to the consumer. Online sales make up almost 40 percent of the brand’s revenue.

Goldin says it is important for Hint to have that direct connection with customers.

“Focusing on our customers and customer experience has helped us grow the brand,” she said.

Whilst she seems to have conquered the US market, with Hint now a multimillion dollar company, Goldin has her eyes on other locales. Getting Hint’s distribution right is critical. Ensuring products are manufactured as close to a distribution point as possible not only saves Goldin money but sits well with the brand’s purpose of doing good.

“From a distribution standpoint, we wanted to ship as locally as possible. We do everything here in the US.  As we go into other countries we want partners that will allow us to do this too.”

Her advice to other business owners looking to pursue their dreams is simple, “enjoy what you do every day”.

“Otherwise the days will be long and hard. Also, have a purpose. You have to ask yourself a lot of questions. Are you driven by a mission? What are the barriers that stop you from moving the needle for your business? How do you put processes in place to scale your business? What are your opportunity costs?  How can you be a top company and get your story out there and how do I protect my company culture while growing rapidly?’

“We never started this company to be just a beverage company but be an arm to bring out products that are good for our customers Every day I get emails from customers saying ‘you’ve changed my life, you’ve helped me drink water’.”

[The author was a guest of Netsuite. Goldin was a speaker at NetSuite, SuiteWorld, Las Vegas]

This article was first published on Kochie’s Business Builders, part of the Pinstripe Media network.

From product labels in a shop to banner ads on websites, billboards on the street, and ads heard on a podcast or seen on television, it’s estimated that the average person can be exposed to up to 20,000 advertisements, marketing messages, or instances of ‘brand exposure’ each day.

Cutting through the noise can be a tough ask, but looking to do it through a gamified approach is Queensland startup rubin8.

The idea for it came to founder Rob Holden in 2011, when he was selling advertising space at the Gabba in Brisbane.

“Cricket fans would leave the stadium during breaks to drink at nearby pubs. They would sometimes not return and this meant stadium vendors were losing out. They needed to find a way to entice attendees to stay when the game was at a standstill,” he explained.

The solution Holden came up with was a game where players had to be in the stadium in order to win, aiming to keep them engaged, entertained, and most importantly, on-site.

With Holden having spent the years prior to launching rubin8 building bespoke campaigns for clients, he said he had learned that most clients had similar requirements when it came to how data was handled and analysed; with this in mind, he sought to combine the gaming idea to create rubin8.

The startup works with researchers and marketers to create bespoke games.

“Researchers are interested in the best ways to capture accurate information so they’re able to effectively analyse it to make a conclusion. rubin8 gathers customer and prospect information through serving them bespoke games that are tailored to attract their attention and keep them engaged,” Holden said.

“Through the power of play, researchers are given access to more accurate data points giving them a more realistic perspective of their respondents so they have greater confidence in the data obtained.”

Marketers, similarly, need to have a deep understanding of their customers in order to tailor marketing campaigns that will cut through.

“Using games, marketers can gather more truthful data from customers who are engaged with the game. Not only does this uncover new insights about their target audiences, it is likely to unveil new information about their attitudes, sentiment and preferences,” Holden explained.

“With this information, marketers can deliver more tailored or customised offers to target customers and generate new leads.”  

Holden explained that rubin8 typically identifies 10 to 20 data points per game, from basic demographic information to buying behaviour, personal interests, attitudes and preferences, and purchase intent.

“We find people are more truthful when playing games than when simply answering surveys because their guard is down. Game-based marketing best captures consumer attitudes and predicts future behaviour,” he said.  

Despite this belief, Holden said the startup struggled early on in sharing the message about the power of gamification.

“One of the biggest challenges we faced in the beginning was convincing clients that using games could deliver highly successful and serious marketing outcomes for their business. We were always put into the gimmick basket and considered a nice to have option instead of a need to have option,” he said.

To help the push into the need to have category, the startup recently partnered with the Queensland University of Technology to research how participants respond to a game-led approach to surveys.

“The study will look to determine if people are more inclined to provide information to a company when there is a game involved, or survey completion rate, and if people are more truthful with the information they share when they’re engaged in gameplay, that is quality and reliability of survey responses,” Holden explained.

The startup has brought on clients across a variety of industries, from travel to retail, finance, tech, and education, among them Tatts Group and Suncorp.

Working directly with brands or with their agencies, Holden said the startup has a suite of games to tailor to various audiences; rubin8 also has first party data that brands without their own database can leverage.

rubin8 is one of a growing number of Australian startups working with gamification.

Melbourne-born platform Arcade helps retailers keep their sales staff engaged and motivated through gamification of employee goals, recognition, and rewards, while Quitch has created a gamified learning app that looks to truly engage students in their learning by reminding them outside the classroom via push notifications to answer timed quiz questions based on their coursework.

Focusing more on the marketing space, meanwhile, Sydney startup Snooper has developed an app allowing anyone to earn cash while they are shopping, filling up petrol, or having a drink at a bar.

Through this model, the startup provides brands with data on their in-store products and their performance based on the “missions” each user on the app completes. Missions typically come in the form of asking a shopper to complete an on-the-spot survey, which may include taking a picture in addition to answering a set of questions determined by the brand.

As it looks ahead, Holden said rubin8 is focused on working with customers to better understand their needs and pain points in order to develop more games that suit a variety of situations and business types.

Image: Rob Holden. Source: Supplied.

Hypnotism in popular culture perhaps isn’t always portrayed in the best light, but Melbourne brothers Chris and Alex Naoumidis are determined to highlight the benefits of the practice and bring it into the mainstream with their app Mindset.

As Chris explained it, Mindset is a hypnosis app that aims to help “retrain the thought patterns undermining your self-improvement”.

“We designed Mindset because we hate the idea that people everywhere, ourselves included, have a distinct gap between how we are, and how we wish we were. Everyone has areas of themselves they’d like to change, yet we struggle to succeed in changing them for the better,” Chris said.

The brothers came up with the idea after exploring hypnosis as a way to stop biting their fingernails.

“We were initially pretty sceptical about it but decided to give it a shot and were amazed when, after to listening to one low-quality hypnosis Youtube video, we stopped biting our fingernails almost instantly. We thought it was incredible and started to look deeper into the science. We then realised it was actually legitimate scientific phenomena, not the mind control for magicians we had initially believed,” he said.

“We thought it had massive potential in the area that we were really passionate about, self growth and improvement, but couldn’t find anything that could help. The apps that were out there were clunky and unintuitive, and a session with a hypnotherapist would cost hundreds of dollars each time. So we decided to make something ourselves.”

The pair soon got to work building an MVP aimed at testing what kinds of areas of self improvement users wanted to explore. The result was BetterMind, an app which looked at a variety of hypnosis sessions, through which Chris said the cofounders found users weren’t that interested in changing bad habits, but rather, wanted to focus on self development, from getting better sleep to being more productive and motivated.

Along with all the usual challenges that come with developing an app, Chris said the startup has come up against a stigma towards hypnosis.

“[People think] it is just stage hypnotists making you cluck like a chicken. The misconceptions surrounding hypnosis makes it difficult to encourage users to give it a try but that’s why it is such a massive opportunity if we get it right,” Chris said.

According to Chris, Mindset uses “deep-relaxation hypnosis”, which brings a person into a “highly relaxed state of inner concentration and focused attention where they are more open to suggestions” and cited a Stanford study that found distinct sections of the brain have altered activity and connectivity while someone is hypnotised.

David Spiegel, the senior author of the study and professor and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the university, said of the results, “Now that we know which brain regions are involved, we may be able to use this knowledge to alter someone’s capacity to be hypnotized or the effectiveness of hypnosis for problems like pain control.

“Hypnosis is the oldest Western form of psychotherapy, but it’s been tarred with the brush of dangling watches and purple capes. In fact, it’s a very powerful means of changing the way we use our minds to control perception and our bodies.”

To give people the chance to try it and make up their own minds, new users joining Mindset are given access to a free seven day ‘Foundation’ pack, which Chris explained provides an introduction to hypnosis, and an overview of some of the topics available.

“Each session is a hypnosis audio track, which uses deep-relaxation language techniques to induce them into a state of hyper-attention and then provide suggestions that help change their behaviour,” he said.

Once they have completed this pack, users can subscribe to unlock the other tracks available, from more than 50 hypnosis sessions to sleep tracks, with this priced at $9.99 per month or $89.99 yearly after a free month’s trial. These are grouped into themes which target specific areas of self improvement, Chris said, approaching the topic from different points “to provide well-rounded growth”.

“The hypnosis sessions found in Mindset use attention, language, and context in order to influence user’s attitudes and perceptions, leading to long-term behaviour change,” he said.

Mindset’s recordings have been sourced from a UK company run by two hypnotherapists.

“We are planning to bring the pack development inhouse in the future so we can provide personalised sessions for each user,” Chris said.

“There are many different types of hypnotic inductions, and users may find some more effective than others. So, our end goal is to use machine learning along with different inductions and suggestions to personalise each session to best hypnotise each individual user.”

The app takes requests from users around which topics they would like to see in new packs.

As Chris explained, Mindset’s target market are 18 to 30 year olds who may have tried meditation and “strive for self improvement”.

The app has brought users on through various channels, including Product Hunt, where it was for a time listed in the top 10 startups, reddit, and Hacker News.

Chris acknowledged Mindset has a number of competitors, from hypnotherapists themselves – which can cost hundreds per appointment – to other hypnosis apps and apps focused on various areas of self-improvement.

“The difference between Mindset and these other products is that instead of attempting to change the behaviour directly, like they do, our app targets the root cause of the behaviour leading to faster and more long-term change,” he said.

The brothers have been supported in their startup journey by the Generator Accelerator program at Monash University, which they both attended. They entered the program with a peer-to-peer dress rental app called Covet, however advice from the team, Chris said, led the brothers to stop work on Covet.

“Some of this advice helped us make the tough, but necessary, decision to stop working on Covet and focus on working on ideas that we both have a deep passion for and that users truly need. If we didn’t go through the program I believe we would of kept limping along and not have been able to create Mindset,” Chris said.

As they look to grow the app, Chris said he and Alex are focused on their main mission of bringing hypnosis to the mainstream.

“Less than a decade ago meditation was viewed the same as hypnosis, alternative science for hippies and monks. Over the next year we will make significant inroads in bring hypnosis to the mainstream, just as Headspace did for meditation.”

Had enough of all the startup buzzwords? So have we. That’s why we’re asking the startups we chat to to send us a video where they pitch their business in a way that’s easy enough for even the most technophobic of grandparents to understand:

Mother of three Leanne Papadopoulos was looking for a way to engage her children’s imagination when she came up with the idea for My Creative Box.

“My Creative Box was inspired by my children and what I see happening around us with technology and the divide that this is creating between parent and child,” Leanne tells Kochie’s Business Builders (KBB).

“I wanted to bring the joy of learning back into homes around the world by creating age-appropriate, fun and engaging activities that families could conveniently use to share special moments connecting with their kids,” she explains.

As a busy Mum, Leanne says she constantly endeavoured to provide her children with opportunities to be creative at home, but often the time and effort it took to find ideas and collate all of the materials took all the fun out of the experience.

