We were honoured to be joined by our community for a moment to reflect on the past and how far we’ve come, and the stories still being written today.
The entrepreneurial student community in Dunedin has long been supported by the University of Otago, Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin City Council, and Startup Dunedin, and so the evening brought together the people who’ve shaped the student startup scene over the past two decades.
Expanding your business into international markets can be a game-changer. However, understanding the nuances of various geographies is crucial for success. Here are some things to consider when exploring new markets.
The Chair of the Startup Dunedin board, Wade Pearson brings over 10 years of experience in both law and startups - and you’d be surprised how often those two things cross over.
Startup Dunedin’s one-off microgrant fund has officially wrapped up, and one thing is for sure - there’s no shortage of great ideas and great founders in Ōtepoti.
A box of random items, a few hours of ideation and two days to make a business. A pretty impressive feat for the 2025 cohort for Bachelor of Applied Management at Otago Polytechnic!
We had the pleasure earlier this week of stopping in on the Applied Management students for a workshop as part of their Business in a Box challenge - keep reading to find out how it all went down!
This blog was originally published in the Otago Daily Times.
By McKenzie Dowson Chamberlain
Things can get pretty quiet this time of year, especially if you’re running a startup or small business.
If you’re looking for new customers, now is a great time to reflect on your strategy for customer acquisition. In particular, you can look at revisiting customer personas.
This blog was originally published in the Otago Daily Times.
By Euan Kirkland, founder of Emplify which helps organisations measure and strengthen the cultural traits that drive sustainable innovation.
Startups thrive because their people deeply believe in what they are building.
This gives the team a shortcut to a strong cultural identity: they move fast, take risks and innovate relentlessly. Teams demonstrate resilience, adaptability, exceptional teamwork and customer obsession.
These are not optional extras, they are the traits that define a strong culture and support their early innovation and success.
Rayn Ong is an angel investor, a Principal at Archangel VC, and a Blackbird Giants mentor. He recently hosted an event for startup questions in a reddit-style AMA - you can take a look here to see how it all played out.
Our startup coach Pete Lead was in attendance, and he has put together a series of bite-sized insights for you to digest below!
This week, we were joined at our Founders’ Breakfast by Laura and Adam from Solid Oral Care for a kōrero about their journey from identifying the problem, to landing on supermarket shelves. In particular, Solid found a way to shake up a largely slow-moving and non-innovative $33 billion industry
We were honoured to be joined by our community for a moment to reflect on the past and how far we’ve come, and the stories still being written today.
The entrepreneurial student community in Dunedin has long been supported by the University of Otago, Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin City Council, and Startup Dunedin, and so the evening brought together the people who’ve shaped the student startup scene over the past two decades.
Earlier this month, Sally Warlow - founder of Baasistech and part of Startup Dunedin’s Distiller incubator - had the pleasure of getting along to the Ministry of Awesome’s Electrify Aotearoa 2025 in Wellington.
She came back to us with a truly awesome stack of insights worth sharing from startups around the country, and we’ve pulled together a few highlights that other founders might find useful too!
Jonny Mirkin joined one of our Founders’ Breakfasts late last year. A familiar name in the NZ startup world, you may know him from his earlier venture Nomos One, or Givenwell, which launched in August 2024 and is already expanding into Australia.
At our Founders’ Breakfast, he shared the good, the bad, and the ugly, but more importantly, the lessons he is applying this time around. We took some notes.
You may have heard us talking about validating an idea, and part of that is to test the desirability of the idea. Desirability Validation is used to de-risk an idea and test the solution, without building it first. This helps to save you time, effort and money. It also helps to give you confidence that the problem is worth solving; and that people will pay for the solution.
But… how do you actually do that?
The Chair of the Startup Dunedin board, Wade Pearson brings over 10 years of experience in both law and startups - and you’d be surprised how often those two things cross over.
A box of random items, a few hours of ideation and two days to make a business. A pretty impressive feat for the 2025 cohort for Bachelor of Applied Management at Otago Polytechnic!
We had the pleasure earlier this week of stopping in on the Applied Management students for a workshop as part of their Business in a Box challenge - keep reading to find out how it all went down!
Startup Dunedin is lucky to have a board made of people who really go to bat for Dunedin and our entrepreneurial community. We’re stoked to have some awesome new faces on our Startup Dunedin board; including this week’s spotlight on Janine Kapa!
Janine brings with her a passionate involvement in Māori education spanning 30 years, with leadership roles across compulsory and tertiary education sectors, both locally and nationally. Keep reading for more about her and her journey.
At Startup Dunedin, we are big fans of the lean canvas, and we have recently revamped it to be easier and simpler than ever!
If you're currently working on a solution or have an idea, it's a great idea to take a look at a lean canvas to help you plan and focus on customer validation and problem-solution fit. Our new blog is here to help you do just that - take a look below.
The Christmas period can be a minefield for those of us with a long list to buy for! If you’re looking for some awesome gifts for your friends and whānau, why not support Ōtepoti Dunedin and shop local this time around?
The good news is that there’s loads of options from Dunedin businesses to tide you over - here’s a list of some of our top options for 2024.
Note: This list is by no means exhaustive! There’s far too many amazing businesses, startups, and organisations in our city to count - a great place to start for further research is here: https://www.dunedinnz.com/
This week, Startup Dunedin popped along to the Young Enterprise Scheme (YES) Regional Finals to cheer on the latest secondary-student-led startups coming out of Ōtepoti!
Your tech stack is the set of technologies you use regularly. It can include how you keep track of your accounts, manage business operations, projects, collaborative tools, comms platforms, asset management, and more.
You’ll find a list below of the different tools and technologies used by the startups who came along to our Distiller Incubator founders’ breakfast recently! Keep reading for our founders’ most-used tools.