“There’s nothing like the opportunity to connect with your kids and help challenge their thinking while teaching them new things. There is nothing that makes a parent feel better than spending some real quality time with their children, but I couldn’t find a product on the market in Australia that gave me this, so I decided to create what I was looking for myself.”

Drawing on her background in Early Childhood teaching, Leanne set about creating her product with a mantra to ‘inspire little minds to explore, learn and create’ driving the process.

“My passion and background in Early Childhood Education has really been the backbone of this business start-up along with the purpose it brings to inspire both parents and children to explore, learn and create together,” she says.

“I feel like my studies and experience working with young children and their families has taught me so much about the way kids like to learn. I know how much families loved seeing the time and effort that was poured into my programs over the years and I am so glad to be able to offer this support to families to inspire them to create the same magical moments at home.

Leanne believes creative play is essential to the development of a young child’s mind and future health and wellbeing.

“Nobel laureate Professor James Heckman came out with some groundbreaking findings in which he concluded that early nurturing, learning experiences and physical health from ages zero to five greatly impact success or failure in society. Professor Heckman also concluded the most efficient time to develop skills and social abilities was in the very early years of a child’s life.

“We know that children’s brains are still developing at this time and that positive experiences, as well as good health and nutrition, play a big role in children’s future learning and success. There has also been endless coverage in both media and academia into the negative implications technologies are having on children’s learning particularly with their social and emotional development, so our challenge is bigger than providing creativity in a box, it has a social cause in delivering families screen free alternative activities that allow parents and guardians to reconnect and be educators to their children in the critical early years of their life.”

There is an expectation that play comes naturally to parents and children, but Leanne’s experience suggests the opposite is true.

“Most parents really don’t find playing with their kids easy. Like most skills when they are not practised for a while they are forgotten and almost have to be learnt again, parents don’t have the same imaginations as kids, we lose all of these fun and magical things as we get older! Parents are a child’s most valuable teacher. Even the busiest parents can make time to play with their kids and guide their learning. It really is like most things in life is quality over quantity. You don’t need loads of time, you just need to make sure those short moments are special.”

Leanne tells KBB encouraging creative play with her children has seen a major shift n the way her kids think.

“Both my husband and I felt like our kids would wait for us to give them all the ideas, ‘I’m bored’, ‘I’ve got nothing to do’ were things we would hear often. When children have been exposed to creative ideas and thinking they are challenged to think creatively and innovatively and their natural curiosity to learn more about the world they live in is challenged, they gain a further desire to ‘find out more’. So, creativity brings a big shift to the way kids look at the world as it exposes them to questions, it gets them to problem solve and try new things to find out and make it work.

“BEING CREATIVE ALSO HELPS CHILDREN BE EXPRESSIVE AND EXPRESS THEIR FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS WHICH IS SO IMPORTANT WHILE YOUNG CHILDREN ARE LEARNING STRATEGIES TO HELP THEM REGULATE THEIR EMOTIONS AND EXPRESS THEM IN APPROPRIATE WAYS.”

Since starting the business 16 months ago, My Creative Box has scaled rapidly growing its revenue by over 2000 percent. Leanne says the rapid growth has been challenging.

“When you start your own business there is so much uncertainty around everything, you wonder if people will like it, you wonder if people will get what it is you’re trying to achieve. There are a million and one questions that run through your mind. I remember my husband looking at the first prototype and looking at me with a scrunched up face saying ‘Do you really expect people to buy this? They will just make it and throw it away?’ At the time I can’t lie, I felt a little disheartened by it! It wasn’t him though I was just missing the biggest point in the product, the experience it gave kids and their families! That’s something you have to experience yourself. I would have never in my wildest dreams expected my product to be so well received but I was right, there are a lot of people who really value their time teaching their kids.”

Leanne says scaling so quickly has certainly kept her on her toes.

“We have had to make changes and big decisions to keep up with the ever-growing demand for our products. We also went into the business with a partner who had a 50% share, that later decided it wasn’t the path she wanted to take because of the growth and workload and time we were spending away from being Mums to our own beautiful children. This has also been another hurdle but in saying that I feel like every day is a new learning opportunity for me and I am so much more resilient than I was 16 months ago.”

Creative Boxes can be bought as a one-off or via a subscription. Leanne tells KBB she decided on the subscription model very early in the business.

“We felt that families would greatly benefit from having a new and exciting delivery arrive at their home every month that kept them and their children excited to learn and spend quality time together. We also wanted to make our product exciting releasing a completely new box every month. Learning is forever and constant and so we figured our boxes should be too!

As for what we might find in a typical creative box, Leanne says each box is different, but all will provide age-appropriate, fun and engaging activities along with all the materials you need to complete them.

“Each box usually has a theme to it so children gain a full range of new skills and learning through each delivery. Each creative box also comes with a creative handbook which gives parents prompts to use with their children to help them share quality interactions and challenge their child’s skills and abilities.”

Leanne encourages anyone wanting to engage and connect with their little ones to consider taking up a subscription.

“My Creative Box will help you and your family share special moments connecting again. It will help you easily set up moments to explore, learn and create with your child. It will help parents feel empowered to take on a role of a teacher at home and really cherish the special quality time they share with their child. Sometimes we are told even the parents learn something new too! There is nothing more beautiful than seeing kids getting excited about learning!”

As a mumpreneur, Leanne knows the challenges of maintaining a work-life balance, but she encourages other mums to follow their small business dreams too.

“Never let someone else tell you that your idea is silly! If you’ve thought about it, then I’m sure someone else has. Do what you believe in and do it well, you really need to love what you are doing as you will be faced with times when it feels like it’s all too much but love, passion and believing will be the only thing that can help you through it.”

This article was first published on Kochie’s Business Builders, part of the Pinstripe Media network.

Image source: courtesy of Kiki&Co.

Serial, the podcast exploring the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and whether her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed, who was convicted of her murder, in fact committed the crime, was a global hit in 2014, spawning breathless internet recaps, memes about Best Buy, and this past March a retrial for Syed.

Podcasting was by no means new in 2014 but for many listeners Serial was their first introduction to the medium; the podcast in 2015 won a Peabody Award, recognising that it helped take podcasting into the mainstream.

The medium has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years – Scrubs star Zach Braff is now even starring in a sitcom, Alex Inc, based on a podcast called Startup, which follows a radio producer called Alex Blumberg starting a podcasting company called Gimlet.  

Australia too is boosting its podcast production, with the ABC launching a $1 million fund to help uncover and produce new podcasts and tech companies like Acast helping producers reach audiences and advertisers.

For Henrik Isaksson, country manager for Acast in Australia, the growth of not only the local podcasting space, but streaming in general, has been interesting to watch.

A Swede, Isaksson first came to Australia in 2012 as part of the launch team for Spotify in Australia and New Zealand.

“Back then, the conversations we were having with music labels, collecting societies, and also podcasting systems were not about streaming, they were all about about downloading. The concept of streaming stuff didn’t exist at all,” he said.

Like many a startup looking to pitch a new technology or way of doing things, Isaksson admitted it wasn’t always easy to get others to see the light.

“Over the last eight years at least, I’ve been working for businesses who have been punching above their weight, the up and coming disruptors, you might like to call them, so it was always was very tough. I remember going into negotiations with brands and agencies and publishers and being quite nervous, which is not the case anymore at all,” he said.

“When we go in into conversations these days it’s a very different mindset. I think Australia was really ready for change.”

After a stint at Amobee after leaving Spotify, Isaksson took on the country manager role at Acast last August, tasked with growing the service into Australia.

As Isaksson explained it, Acast, another Swedish company, is creating a global podcast ecosystem with a simple goal: “What we’ve set out to do is bring money back to the industry, the content creators and publishers, by connecting them to brands and agencies through technology, so they can continue creating content and expanding their universe.”

Isaksson had to pitch for the Acast job and explain why Australia was a solid expansion market. The facts, he said, were clear to see.

“If you look at the radio landscape in Australia, which is very healthy, actually, the big three publishers will turn over somewhere north of $750 million this year, and with podcasting they add another $250 million. That’s a billion dollar market, before you then also add the fact that services like Spotify have also been successful here,” he said.  

The podcast space is booming, Isaksson said, because podcasting is “almost like the last frontier” and brands and agencies are keen to get involved.

“I see it like what video was like almost 10 years ago; there’s not enough premium content to go around through which they can actually communicate with audiences,” he said.

The company works with both creators and advertisers to understand what they want and how to best connect them, with Acast keen to work with both prolific producers and first time podcasters alike. Acast recently signed on the satirical website The Betoota Advocate, for example, having convinced the founders to start a podcast.

The business case for Acast, and the brands and agencies they work with, is clear, but the other key drawcard is the storytelling itself.

“There are so many good stories in Australia that still need to be told,” Isaksson said.  

Helping to tell these stories is Kate Montague, an audio producer and founder and director of Audiocraft, an audio content agency and the organisation behind the annual Audiocraft Festival, a three day event dedicated to podcasting.

“I come from a film and TV background, but once I got into audio I became the biggest diehard there is,” Montague said.

“I think it was the immediacy and intimacy of audio that excited me the most, and the versatility from storyteller’s perspective of what you can do with audio in creating a one to one connection with a person and their story, or peering in on a conversation between two people in a really intimate way. It’s quite exciting and powerful as a storytelling tool.”

The drive to create Audiocraft, a vehicle through which to support the burgeoning podcasting landscape locally, came a few years ago, as Montague began to notice a shift away from traditional radio, seeing that she and her friends, were increasingly listening to podcasts coming from overseas.

“I just saw this saturation of really quality content that was coming from overseas, but not as much amalgamation of local content,” she said.

“I think, you know, as much as everyone’s podcast feed will be loaded up with international podcasts from overseas and predominantly American content, I think that, still, we have a real yearning for local stories and local voices. Australians want to hear themselves in their content.”

The space has grown drastically since Audiocraft launched two years ago, Montague said: companies like Podcast One, Acast, and Audible have set up down under, partnering with local producers to explore the production of local content.

“I think that’s going to be the tipping point for Australian podcasting, when we have a body of work that is more reflective of our own stories, and our own content.”

The opportunities are limitless; you’re not restricted by traditional radio formats, pesky things like time limits or ad breaks, Montague said.

“A conversation can go as long or as short as it needs to be – though that’s a power that needs to be used wisely,” Montague said.

“The editorial skills that come from radio are still really important, but what you have is a more flexible format, and there’s an excitement in the air about the democratic nature of podcasting. Anyone can make a podcast, the tools are more accessible, and there’s a sense of freedom and experimentation for makers getting into podcasting.”

Audiocraft is next month running the Audiocraft Podcast Festival, running in Sydney as part of Vivid Ideas.

Bringing together producers from around the world, the festival will run talks and workshops covering everything from the art of a good interview to editing basics and how to pitch your idea. Audiocraft has also partnered with Audible to run a content development retreat, aimed at helping develop the next big thing in audio content.

With the Australian podcasting charts dominated by international content and local shows that are either podcast catch ups of a radio broadcast or conversational shows, Montague is hoping this year’s festival can help more Australian creators explore different ways to tell a story.

“The challenge is, how can we make more interesting sounding audio, and that’s what we want to foster, raising the bar in terms of production quality and having a bit more fun with the medium,” Montague said.

There is a question here, Montague said, around the Australian sound and what that is – as well as who is included when we try to talk about and define the ‘Australian sound’, and who isn’t – and why we have sometimes been shy about sharing it with the world, and it is a question Audiocraft will look to explore with a session at the festival.

“If I think about what distinguishes our voice and stories, personally, I think of the unique sound of our environment, like the birds, and the texture and diversity of our accents and voices, which are unique to us, and a kind of irreverence, too,” Montague said.

“I think we want to hear those unique and slightly odd stories.”

Image source: Podcasters Andrew Levins, Kamna Muddagouni and Lee Tran Lam at Audiocraft 2017. Photo by Bryce Thomas.

According to the Australian Network on Disability, over two million Australians of working age have a disability. While access to adequate and affordable care and services is crucial, studies show social exclusion is also a key issue for those with a disability.

A 2013 poll of over 700 Australians with a disability conducted by service provider Scope and Deakin University found 94 percent did not feel they had enough meaningful participation in their community.

Ninety percent added they didn’t have their need to feel valued and to belong met, with 91 percent of respondents stating they didn’t have their need for social contact and support met.

Looking to help bridge this gap is Victorian social enterprise startup Assisted Outing, founded by Winnie Wong.

As Wong explained it, Assisted Outing connects those with needs to assistants in their local community who can take them out on outings.

“Our aim is to address the issues of social inclusion and wellbeing of people with disability or chronic illness. There are about 2.7 million Australians that need help getting out of the house, and this is the group of customers that we would like to serve, because social isolation is a real issue,” she explained.

The idea is one close to Wong’s heart, having been her mother’s carer for more than a decade.

“Growing up, I remember my mum as someone who loved going out, travelling and trying new things, but now she has Parkinson’s Disease so she needs help going out. There was this one time when my mum paid a lot of money to hire a professional carer to take her to the museum, but the outing didn’t turn out so well because that carer just wasn’t into arts, and she was more focused on getting my mum back home safely and on time,” Wong said.

“What I think my mum really needed was an activity partner who could assist her, not a professional support worker. And that’s how it all began.”

Like many a founder, Wong’s vision is to scale her platform internationally – but in that, she has a specific goal in mind.

“My vision for Assisted Outing is to grow it globally so that one day my mum would be able to connect to a local artist in Paris who can pick her up from the airport and take her to the Louvre museum,” she said.

The service works by having verified assistants take customers out for activities, with these outings priced by activity rather than by the hour.

“Think of them as mini trips or tours for people with needs. Customers and assistants can customise any outings they like as long as it involves getting out of the house and have fun,” Wong said.

Customers are able to pick from a range of activities offered through the platform – among those currently listed is a hike and lunch at the Yarra Valley, for $308 – or request a customised outing.

They are then asked to detail their specific need before booking their assistant, while assistants signing up must complete a number of checks and take part in online training before they can create a profile listing their availability and price range.

Like other platforms, assistants are rated at the end of an outing.

Assisted Outing, meanwhile, takes a 15 percent cut on the price of an outing to cover admin such as insurance, vetting, and training.

“One of the biggest challenges for us was to secure appropriate insurance…insurance for startups looking to disrupt the disability sector is a relatively new concept for insurers, and we spent a lot of time talking to many contacts in the industry in order to tailor a policy that is suitable for the business,” Wong said.

Having recently received funding from Grameen Bank Australia and Monash University’s Sustainable Development Institute through the Leave No One Behind accelerator program, Wong said Assisted Outing is also working to further develop its platform to best suit its needs; beyond connecting assistants to customers, the startup also provides its online training on the Assisted Outing platform.

There are a number of startups operating in this broad space, connecting those with needs to professional carers.

With this in mind, Wong said Assisted Outing’s focus will always be squarely on outings rather than home care, grocery shopping, or medical appointments and the like.

“We only want to focus on fun outings because our main mission is social inclusion,” Wong explained.

“Also, we want to match people who share similar interest and passion so that they can go and do the things that they love. Our vision is to enable people with needs to go on local, interstate and overseas outings by connecting them with a local assistant at the destination.”

Wong will be looking to leverage the expertise and networks of Monash University and Grameen Australia to help bring this vision to life.

Image: Winnie Wong. Source: Supplied.

According to the idea of six degrees of separation, any two people on earth are just six acquaintance links apart.

Leveraging this notion to put a new spin on couchsurfing is Melbourne startup Friend Theory. Founded by Carlo Spada, Guillaume Prevost, and Carlos Costa, its platform connects users to friends of friends to find places to stay when they travel.

According to Spada, a millennial has, on average, 180,000 friends worldwide. Through Friend Theory a user can view a map to see where their network is scattered, filter the network, and look at what kind of things a user is happy to provide a friend of a friend, from accommodation to wifi.

The idea came from years of travel the cofounders have done.

Spada and Costa met through a mutual friend while studying in Hong Kong five years ago. Becoming fast friends, they travelled to 17 countries together over the next year, always staying with friends or friends of friends.

“After doing so for over five years across six different continents, we realised how close you feel to friends of friends compared to total strangers,” Spada said.

“After some research, we found out how big the friends of friends network is. However, we also realised that the current process of reaching out to friends of friends via social networks is full of friction and you never get to see the full potential of your network, especially for travel purposes.”

So the pair decided to build a platform to solve this problem themselves.

They began work while Costa was still at university and Spada was based in South Africa, later bringing on Prevost, a software developer and friend of Costa’s, as a their third cofounder. Development was still slow going, however, so Spada eventually moved to Melbourne to join the team and Spada and Prevost left their jobs to work on Friend Theory full time.

Given the idea of Friend Theory is all about saving money, the trio worked as lean as they could in building the platform.

“We didn’t want to raise any money, as we wanted to build the foundations of the project without any outsiders involved in the process. This had a price, though; we had to move to cheaper houses, cut off personal expenses, and find casual weekend jobs to make some cash,” Spada explained.

“It was a bit trickier for company expenses though. Our office was basically a storage room of a university we managed to get wifi passwords from. We worked from there for around half year, with zero budget, not even for proper business email accounts, always finding a way to get stuff done by ourselves without spending any money.”

As they finished the first iteration of the platform, Prevost took a six week trip around the world to test out the idea; according to Spada, he was able to find friends of friends to stay with for the whole trip.

The platform works by having new users fill out their profile with basic information about themselves as their interests, along with what they’re willing to offer to friends of friends, from accommodation to wifi, advice on sightseeing spots and the like.

Users are then able to search by location and see the friends of friends they have in a certain place, and what they can offer, before reaching out to them should they so choose.

According to Spada, the platform will be limited to showing users their network of friends of friends to keep a sense of build-in trust and safety. The startup is, however, working on features beyond blocking and reporting to ensure users are safe.

“Our product is for both male and female travelers, but making sure our female users are the ones feeling more comfortable with it is our priority as well. Female travelers are considerably more concerned about safety than male travelers, so we aim to provide them the product they need,” Spada said.

As one might suspect, the startup is targeting millennial travellers, along with international and exchange students.

“International exchange students are extremely keen on traveling and they tend to be social and open minded. They have a big problem though: they normally don’t have much money,” Spada said.

Pre-launch, the startup has 1,000 users on board, with the first having come from an introduction video Friend Theory pushed on Facebook and referrals.

“Over the past months, we’ve received emails from all over the world from people offering us to help us out with whatever we needed. For instance, we previously had a terrible landing web. A girl from Germany reached us out asking if we needed any help with that, and we did. The day after, she had already developed a landing page for us,” Spada said.

“We’ve managed to build an incredible team of eight people fully committed to getting Friend Theory off the ground without getting even a salary in return…the people supporting us behind the scenes are the real heroes of the project, and we couldn’t be more grateful about it.”

The team has been supported by Melbourne outfit Outcome Life, which has a number of services dedicated to helping international and exchange students, including coworking hub Outcome Hub.

“As international entrepreneurs, we didn’t have any contacts around Melbourne when we started, so we literally went to every single networking event we could, and that’s when we met Gerard, the CEO of Outcome Life. He heard about our project and decided to provide us with an office space as well as with interns and many other very valuable resources without asking anything in return,” Spada explained.

As Spada put it, there are “a lot of reasons” why the team decided to start the business in Melbourne, but one of the key factors is lifestyle.

“We are in love with the laid back Aussie lifestyle and culture and we aim to replicate that in our company culture,” he said.

“To be honest, Melbourne is just great for entrepreneurs, and I feel it only gets better and better. The startup scene is booming and you can really feel how talented entrepreneurs down here are and how much they help each other.”

It’s never been easier to start a side hustle and pursue entrepreneurship, every second Instagram influencer seems to be telling us. Of course, the truth is that nothing happens overnight, as Dr Kate Adams knows well.

Having trained and practiced as a vet, Dr Adams has a stake in the Bondi Vet clinic and has also held executive-level positions within the Federal Attorney General’s department, so when the idea for Thankly, an online platform allowing users to personalise a thank you note that will be handwritten and sent on to the recipient, came to her while waiting an hour in line to buy a stamp, she decided to give it a go.

The startup turned over more than $70,000 in its first 12 months and is now growing around 25 to 30 percent month on month, however Adams admitted, “building Thankly was definitely harder than I thought it would be”.

“Gone are the days where you can build a website and they will come. And when you’re bootstrapping on limited marketing dollars you really have to be good at creative tactics for growth marketing,” she said.

“Getting traction and getting people to know and trust your brand is a hard slog.”

Having sought inspiration and tips from other business owners compiled on the Optus Yes Business hub, Dr Adams believes Thankly’s growth can be attributed to four key things.

First is a strong user experience and customer journey: “You really need to be conscious of the psychology of buying when you build a website and design a really easy to navigate, clear and with a simple journey,” she said.

Customer service has also been key, particularly given Thankly is all about recognising the power of words.

“I have always been great at customer service and wanted to make sure Thankly embodied this. I can’t stand online businesses that don’t get back to people, don’t provide refunds and don’t look after their customers. Looking after relationships is what Thankly is all about so we work hard to make sure every customer has a repeatable amazing experience when using the service,” Dr Adams explained.

“The first year we really looked after our brand advocates. We identified those people who used Thankly, loved it and would be willing to go out and tell their friends about it. Identifying and asking your first brand advocates for help is really important in getting other people on board. These days, we rely so heavily on word of mouth rather than say paid adwords or paid social media posts.”

The realisation that paid social media advertising wasn’t the way to go came early on, Dr Adams said.

“For businesses with a small budget and with the landscape being so cluttered with noise, people are paying less and less attention to static Instagram or Facebook posts. We needed to create value and build a community of people that held the same values as Thankly,” she explained.

This came through Adams creating Thankly TV, a series of “inexpensive” videos often shot on her iPhone that featured the likes of life coaches and entrepreneurs sharing their stories and inspiration.

“It was…an effective way to improve our brand recognition and trust,” Adams said.

All of this, however, Adams said, leads into the core focus of the business: delivering “a really great product”.

Every card is handwritten, every gift wrapped, and “we do exactly as a we say we will”, Adams said.

“We send out feedback forms after purchase and we listen to customers. We tell them we are a startup and we need their help. You’d be surprised at how many amazing people have given us helpful feedback to make Thankly even better,” she said.

“The first 12 months is really about looking at what people are doing and what they are telling you, and acting on that feedback. We still send gifts out to our VIP customers, who are always excited to receive a random unexpected package at work. We even sent our delivery guy a Thankly – and pretty sure, just from that small gesture we get first class service.”

Thankly is often asked whether it’s B2B- or B2C-focused, Dr Adams said, but she feels it’s neither; rather, she sees it as P2P, or person to person.

“I really learnt this from places like Japan. Business is personal, and it really is person to person. So while we still see more women than men order, most of them are from a business. A lot of the business people that use us, have the same values as us – they are innovative, great at customer experience, personalisation and building relationships and want something personal, unique and different – a gesture of appreciation,” she explained.

With this in mind, the bulk of Thankly’s customers work at tech companies like Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn, rather than big corporates, Dr Adams said.

“The employees at these companies often rely on relationships and they think more like entrepreneurs, as opposed to just having a job. Their networks are important to them.”

The growth of Thankly’s customer base came in hand with the evolution of the company’s brand, which Dr Adams said started out rather feminine, with a sense of youth and playfulness in its branding and tone of voice.

“Our target market didn’t quite fit our branding, and we’ve matured and grown since then to be more gender neutral and more luxe than we used to be,” she said.

“We also are strategic in our choice of brand and product on the site. Thankly is about helping people to succeed, build relationships, connect with other people and be the best they possibly can be. So we are pretty definite on not sending, say, donuts. All our products are a bit special and hard to find – they might be organic, ethically made, have no sugar, or be handcrafted – something that makes them unique and special.”

The startup still receives feedback from people wanting more choice in gifts, however Dr Adams is adamant in keeping just 30 on the platform at any given time to avoid overwhelming customers; to keep options fresh, the selection of 30 is rotated every so often.

As it looks to grow further, the startup is looking to implement a system through which someone looking to send a card or gift won’t need to input the address of the recipient, with Thankly to contact the recipient itself via email and ask where the most convenient place to send their Thankly is.

Dr Adams said, “My personal aim is that every time someone lands a deal or leave a meeting they think to themselves, we should send them a Thankly. I’d like it to become a household Australian brand.”

Image: Dr Kate Adams. Source: Supplied.

Education is often described as one of Australia’s most important exports: according to the federal Education Department, there were almost 555,000 full-fee paying students in Australia in 2016, up more than 10 percent on 2015. These numbers translate to more than $21 billion in value for the local economy.

Though the students keep coming, the experience they go through to come to Australia can often leave something to be desired, and Australian startup Brigie wants to fix it.

Brazilian brothers Nick, Mike, and Guilherme Borrego, now all based in Brisbane, have been working on Brigie since November 2016, inspired by their own experiences coming to study down under.

Having made the journey himself in 2008, Nick noticed that the arduous, paper-based process had barely changed when his younger brother Guilherme applied to study in Australia in 2016.

This experience, coupled with stories in the news at the time about international student agencies trying to funnel students into courses for which they would be paid the highest commission and other horror stories led the brothers to start brainstorming.

“We started to think of a better way to help international students find information about coming to Australia and apply to study in Australia using technology,” Nick said.

The platform is aimed at both course providers and students, with Brigie looking to partner with educational institutions to list their courses on the site for international students to search through and apply for.

“The process to find, compare, choose, and apply for a course to study in Australia from another country is a very time consuming, costly, and difficult process. Even to find someone or a travel agency that can be trusted is not an easy task,” Nick said.

Students will be able to search for and apply to courses with the help of an education agent, organise and pay their tuition fees, book accommodation, buy flights, and choose and purchase their health insurance, with the startup having partnered with a number of providers to ensure easy access for users.

Meanwhile, Nick said a major draw for educational institutions is to be able to have information about their courses translated into various languages for a global audience, with the platform also giving them the ability to chat directly with students and ensure students are being given up to date information.

With seed funding from a family member, the brothers have been working for the last 18 months to navigate the complex systems in place to help bring international students to Australia.

Among the key challenges, Borrego said, was getting educational institutions on board in the first place.

“This was, and still is challenging for us, to have the educational institutions come on board on this journey with Brigie. We are continuously having meetings with educational institutions around Australia; we have found that we need to personally show the institutions the Brigie platform and explain in detail how Brigie will help them and their international students for them to want to be included into our platform,” Borrego said.

From there, Brigie has had to work with institutions to standardise their application processes for Brigie’s online form.

“We overcame this challenge by showing the educational institutions that our interactive and friendly application form would be much easier for the international students, especially in their own language with Brigie’s location translation,” he explained.

Brigie has also implemented features at the request of students and institutions; among these is ‘Brigie Education Agent’ which, as the name suggests, performs the same kinds of functions as an international student agent, helping a student collect and submit all their relevant documents in order to attain a visa and a place in a course.

The platform tracks the progress of their application, and is available to help students throughout their time studying in Australia.

With the startup initially focused on bringing on students looking to study vocational education (VET) and English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) courses – 21 percent of the 550,000 international students in Australia in 2016 were studying ELICOS courses – Borrego said Brigie is currently working on contracts with educational institutions in this space.

“To create a lean market strategy and explore the early adopters, Brigie’s initial focus will be South American countries which includes Brazil, Colombia, Chile as the primary focus,” Nick explained.

“We are working with global marketing agencies to produce effective marketing campaigns initially focused in countries in South America. We are investing significant time in the marketing plan to attract students to the platform.”

Brigie, of course, faces significant competition: the education agents that dominate the market. Nevertheless, Nick said the team is confident they have a strong competitor.

“Nothing has changed in a long time, and they still use the same slow process. Brigie will not advise the student what course [they] should choose because of commission. The students will have the ability to choose for themselves and decide what the best option is. Brigie will be fast and easy; the student will be able to do everything on the tap of a finger without wasting time and money,” Nick said.

Brigie joins fellow Brisbane startup CohortGo in targeting the international student sector: the startup’s platform looks to assist international students in setting up their lives and study in a new country, with a focus on facilitating easy payments to educational institutions, insurance companies, accommodation providers a student may be using, and providing comparisons to health insurance.

As it gears up for launch, Nick said Brigie’s long term goal is to target students beyond South America and expand its partnerships with educational institutions to offer TAFE and university courses.

Image: the Brigie team. Source: Supplied.

There is no shortage of platforms available to connect brands and individuals to freelancers of all stripes, but Dave Bentley, former managing director of digital agency MullenLowe Profero, and Nick Stevens, the former senior tech lead at Razorfish, had long felt there was a gap in the market when it comes to finding quality freelancers to support digital and advertising agencies.

Across two decades in the industry, Bentley said that while freelancing was becoming more important strategically due to increased revenue volatility, finding quality freelancers was difficult, costly, and time consuming for brands.

And so Cavalry Freelancing, an end-to-end management system helping companies and freelancers do everything from find each other to generate invoices and send payments, was born.

The platform allows companies to pick freelancers according to what they need and when they need it with targeted Gig Alerts, where Cavalry sends out an email detailing the job to a shortlist of suitable freelancers, or through Cavalry’s search feature, which recommends the suitability of a freelancer for a job based on their expertise, skills, availability, rates, and reputation, Bentley said.

A freelancer can then be added to a company ‘roster’, which looks to help companies build and nurture relationships with their freelancers.

“Being on a roster demonstrates an elevated strategic relationship and ensures that a freelancer is the first or second option when gigs crop up that require their skillset,” Bentley explained. “Being on a roster is [also] promoted as a badge on the freelancer’s profile and has some impact on their rankings in search.”

According to Bentley, the startup is targeting local, highly skilled freelancers with “a track record of applying their craft within the advertising, marketing, or technology sectors”, with these typically freelancers with expertise in creative, software development, digital, data, or communications.

On the other side of the market, Cavalry is targeting companies in the advertising, marketing, or tech sectors who are likely to have existing expertise and capabilities in developing creative, communications, or digital activity, Bentley explained.

With this in mind, Bentley said these companies typically rely on freelancers to supplement their team during busy periods, or boost their team with “strategically important skill sets” they can’t afford or justify in-house.

“Our early focus has been advertising, digital and comms agencies, but equally Cavalry can support in-house companies or product teams as well as startups looking for expertise to supplement their burgeoning team. With these companies we can help connect them with freelancers who can work onsite or remotely,” Bentley said.

The startup has brought on clients including PR agency One Green Bean and tech company Kounta, while Wayne Arnold, cofounder of MullenLowe Profero, has invested in the company’s seed funding round.

“While there is enormous enthusiasm for Cavalry within the industry, changing an industry’s behaviour is always hard,” Bentley said.

“Learning this, we’re now heavily focused on making sure that we’re hand-holding new customers through the Cavalry experience and supporting them along the journey to make sure its seamless and enjoyable. While it doesn’t scale long term, we learn so much about their expectations and build tangible relationships that transcend the platform.”

The startup charges a commission fee of nine percent on a booking, with Bentley explaining Cavalry has positioned this fee as comparable to a recruitment fee in order for it to be immediately understood by the industry.

“As an MD of an agency for seven years, I experienced first-hand the discomfort of paying high recruitment fees. Right from the beginning I wanted to develop a pricing model that was unquestionably great value for customers and felt disruptive to the industry,” he said.

“The pricing model of nine percent commission fee on a booking is approximately half of what a recruiter will charge.”

While the likes of Freelancer and Upwork keep growing, Bentley is confident Cavalry is filling a clear gap in the market in its focus on supporting the advertising and digital sectors.

“There are many that graze the edges of it but promote very different types of freelancers including Expert360, Upwork and The Right Fit. At this stage, I would see established recruiters within the industry as our direct competitors,” he said.

Bentley said the startup is “well on our way” to hitting its calendar year targets of getting 280 companies and 2,200 local and active freelancers on board, with the goal for 2019 to look to expansion in markets including New Zealand and Singapore.

Image: Nick Stevens and David Bentley. Source: Supplied.

One of the biggest challenges facing small businesses is maintaining a sustainable level of growth with only limited resources at hand. Any help in streamlining operations or finding efficiencies can have an immediate impact on a company’s bottom line. This is why it is so exciting that an increasing number of developers are rising to the challenge of solving small business problems.

At the Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Hackathon in Sydney on the weekend, more than 100 developers from Australia and New Zealand converged on the offices of Intuit to build apps that could help small businesses prosper. It was a tight field of 23 teams who spent two straight days wracking their brains and drawing on their collective experience to come up with amazing array of solutions.

“Small businesses don’t have the revenue to engage a developer,” says Oliver Dolk, a Software Engineering and Commerce student at UNSW and member of the winning team. “So the solutions have to be generic enough so most small businesses can use them but specific enough to solve a particular problem.”

A significant sweetener to the event was the opportunity for developers to access the APIs of sponsors Google, Telstra and PayPal, as well as cloud accounting software QuickBooks Online. With their hands on such impressive technology, developers were inspired to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Solutions ranged from helping small businesses to more easily manage their finances to being able to better store and categorise important documents.

The winning submission, Mobius, is a predictive supply chain management system that learns how to forecast and match supply and demand from via online accounting data. “We figured that small businesses are not always sure how much inventory to stock,” says Dolk. “If you have too much, you pay warehouse costs. If you don’t have enough, you risk losing customers. So we built a model to determine demand. We wanted to automate the process as much as possible.”

“The world of tech and business is rapidly favouring agility and flexibility,” says fellow winning team member and Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science student at the University of Sydney Celso Milne. “The rise of tech start-ups is a testament to this. Small businesses are pioneers of finding new ways of satisfying customer needs. So understanding what small businesses are doing is essential to maintaining the momentum of innovation.

“We want to give small businesses the tools large organisations already have, as well as the ability to capitalise on the power of big data science.”

It was this positive attitude that coloured the atmosphere on the day. The developers really empathised with the challenges small businesses face and wanted to do whatever they could to help. It was an ethos shared and fostered by the hosts Intuit Australia.

“Intuit Australia is really committed to powering the prosperity of small business,” says Vice President and Country Manager, Nicolette Maury. “This is why we encourage developers to develop solutions on our platform. The benefits go directly to our small business customers.

“This is the first time we’ve held the Small Business Hackathon in Australia as part of our flagship conference QuickBooks Connect so it was terrific to see so much talent in one room. I’m confident word will get out and more developers will discover how rewarding it is to help small businesses prosper.”

Another developer at the event, Elena Williams, was impressed with the quality of the actual hackathon. “The one thing that really stood out was the positive and proactive culture of all the QuickBooks people that I met and talked to,” she says. “This struck me as being really special. I am so proud to be a part of the first Sydney event.”

It’s reassuring to know that the digital era is fostering a generation of developers who not only understand small business but are doing everything they can to give them a competitive edge.

This article first appeared on Kochie’s Business Builders, part of the Pinstripe Media network.

I spent 45 minutes yesterday interviewing one of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, Twitter and Square founder, Jack Dorsey. It was one of those rare privileges (thanks to the American Chamber of Commerce) which challenge the way you think. He is a remarkable man – thoughtful, inspiring, and humble.

These are the five most important lessons I learnt from my chat with Jack;

1) He starts every day investing in himself

Jack is a man of routine. He rises early, meditates, works out and then walks 90 minutes to the office listening to podcasts.

“Even before I start work I know the day has been a success because I achieved and learnt so much personally. I’m in the right mindset,” he said. 

He has built that particular early routine because it can be achieved anywhere…there is no excuse not to achieve it. He can meditate anywhere, all he needs for his 7 minute work out is a wall and a chair, and he can walk anywhere. So no matter whether he’s at home or traveling there is simply no excuse.

The podcasts Jack listens to are interview or health-themed.

2) The three roles which define Jack

I asked how on earth he could balance being the CEO of not one (Twitter) but two (Square as well) companies each valued at over $1 billion.

He explained his three responsibilities as CEO were;
. Build a great team
. Make sure decisions are made in the context of the people that they serve
. Raise the bar of what you thought was possible…inspire customers and staff

3) Nothing is ever perfect

Jack loves failure and learning from failure. While conventional business thinking is to develop a product and launch it when its development is as close to perfect as it can be, Jack just launches a new product as early as he can. He then watches the reaction of customers and constantly makes changes to respond to their criticisms and needs. He believes no product is ever perfect and never will be. It has to be constantly adjusted and evolve.

4) Be decisive in getting rid of toxic staff

Jack admits one of his early weaknesses was being too slow in moving out toxic staff who had a negative impact on the business and the culture. It’s ironic that one of the highest of high tech companies in the world has the same problem as any other company: human resources. Business is always all about the quality of the people.

Jack has a policy now that it doesn’t matter who the person is, or how critical they are to the business, if they are a negative impact on culture and morale they are out. He is amazed at how the remaining team rise to the challenge and fill any gaps.

5) Not interested in new customers

Twitter and Square grow their business by providing the best possible product, service and experience to their existing customers. They ignore potential customers. Jack’s rationale is that committed satisfied customers will be your best salespeople by referring you to others.

Oh, and he and his mum text each other every day. She is a small business owner and has been one of his mentors during his entire career.

https://t.co/gnNUxkvNrP

— Twitter Australia (@TwitterAU) May 24, 2018

David Koch is the chairman of Pinstripe Media, which owns Startup Daily. This post first appeared on Facebook.

Image: David Koch and Jack Dorsey.

For those without the tech knowhow, developing an app has traditionally been a costly, time-consuming ordeal, with many falling at the first hurdle: finding the right developer.

Cofounded by Dr Eban Escott, Indi Tansey, Matt Francis, and David Burkett, Queensland startup Codebots aims to open up app development to the non-techies among us, creating an app building tool for non-developers.

It doesn’t replace developers, Tansey noted, but rather looks to encourage those less technical to create the apps they need, without feeling limited by their tech knowhow or lack thereof.

“The platform enables anyone to build and manage software with the help of AI-powered codebots, or code-writing robots. You decide what you want your app to be able to do, you give a codebot instructions, and it writes more than 90 percent of the codebase that a human would typically have to write,” she explained.

“The aim of the platform was always to make technology more accessible for everyone. We saw that technology was a real barrier to so many people who want to solve real problems that are going on right now. We don’t think that everyone should have to learn to code just to be able to build an app, so we designed a product that lowers the barrier to entry so more people can execute on their ideas.”

The technology underpinning the platform has come out of Dr Escott’s PhD at the University of Queensland, with the journey to commercialisation helped along by the iLab accelerator.

So how does the tech work?

“The current architecture for each codebot is a standard EMF architecture. We define a meta-model using EMF and then create a number of models using this meta-model. The models are transformed into the target application. The target application is both the development target, deployed into beta/production, and the testing target, deployed in continuous integration and used for UATs,” Tansey explained.

“We also leverage open-source technology. Our most popular bot, Lampbot, writes to a LAMP – linux, apache, MySql and Php – stack.

For those who had that techy explanation go over their heads, Codebots works by having a user sign up, set up team members and projects, and begin to describe the project they want to create. From here they set up user personas and create epics and user stories for the project that determine what will be done and by who.

They then use a drag and drop interface – called the diagram editor – to construct the application: here they are drawing up the UX design and database schematic. The next step is testing, with users taken to the scenario builder where they choose the tests they want to run on their project.

“Then comes what we call the ‘fireworks’ moment where the codebot writes thousands of lines of code on your behalf,” Tansey said.

“Your codebot will build your application as you watch, with each part of the database and connective flow of the UX coming to life.”

As the community lead for the startup, Tansey said the team has gone through a number of iterations in terms of how it markets and describes the platform.

“A big breakthrough was when we landed on the term ‘codebots’. We had been talking about software bots for a long time and it helped the concept click in the minds of our customers. The idea of humans being enabled by bots working on their behalf is an important part of our story and development as a company,” she said.

This also helped the company narrow its focus when it comes to its target market. Initially, she said, Codebots was trying to target everyone who wanted to build software – “almost impossible when you’re building a marketing funnel on a bootstrapped startup budget,” she said.

With this in mind, the startup is looking to target medium-sized businesses “who have an ecosystem of outdated or unscalable software”.

Tansey said, “We want to make it easy for them to quickly build apps that streamline their processes, unlock their data and find their competitive edge.”

The platform has already been used for more than 30 real world software projects, with Codebots working with the likes of startups through to government departments.

Codebots will work along a freemium model, with premium features available with a subscription. It will also charge a one-off deployment fee for projects.

Beyond the building of apps, the startup is also launching Codebots Academy to teach users both the basics of code and app design and how to make the most of its platform.

There are a number of businesses in the low-code platform market that look to automate the code writing process, Tansey admitted, but with the market predicted to grow by nine times to $22 billion in the next four years, there is space to play with.

Identifying Outsystems and Mendix as its two key competitors, Tansey believes there are two big differences between Codebots and the others.

“Both competitors require their users to install software locally on their computers. Codebots is 100 percent cloud-based and available online through a browser and a mobile-app. Secondly, Codebots uses artificial intelligence to write code. No other competitors use AI in this context.”

Having taken part in the Myriad Festival in Brisbane last week, the startup anticipates a public launch in the third quarter of 2018; until then, users can go through the Codebots Academy and upskill before the full platform is live.

Image: the Codebots team. Source: Supplied.

According to IBM, 90 percent of the world’s data has been created in the last two years alone. For those working in any way online, this means the ability to understand an audience or target market better and in more granular detail than ever before – in theory.

Australian startup Incites believes content experts are just that – experts in content – so it has created an insights platform “made for marketers and publishers, not data analysts” to give users automated, easy-to-action insights.

As founder Leon Bombotas, former head of data at Ogilvy Australia, explained, “Businesses are losing ground because they no longer understand their online audience, despite an abundance of data. Incites tells publishers and brands, in simple natural language, what they need to focus on right now, and makes it easy for users to see and discuss these insights with their teammates in a personalised feed.”

The business was born as Bombotas realised he was hearing a common concern from marketers and publishers: that they were still too reliant on gut feeling, because they weren’t getting enough value from their data to make important decisions.

“We see an industry that is battling dashboard fatigue and struggling to get real direction from data. While there a plenty of great tools for analysts, these tend to be a misfit for editors, marketers and business leaders who fundamentally, just want answers and ideas to grow their audience,” he said.

“The imperative to create high impact content has never been higher and yet the sad reality is that most content made will never generate enough activity to cover the cost of making it,” Bombotas said.

Incites was originally conceived as Newsroom.ly, built as a dashboard focused in large part on ranking content on a scoring algorithm, Bombotas explained.

Supported by $750,000 in seed funding, the platform earlier this month rebranded to Incites, with the new system working to uncover patterns across a broader range of data, Bombotas said, with the findings posted in a live feed for groups of users to see, explore, and discuss.

The fact data is being fed to a group of users rather than just one is crucial, the startup believes, with insights more likely to be acted upon if they have been discussed and explored by a team.

John Georgopoulos, recently appointed CEO of Incites, said, “There is nothing more powerful than collective human intelligence. With Incites our goal is to unleash great ideas by unifying data based, purpose driven insights with the wisdom of teams. When an insight is presented, understood, discussed and resolved through action, special things happen.”

Bombotas added, “Our customers taught us that an insight is only as good as the conversation it sparks or incites.”

Currently in beta, the platform works by having users sign up, add a data source, and create a group to which they can add their teammates. They will then start receiving insights.

The startup’s clients already include the likes of The Guardian, Junkee, and the University of Sydney.

As it looks to grow further, the startup has its eyes on raising a Series A round later this year; Georgopoulos explained the plan is to expand beyond content publishing to provide business intelligence across competitor, channel, and sales data.

Image: John Georgopoulos and Leon Bombotas. Source: Supplied.

Emerging Australian startup ARIVAL is a fan-focused mobile platform that uses augmented reality to visualise player team data and statistics whilst gamification aspects are added to drive engagement.

It’s a potent second screen experience for fans at home watching on TV or in the arena.

ARIVAL cofounder and head of innovation Matt Coleman spoke to us just after winning the University of Queensland’s HYPE Spin Lab Sports Innovation Global Pitch.

The chance to pitch their product on a global stage with global sports beckons for the company this year: along with a $25,000 cash investment, the company has won the opportunity to pitch and present their technology at the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.

Describe ARIVAL, the product and most of all its potential?

Matt: The company started out creating a solution as a fan engagement tool using AR, we saw the opportunity with all these new technology revolutions that are going on where you’ve got 18 to 35 year old’s not turning up to attend live sporting events anymore, not watching television, how do teams and leagues connect to this audience? They’re all watching snippets of content across different social platforms. We thought why don’t we use exactly what they’re already using which is augmented reality on other social platforms like Snapchat and Facebook.

That’s how the platform started out, it was in-stadium to begin with and then moved into augmenting real time data and adding gamification such as simple predictions, rewarding fans for making the right choice. It’s not a PlayStation gamification opportunity but it could be in the future and with recent developments from Apple and Google the technology is so advanced that you’re able to now lay down and create a digital basketball court on your coffee table, which is pretty ground breaking.

AR is much more interactive and immersive. It’s completely the opposite to virtual reality because this is shareable, where VR is a one-on-one experience, AR is a whole market that is so much larger than VR which is another reason why it’s the right solution for the market.

You just won HYPE’s Sports Innovation Global Pitch. How are you feeling, where’s your head at?

It’s certainly a pleasant surprise, you never know which way it’ll go. We were happy to join the program and just a great outcome to win it. The HYPE team from Israel and around the world have been amazing to work with and in particular their Australian partner iLab at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

The chance to pitch at the 2018 FIFA World Cup and a cash injection are two brilliant things but to enter the HYPE Top 50 and have that access and international contact is probably the most alluring?

You’re right and fortunately that’s already begun even before we won this competition. We got asked to apply to pitch at the NBA All-Star Weekend with brands such as Spalding and Puma in Los Angeles.

We applied for that, went over there and signed contracts with new clients directly related to their introductions.

It’s thrown a nice spanner in the works.

Football could be the biggest opportunity in the market we certainly don’t want to miss out. It’s definitely on our roadmap.

The great thing about the HYPE scenario is that a lot of their connections are based in Europe and England and we can take advantage of the football side of the business.

How has your timeline changed for the next 12 months?

The FIFA pitch opportunity does change the whole thing. In our timeline, we’re also in discussions with data owners who have access to 30,000 basketball games around the world.

The data company tie in is an interesting proposition as it’s another international sport opportunity.

That’s an interesting thing about basketball, and that’s really where we started thinking about how we can use the technology for a sport where you’re not in a 60,000 plus seat stadium and trying to interact with the players on the field. Most of the NBA stadiums are about 30,000 capacity, it’s a little bit more controlled for us.

Where our opportunity gets even bigger we can globally locate displaced fans that can’t attend a game in every country and city.

In your HYPE Spin Lab pitch you brought up an example of measuring how many people around the world are watching a Washington Wizards game through the usage of your AR app.

That’s what is crazy. We could evolve into a market research or marketing platform instead of just a pure fan engagement play because there’s a lot of deeper analytical database information that we can collect and that’s on a pure statistical level.

You’re positioning ARIVAL so you would be able to have data partnerships with leagues, rights holders, governing bodies, player data suppliers?

Potentially the player associations have a role to play in this moving forward with data rights. Essentially, who owns the data? Is it the player, the league? In what situation can that data be exploited for financial gain? Some of these details are still up in the air to be honest.

Take the NFL for example, they have been tracking player data for the last few years through digital devices on jerseys. The coaches haven’t really taken it to the next level. This is an opportunity where they would look at this for coaching, whereas we would look at using that data for fan engagement.

Have you been testing with rights holders, governing bodies?

We’ve got one pending launch coming up shortly. There’s a number of brands that we’ve engaged around the NBL that are very interested. We’ve definitely got the ears of many clients in Australia and worldwide.

What’s the Australian market potential? The global potential?

We’ve been looking first of all to offer this in Australia, they have the first opportunity, and we are already in the US, this market in particular want to be first and innovative, we will see how it rolls out after our FIFA World Cup pitch too.

We work with our clients on an advertising business model, and discuss the size of the sponsorship per game per season. What’s the size of the sports sponsorship community in sport in Australia versus the rest of the world? It’s $62 billion worldwide so Australia is of course a small portion of that but still very influential in creating these opportunities for fans and brands.

What is your competitive advantage?

We believe it’s the player tracking ability of our development roadmap that allows us to stand out in the market. Where you hold your phone and it has the ability to track, say LeBron James on court, and giving you real time data on him. What is currently in the market gives you general information that may or may not be in real time.

Real time is what everyone expects which is what we aim to deliver.

This article first appeared on Bullpen, a site that focuses on the Australian sports business, sportstech and the sports startup ecosystem.

Image: Matt Coleman.

It is estimated that 136 million children globally experience clinical attention difficulties. In some cases, this is diagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), with an estimated one in 20 Australian children having ADHD.  

According to the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne (RCHM), the condition has the potential to affect a child’s learning and social skills, and even how their family functions. As the RCHM puts it, “the most effective treatment for the symptoms of ADHD is stimulant medication, and it has been the standard treatment for children with ADHD since the 1980s”.

Taking an alternative approach to the treatment of attention difficulties is ASX-listed healthtech Novita Healthcare with its TALI Health business.

As Glenn Smith, CEO of Novita Healthcare, explained it, TALI Health provides engaging software platforms and game-based apps to assess and treat core childhood difficulties, such as inattention, and improve cognitive and academic performance.

Among its solutions is TALI Train, a game designed by a team of neuroscientists at Monash University based on a 20 year research program, that aims to improve attention and numeracy by “strengthening underlying attentional processes”.

“Unlike psychostimulant medication, such as Ritalin, which aim to reduce symptoms of attention difficulties, such as inattention and hyperactivity, TALI Train is based on the concept of neuroplasticity and therefore builds and strengthens attention networks at the brain level to promote stable improvements in children aged 3 to 8,” Smith explained.

The drive to create the program, Smith said, came from the fact the company had identified both a lack of “suitable non-pharmacological interventions” to treat inattention, and growing evidence that targeted training can have a positive effect on such problems.

“Cognitive training using game technology has increased exponentially and, while its use is well established in adult populations, relatively few technologies have capitalised on the accessibility of portable touch-screen technology to develop a therapy for young children,” he said.

The six year journey to creating a commercial product out of the university research has been helped along by the fact the original partners have remained a close team, Smith said.

One of the key challenges the team has faced along the way is differentiating TALI Train from all the ‘brain training’ apps out in the market, which Smith believes are “predominantly developed without any scientific direction and evidence behind their claims”.

To do this, TALI Health actively promotes the findings of the clinical trials it has conducted to evaluate its program; according to Smith, over 170 children, both with and without developmental disorders, have taken part. 

“TALI Health’s strong relationship with Monash University has resulted in further research trials that aim to assess whether TALI Train is beneficial to children with traumatic and acquired brain injuries. It is the quality of the research that underpins TALI Train that launches the program above other tools that claim to improve attention or associated skills,” Smith said.  

As Smith explained it, for children using the program TALI Train doesn’t feel like a therapy or treatment, but rather “a fun outcome-based experience” as they are taken through games that train their attention through selection and focus skills.

The program runs across five weeks, with children completing five training sessions each week. TALI trains children’s ability to maintain focus on a task, prevent impulsive behaviour, avoid fidgeting and switch between tasks, avoid distractions, concentrate while learning something new, and improve learning at school.

“TALI Train provides verbal and visual reinforcements through the exercises to encourage and motivate children. In addition, game-based features such as interactive characters and storylines are incorporated to increase engagement with the program,” Smith explained.

The app can measure results and report them back to clinicians, who in turn can share this data with parents.

With the company looking to distribute its program via various providers, TALI Health in April had a “controlled commercial launch” for TALI Train, which targeted 108 clinicians, Smith said, primarily psychologists in Victoria. From there, they had a take up rate of 50 percent, with 54 becoming certified providers.

“Considering our initial launch was for a seven-week period, we consider this a high level of engagement and demonstrates there is a need for a digital therapy like TALI Train. With TALI Train now approved as a registered NDIS provider, we look forward to engaging with clinicians Australia-wide.”

The company was then in May approved as a registered provider by the NDIS, meaning TALI Train is available through the NDIS.

TALI Health is just one of a growing number of healthtech businesses in Melbourne, which was identified by a recent Startup Genome ecosystem report as a hub for innovation in the health and life sciences spaces; more than 40 percent of ASX-listed life science companies are based in Melbourne.

In Smith’s view, this growth is due to strong collaboration between the private and government sectors, along with strong long-term university engagement.

“The Melbourne Biomedical precinct is a prime example of this strategy and success on show every day,” he said.  

“This cluster has delivered Melbourne a sustainable competitive advantage. This provides a huge advantage for new ventures who can benefit from advanced research centres and talent that will lead global transformation in the health sector for decades.”

As it looks to further assist children, TALI was last year awarded a development grant that will go towards extending TALI Train to new users, such as children with acquired brain injuries and typically developing children, and another grant to develop TALI Detect, a tool to assist in the detection of inattention in early childhood.

At the same time, the team will also be working to spread word of the program to healthcare professionals, educators, and parents across Australia and encourage access, either direct or via the NDIS.

Image source: TALI Health.

Setting up a business in Australia is not always an easy task, but it can pale in comparison to the process of setting up in China.

Talking through the basics at the Secrets to Doing Business in China conference in Shanghai last month were Chris Carr, partner at MinterEllison and chief representative of the firm’s Shanghai office; Richard Kimber, director at Norman Waterhouse Lawyers; and Justin Howden, executive manager, government affairs and industry development at Swisse.

Across the board – or panel – the key piece of advice was: do your homework. From partnerships to joint ventures and wholly foreign-owned enterprises (WFOE), researching how to structure your Chinese operation is vital, but even before that, researching where to set up is key.

“Understand what you’re actually doing here,” Chris advised.

“China is 1.4 billion people and you’re not going to be able to hit all of them, so where are you going to be able to set up? Where’s your market? If your market is in Sichuan you shouldn’t be setting up in Shanghai, because that’s not where your business is. You need to figure out where your market is, because that’s where you’re going to need to set yourself up.”

It’s also important to keep the geography in mind when hiring people on the ground.

“You’ve got to remember China is 16 dialects and 21 provinces. I’ve seen time and again people say, we’ll set up here, then go and hire someone who’s from somewhere else, and they don’t realise that that person’s not a local,” Richard said.

“Relationships matter so much in whatever business you’re doing, so you’ve got to research who’s going to be your man on the ground, and make sure they’ve got the connections and the abilities for that part of the world.”

The relationship with the business back home is also key, Chris added. Does your point person in China properly understand your Australian business, and its culture and values? Similarly, if you’re sending an Australian staffer to China, who’s around them to support them and do they understand China?  

The need to focus on getting everything set up properly from the get go is crucial, Justin said, because “this isn’t a market that suits a quick kill”.

“[China is not somewhere] where you can just turn up, do a quick transaction, make some money…it’s a very large market, it has very huge potential, and it really deserves research and homework.”

The panel admitted that the research and homework can be difficult, with the Chinese market changing rapidly from day to day.

As Justin pointed out, this is actually a global problem, with regulations across various industries changing faster than ever before as digital disruption takes hold.

“In a product lifecycle, things might have lasted for eight, 10, or 12 years, but now those same lifecycles are two to three years…[policy makers] used to be able to legislate and get 10-15 years out of a legislative framework, today it’s probably five years,” Justin explained.

“It’s something that every business needs to grapple with; it’s no longer about just having a regulatory affairs person somewhere putting things into an authority, you actually have to proactively manage regulatory affairs.”

While this may be a global phenomenon, it can often feel heightened in China, and not every business adapts to the pace.

Reflecting on his work in China, Chris said the biggest mistake he has seen businesses make is stand still.

“People come with their five year plan, or they might even be able to commit to a five year budget spend, but once they get a day in, China shifted since they were doing their plan, and they’re not prepared to be nimble, or their board or home office in Australia isn’t prepared to adjust and adapt and accept the reasoning for that adjustment,” Chris said.

“The regulatory framework in China is changing constantly…we get an inquiry a week on Chinese cybersecurity law, and I keep telling these businesses, because this is a new law what we say today may not be correct in six months time, because they will have given more guidance, they will have defined what some of these key terms actually mean. It’s about saying, this environment is changing rapidly and you’ve got to keep an eye on it.”

While there may be a lot to learn about doing business in China, the panelists said there is no shortage of resources to help – first off the bat, you can always rely on Australians.

“The Australian business community here is very generous,” Chris said. “[MinterEllison is] an Australian business here and we sometimes need the support of the Australian business community here as well, so seek that advice because people will generally help you.”

Should you hit a rough patch, Justin said it all comes back to those relationships you started building when you first set off for China.

“The relationships you build proactively will be able to help you and hopefully minimise any impact of any crisis, and hopefully ameliorate any of the impacts that will cause,” he said.  

“A problem shared is a problem solved, so talk to people that you know – if you don’t know them and the crisis happens, it’s a very lonely place, so try to get those relationships in place as early as you’re thinking of coming to China.”

Chris Carr, Justin Howden, and Richard Kimber were speakers at the Secrets to Doing Business in China conference, produced by Pinstripe Media. You can find out more about the conference here and listen to all the panels and keynotes here. 

Australia’s embrace of ecommerce is stronger than ever: the latest NAB Online Retail Sales Index found that online retail sales had grown to an estimated $25.3 billion in the 12 months to March.

Of course, we all love a deal, and the most surefire way to nab a bargain over the years has been to hang out for a sale like cyber Monday or hit that refresh button all night long during Click Frenzy – until now, that is, says Singapore-founded ShopBack.

Recently expanding into Australia, ShopBack is an online loyalty program of sorts, giving shoppers cash back for purchases made from partner retailers through its platform.

Founder of ShopBack Australia and head of market expansion for the business, Josephine Chow, explained, “The idea of cashback is very well established in the US and China. In Asia it was an emerging concept when ShopBack initially launched in Singapore four years ago, [but] at the time we could see how big the cashback trend would become in Asia, and that’s why we decided to bring ShopBack to life.”

For shoppers, signing up to the platform is free. From there, they simply shop through ShopBack and receive up to 30 percent cash back on purchases, with the money transferred into their nominated bank account within two or three days.

The offering for consumers is fairly clear, but Chow explained that brands are attracted to the platform because it enables cross-selling to consumers who wouldn’t have otherwise been aware of their brand.

The decision to expand into Australia earlier this year came, Chow said, as the business identified Australia as a mature market with strong growth numbers on online shopping, and mobile shopping adoption.

“The number of Australian consumers shopping on their smartphones is rising and we believe the ShopBack app will not only benefit both consumers and brands, but also help shape the landscape to be mobile-first…in our other markets, 70 percent of users shop via their mobile,” Chow said.

The latest mCommerce Index trends report from PayPal, released last month, found that while 87 percent of Australian smartphone users browse retail sites for fun without any purchase intent, 77 percent of mobile browsers will make impulse purchases.

One in five Australians stated they are more likely to make an impulse buy via mobile than via desktop, with this figure growing to 31 percent for 18 to 34 year olds.

The focus on mobile is where ShopBack differs from the likes of Cashrewards, an Australian offering founded by husband and wife team Lorica and Andrew Clarke four years ago.

Having raised $5.25 million in funding earlier this year, the company has the likes of Woolworths, Asos, Virgin Australia, and eBay on board and reports it has delivered over $36 million in cash back to customers since launch.

However, it does not yet have an app and as mobile commerce grows, ShopBack believes its mobile-first approach is key.

Above all, of course, are the retailers that the platform has on board; according to ShopBack it has 500 local retailers on its platform, among them Chemist Warehouse, The Iconic, Booking.com, Asos, and Woolworths.

The company’s launch down under was aided by Blue Sky Venture Capital, which last November participated in a $32 million funding round for the business.

While Blue Sky has been looking to Southeast Asia with a couple of investments – it also backed aCommerce last November – Chow said the firm’s base and connections in Australia made the firm an attractive investment partner for ShopBack.

“Their funding is being used to drive three key areas of development; recruitment of talent to lead business in the Australian and New Zealand markets and to continue to build teams in Asia; launching new product features; and establishing market leadership in each region we operate in,” she said.

The company has defined four core groups of users: ‘PMEBs’ or professionals, managers, executives, and business people; tech enthusiasts; students; and stay at home parents.

“Right now, we see a huge influx of users coming in through our referral channel and will focus on efforts to encourage our existing ShopBackers to be our advocates,” Chow said.

Chow’s goal is to see ShopBack become the go-to destination for all Australians when they think of shopping.

“Within the next 12 months, we hope to hit 300,000 users. It’s a stretched target but what are targets for, eh?”

Image: Josephine Chow. Source: Supplied.

Medical rehabilitation company Prohab has developed cutting edge hardware that helps athletes and patients recover from injury.

The Adelaide-based company built a hardware device with sensors that clips into exercise resistance bands or testing equipment which then connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth. As soon as a person uses the band, data is captured and fed instantly to an app so they can measure how hard a person is going, how much they’re doing and how to progress effectively.

The device can be used in conjunction with physiotherapists and medical professionals to help treat patients. It’s the device’s potential that is the most exciting, with industries including sports, fitness, medical and healthcare a potential target.

Prohab CEO Lyndon Huf spoke about his company’s development and how his dad encouraged him to go hard and pursue this idea.

We’ll start with the conception of the idea. As you’re a physiotherapist, what moments necessitated such an idea?

This story really started from my mother, she was on a caravan trip up the east coast of Australia with my father and she tripped and fell on a footpath and landed face first, and put her arm out and hurt her shoulder. Through the course of time she was having a lot of problems with her shoulder, and with the physiotherapist she was seeing. She rang me up and asked ‘can I have some free treatment? I’m not doing too well, I’m struggling to sleeping well at night, I can’t manage.’

I got her to come over to Adelaide, had a quick look at what was going on and in that moment I rang my brother and said to him, ‘mum’s doing the right things but I think she’s doing too much. She should only do very small amounts and do it in a particular way without aggravating her shoulder to help her progress.’ It’s what we call static contraction (strengthening the shoulder muscles without moving the joint), so there’s no aggravating movement in her shoulder.

My brother and I put together a really rough prototype, what we called The Brick, and that allowed us to just measure and quantify how much force our mum could put on an exercise band to help her shoulder. And it actually worked.

The interesting thing that came out of it was my dad was using it. He didn’t tell anyone he had a sore shoulder for over 12 months. My parents lived on a golf course and my dad thought if he told mum he had a sore shoulder she wouldn’t let him play golf, so he kept it all quiet. But he was using this device in his shed and measuring it, and he started to write down all of the data behind what he was doing and he said to me, ‘you need to do something about this because this thing works’.

Your dad encourages you to go with this idea, how did it progress from there?

I spoke to someone in Adelaide about what my brother and I had done, then through speaking to various people I ended up meeting someone at Flinders University who wanted to build it due to its value and potential. It snowballed ever since.

And they helped you develop the first prototype and the iterations of the product since?

We had initial discussions and they were interested. I put together a lot of prototypes myself, really rough ones, and the Medical Device Partnering Program (MDPP) headed up by Karen Reynolds at Flinders University was the driving force behind it. She got her team to look at the feasibility of it, determine if it could it be built, assess the technical and commercial risk, obviously bringing a lot of expertise to the table. Through that we built a lot of relationships and some of those relationships are still ongoing which has allowed us to be placed within the university to access researchers and professors.

The problem you’re ultimately solving is accurately managing rehabilitation loads with athletes, rehab patients, the elderly.

That’s one of the things that we’re solving. But there’s other things still to come which we won’t publicly release just yet. We’re holding off on giving the full product suite as we’re heavy in R&D.

We‘re tackling sport first because everyone understands sport, they’re early adopters with clinicians. The sports market has 4000 professional sporting clubs globally that we could sell to but the big picture is we could sell to the multibillion dollar healthcare market and that’s the really exciting one.

There’s also the baby boomers that need to do rehab for a particular reason. For example, at 40 years of age your power starts to drop off and at 50 your strength starts to drop off significantly. Therefore making sure we can assist a person’s ‘general functional strength is important for them.’ The bigger picture we see is improving healthcare, wellness and awareness.

When you were trialing the product over the last 12 months, were there any findings that were surprising?

The big thing that really surprised us was the usability. Initially we had to show people how to use the product, be quite demonstrative. We then made a slight change to the design and software to create an educational component. When someone picked up a device and first turned it on we allowed them to start playing with it straight away because what we worked out pretty quickly was people don’t hook it up to a band, they hold the device in their hand and want to see real life data straight away.

We did move away from our initial offering which was very data-centric to more of a design experience where people can understand what to do and that was critical.

We have athletes using it independent of us and the feedback we’re getting is that users are really receptive to the real time feedback.

As a person uses the app they are of course building up a bank of their own data. Does the user of the app keep ownership of their own data?

They’re the administrator of their own data and have the power to share it with their physio or health practitioner as they choose. They can see their results in real time.

We can allow for a sharing model where the owner has complete control and can decide whether to share their data with practitioners.

The bigger picture is that we want to improve healthcare. We want to help people’s health and for them to lead a healthier and happier life and to do that we need evidence in the form of data.

How close is the product ready to be launched into the wider market?

We’re building our first batch of products right now and we’ve lined up our first batch of foundation partners. A foundation partner is someone who values what we are doing and are happy to talk about their experience with the product with us, what they’re enjoying and not enjoying with the product.

The feedback loop is very important for us as we develop strong relationships which allow us to focus on building better products and servicing people much better. Our initial offering will be somewhat selected towards foundation partners to people who can provide value back into building better products. We care about serving our clients.

We’ve got a working product now internally, our launch was at the 2018 Commonwealth Games and we have taken pre-orders from there.

This article first appeared on Bullpen, a site that focuses on the Australian sports business, sportstech and the sports startup ecosystem.

It looks like a soft beanie and has the strength of a helmet: budding startup ANTI. is creating a snow sports product that sounds so radical on paper, yet it was just a series of home experiments with non-Newtonian materials helped form the idea that a beanie could be created to maximise comfort and safety.

Medical engineering student and cofounder of ANTI., Rob Joseph, spoke to Bullpen about what drove this idea.

Bullpen: I’ve seen your pitch video, the beanie sounds so radical on first impression?

It stems from my experience; being a Queenslander I hadn’t been to the snow a lot. Pretty much all my life I have been wearing helmets, for wakeboarding, motorbikes, push bikes, and I never had a problem with wearing helmets until I got to the snow and I found myself taking it off frequently. I found it really annoying whilst wearing the added gear such as gloves, face mask, beanie, ear muffs and goggles.

Yet as someone who is a semi-intelligent person it’s a foolish choice not wearing a helmet. But we realised it’s something that people do a lot, and we figured we saw everyone who didn’t wear a helmet, and even some who did, wore a beanie.

What goes inside the beanie, is it patented design or an application of utilising known materials in a new fashion?

It’s using known materials but the way we’ve used them is different to how anyone else has done it, and that’s our intellectual property.

How has the product been refined and tested? Has it been tested on the slopes, not just you being hit over the head with a plank!

We haven’t quite been able to get to this point yet. Luckily I’m a medical engineering student and my business partner is a civil engineer, we have a lot of resources that allows us to do a lot of testing without being on a mountain. By the time we get to one it will be an ergonomic test and a practical use test.

As you’re pre-revenue, how close are you to taking on funding?

We’re pre-funding at the moment but we are getting close with a couple investors. We are trying to get some early seed capital soon.

We’ll also be trying to build up a presence in the next couple months, getting ready for a bigger launch later this year.

I’d imagine your marketing and public presence will have a very strong visual component?

It’s a product that people won’t really believe at first! But it’s quite easy to prove that it works so marketing will be really fun.

It’s a crazy idea, which can be fun to market.

Yeah, that’s why people like it when I get hit over the head during a pitch! They don’t believe it until we get to that stage and then they do because we believe in it that much we have to put our heads on the line to prove it.

Have you considered any wider potential for the beanie just yet?

The material is always the important bit, the application is something we can change quite a lot. There was a couple reasons to go the snow sports market: initially because it’s where our passion lies, we love it and that’s essentially where it started but we also think it’s one of the harder markets to tackle because people are so picky, they won’t put on anything that’s uncomfortable or uncool.

There’s a lot of different criteria a lot of snow sports participants really need out of a helmet and so we decided to go the most difficult one first and then we can move from there.

You bring up the cool factor in regards to snow sports, is that such a barrier?

It’s hard to quantify and it’s individualised for each person. The culture in particular, if the guys really like the product and being seen in the product then it will go well.

We want to build something where people are happy to have it on their heads a lot of the time, not just when they’re riding.

The whole cultural side of it is something we want our product to tackle too.

How do you picture the rest of 2018 going?

We want to get a really nice set of prototypes done and from there we’ll be looking to do some quieter testing in the southern hemisphere winter season. We’ll get some people we know to wear and test the prototype and get their feedback, make adjustments, iterate and keep advancing the prototype before launching into some serious marketing perhaps with the goal of pushing into the market at the end of this year, early next year.

This article first appeared on Bullpen, a site that focuses on the Australian sports business, sportstech and the sports startup ecosystem.

After years in the Sydney rat race, Heath and Melissa Donald decided in 2016 that, with a baby on the way, the time was right to make the move to the idyllic Byron Bay.

Though one could be forgiven for thinking a move with a baby on the way was already more than enough to handle, the pair didn’t stop there, buying food delivery business Munch Crunch Organics.

Founded by ‘Farmer Al’ in 2008, Heath said the business was “ahead of its time” in merging online and organic food sales.

“We saw an opportunity to grow this small delivery service into a subscription delivery service for an entire community. We knew we weren’t the only ones craving a more mindful lifestyle. Demand for local, organic produce is on the rise, and we want to completely change the way people perceive and receive Certified Organic fresh produce,” he explained.

The vision for the business, Heath said, isn’t to compete against the big retailers – which is probably for the best; Woolworths reported a half-year profit of almost $1 billion earlier this year – but rather to provide a sustainable and affordable model to meet demand for produce.

“People perceive Certified Organic produce as expensive, but an unnecessarily flawed system with food wastage, massive infrastructure costs, market manipulation, and a huge reliance on imports are driving up costs. This system affects everyone; the farmers, industries, communities, and customers,” Heath explained.

The Munch Crunch Organics answer is a model based on community supported agriculture (CSA), or the idea of subscribing to a particular farmer to get quality local produce.

“Traditionally CSAs are a one-to-one relationship between a farm and a customer, but our model allows multiple farms to combine for greater supply and diversity of produce,” Heath said.

“Most people buy the same thing each week and food diversity is a real challenge for most households. We faced this same problem and our vision is to address this, providing greater food diversity, greater quality, and cheaper bulk prices at the same time.”

Currently servicing customers from Ballina to Brisbane and expansion into the Sunshine Coast coming soon, Munch Crunch Organics works with local farmers who have a current Certified Organic Certificate and “plan to maintain it”, Heath explained.

From here, the business works with farmers to develop a seasonal crop plan.

“We know week to week what we are going to order – within five to 10 per cent – 12 weeks in advance. We don’t guess, it’s all informed by the data and regular forecasting. Our crop plan means farmers are not picking produce and hoping to sell it – they harvest exactly for our member base’s demand,” Heath said.

The food waste problem is a big one in Australia, with the government estimating it costs the nation’s economy $20 billion each year. According to statistics compiled by OzHarvest, four million tonnes of food ends up as landfill each year: one in five shopping bags ends up in the bin, equating to $3,800 worth of groceries per household each year.

As it looks to combat wastage, Munch Crunch Organics has orders are processed on Thursdays, with the business sending two orders to farmers for two harvests the following week. Produce, in turn, is then delivered to customers within 48 hours of harvesting.

The consistency for farmers is key, Heath believes, and an easy attraction to the platform.

“We pay them more than wholesale, we are consistent in our weekly purchasing for the entire season, and we can pay promptly on delivery [which is] music to their ears. This is virtually unheard of in the farming industry as most farmers don’t know what price the market will pay and when they will get paid, which in many cases can be up to 90 days,” he said.  

Munch Crunch Organics has three core offerings, or ‘packs’: a fruit and vegetable pack, vegetable only, and a meat pack. Each starts from $65, with customers able to add extras such as milk and eggs to each. According to Heath, the direct farmer network is paid up to 50 percent of the retail dollar.

“The rest [is] used to cover operational costs and plans for further functionality. The industry average sees less than 10 percent of the retail dollar for conventional produce going to the farmer,” he explained.

The Munch Crunch Organics model is underpinned by technology, ensuring that the business can meet its promise of providing farmers with timely payment.

“Stripe’s infrastructure powers the backend of our subscriptions and was vital in getting our vision for Munch Crunch Organics humming in a few weeks, with Stripe up and running as our payments gateway within 24 hours,” Heath said.

Originally outsourcing its development, the business eventually brought development in house to ensure it is continuously investing in the user experience for both sides of its marketplace.

For Heath, the company’s target market is broad: families, couples, and singles who are “genuinely interested in the source of their produce”.

Figures show this market is growing steadily, worth $2.4 billion with the retail market worth an estimated $1.6 billion.

According to a report from Australia Organic, based on a survey of 1,000 Australian grocery shoppers conducted by Mobium Group, more than six in 10 Australian households buy organic products in any given year, with 12 percent putting around 40 percent of their annual grocery spend towards organic products.

“We find as someone’s food appreciation matures, they become more interested in knowing where it came from and the specific certification around its quality,” Heath said.  

With expansion into the Sunshine Coast imminent, Heath said the big goal for Munch Crunch Organics over the next year is to grow to connect 50 farmers with 5,000 households.

“We also have big expansion plans to grow nationally. In short, watch this space.”

Image: Heath Donald and Ben Copeman, CEO of Australian Certified Organic. Source: Supplied.

As many business ideas do, that for Internet of Things (IoT) startup Ion Systems came over coffee.

With cofounder Luke Hally having made the decision to wind up his fintech startup, he sat down for a coffee one day with Craig D’Souza, who asked if he might be interested in getting involved with a startup that “had to do with safety and IoT”.

Hally said, “He had an idea around tracking security guards on their rounds. I was intrigued and started thinking about an application that was more exciting, had a higher barrier of entry, and less exposure to consumers.”

The resulting idea was that for a system to improve the situational awareness of teams in hostile environments, such as emergency services or Defence.

Within a week the pair had a website, business name, branding, and a list of potential customers to go after. Within three they had a team, bringing on Aaron Sempf and Dr Anthony Walker, and by week four they were in discussions with Airservices Australia Aviation Rescue Fire Fighters, who came on as a development partner.

Despite having just come off shuttering another startup, Hally was eager to jump into something new.

“What pushed me to bring it to life?” he asked. “The challenge and spark of opportunity that no entrepreneur can resist.”

As Hally explained it, the Ion Systems solution works by having each member of a team wear a sensor pack that connects to a network hub; this in turn feeds data to a team leader or situation commander. The sensors collect data about the wearer’s fatigue levels, movements, and the environment, information that can be crucial in helping a team leader or commander make decisions about what to do next.

“This is a scalable solution; multiple team members per hub and multiple hubs per command centre, so contextual information can be used at all levels of decision making, for any sized event. And since we are leveraging edge computing, each hub-network can continue to operate independently in the event that wider comms are down,” Hally said.

The scope of what Ion Systems could is significant. For example, as Dr Walker, Chief Science Officer (CSO) at Ion Systems explained in a blog post, the leading cause of death for firefighters worldwide is heart attacks, followed by manual handling and falls.

With this in mind, the Ion Systems solution could help monitor and detect a number of tell-tale signs of danger: blood thickening, which results in, among other things, a spike in the heart rate; variations in a firefighter’s gait; and cognition drops, as evidenced by increased reaction times.

With the Defence industry the startup’s key target market, working in partnership with Airservices Australia is not only helping Ion Systems develop and tailor the product, but also helping the team understand what it’s like to work with bigger organisations.

“We’ve had many lessons: insights into how large agencies interact with startups, the benefits of being nimble when working with a large slow moving organisation, plenty of product dev feedback from observation, and data and participant feedback,” Hally said.

“Anthony, our CSO, is based in Canberra and the rest of us are across Melbourne, so we’ve gained insights into working as a distributed team. I’m also developing the ability to digest information from government websites without getting a headache.”

The key to it all, Hally said, has been willing to adapt to change.

“We implement what we learn by being prepared to be totally wrong in our assumptions and being prepared to do long hours to integrate feedback.”

While they faced all the usual challenges startups often come across, from lack of funding to time constraints and everything in between, Hally said one they hadn’t anticipated was insurance.

“A condition of our pilot contract was having appropriate insurance, as you’d expect. What I didn’t expect was the difficulty in obtaining it. It took us about two months. Many insurers refused to even quote because of the environment we proposed to operate in,” Hally said.

“We eventually sourced insurance through Bradley Tempelhof at Sound Insurance Services, who put in the hard yards to get us cover. I’d never been so relieved to spend so much money on something I will hopefully never use. I’ve always wondered why we don’t hear about many hardware startups, now I know why.”

The startup hopes to take part in an accelerator over the coming months to take its growth up a notch and work its way into the Defence pipeline.