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!
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.
Last Wednesday, 2nd June, Startup Dunedin’s Audacious programme held the final showcase for semester one’s cohort of student entrepreneurs. This group of innovators had completed eight long weeks of workshops, market research, customer interviewing, and a lot of hard mahi, and it was time to proudly showcase this to Ōtepoti Dunedin.
Kaffelogic Founder, Chris Hilder completed Co.Starters in 2017, participated in Startup Dunedin’s incubator programme in 2019 and is taking Kaffelogic to the world this year via a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.
What’s the most valuable asset in your business – or your employer’s business? You might say expensive buildings, vehicles, machinery or stock. But often the most valuable assets in a business are the ones we can’t see or touch – the “intangible” assets. In this article, we’ll look at understanding and protecting one of your key intangible assets – intellectual property.
With Semester 2 of Audacious 2020 drawn to a close, we’d like to take a moment to congratulate our amazing Audacious prizewinners. We were gutted that our tech failure meant we weren’t able to video or live-stream this semester’s showcase, so we’ve decided to make a break-down of the evening for you in blog format.
Tenisha was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) at just seventeen years old. She was told that she was probably going to be miserable, struggle to get pregnant and should lose some weight if she wanted to get close to living a happy, normal life.
After using "Dr. Google" and finding dozens of stories from other women struggling with PCOS she decided that she could make a difference.
Anna Guenther is the founder of crowdfunding platform PledgeMe.
She joined Angus on an audio version of the podcast and shared some of her journey including:
- Why Anna chose "Chief Bubbleblower" as her title.
- How PledgeMe responded when their transaction provider shut them down with no notice
-The commonalities of successful crowdfunding campaigns "The three C's"
Angus sat down with winning Startup Weekend team, team Less 2 days after they won Startup Weekend Dunedin 2019.
Team Less have developed an eco-friendly cleaning solution that drastically reduces plastic waste. On the podcast Sophia and Matthew share their Startup Weekend journey including why they got involved, the highs and lows of the weekend, the progress they made and where to from here.
Official Livestream of FoundX & Startup Dunedin Expo - Guest Speaker: Simeon Burnett (with timestamps)
Hear from Snowball Effect, CHAPTER2 Bikes and Ubco Bikes!
Donna Hall has spent her time in Dunedin straddling the gap between two worlds. As a Manager in the Polson Higgs Advisory team, Donna spent her working day in the corporate world, learning about and using business information systems to solve corporate business issues. In her evenings and weekends, Donna flourished in the startup world, facilitating Co.Starters and organising and running Startup Weekends.
This week we sit down to hear what Donna has learned on her journey, and why she made the jump, with both feet, into the startup world.
Serial entrepreneurs, early stage startup consultants and most recently, founders of Winely, Abbe Hyde and Jake Manning join us for this week’s interview!
We were lucky enough to be invited by Startup Dunedin to join a delegation from Dunedin to attend the Tech in Asia Conference in Singapore.
The conference was a collection of up and coming tech startups in the Singaporean region, venture capital groups, existing businesses in the tech space and speakers from global tech giants.
It wasn't only about showcasing the startup businesses looking for investors, there were investor speed dating sessions, networking sessions, specialised business round-tables and three stages of back-to-back seminars covering everything from Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Influencer Marketing, Sales Cycles, Recruitment, B2B, B2C, Legislation, Machine Learning, Hyper-Liquidity, Intelligent Transportation, Bootstrapping and Growth Stage Funding
If we didn’t know what any of the above meant before the trip… we sure do now!
What an experience! I honestly believe that from the conversations, learning and connections I made in the two days attending the conference, I’ve gained a 15% increase in intelligence… at least! (…not that the baseline was all that high to start with…).
We were also given a tour of the spaces (an entire city block!) that the Singaporean government have designated to the support and encouragement of startup businesses. This was literally a city block of buildings 4-5 stories high, full of startup businesses and the supporting services that they all need to get off the ground and succeed… all paid for by the government.
What did I learn…? Obviously, the Singaporeans see the value of tech startups and their potential to contribute to the economy in a big way. In a world where manufacturing, labour intensive and ‘middle man’ jobs are increasingly being lost to advances in technology, the Singaporean government are investing in the businesses that are creating jobs in the technology sector.
New Zealand needs to learn from Singapore – not only about the technology sector, but in the outright recognition and acceptance that things are changing. We need to make sure that NZ businesses and workers are prepared for what’s around the corner. I encourage everyone to learn about the technology that surrounds them and how technology is going to affect businesses, jobs and lives.
Recognition and massive thanks to Startup Dunedin, especially Casey Davies-Bell, Scott Mason and Sarah Ramsay, along with Aleks Dahlberg from Kitt – all fantastic travel companions and champions of the City of Dunedin NZ.
Pikaado is the creation of two local women Kate Gray and Burcu Cakmak and allows people to list profiles for workshops or experiences. The platform aims to be a new arm to the gig-economy, providing a new income stream for individuals and a marketing channel for small businesses.
"Dunedin is stuffed full of creative people doing interesting things, but they are hard to find. We wanted to build a central place to connect with these people, and to create lots of new things to do here in Dunedin” said Kate Gray. "We also felt that while Dunedin is a great place to live, it can be difficult to find part time work which fits around existing commitments. Pikaado offers people a flexible way to make money using their skills and hobbies. We also hope to provide small business people a new way of marketing themselves, and a way for community organisations to fund-raise.”
Pikaado envisions that small businesses and start-ups will utilize the platform to fortify their brand and connect with the local market. “We are speaking to business owners who are either B2C’s or B2B’s who target small local businesses. Pikaado is like a free form of advertising as anyone can post a profile on the site. Workshops also get your target market in the door, and you can use this as a method of increasing your client base” said Ms Gray. “As well as this, people are using the site to test a business idea, to see if there would be a local market in a low risk way. Right now some of our workshops are people’s first steps towards a business” added Ms Cakmak.
There are nearly 80 different workshops listed on Pikaado at the moment with more being posted every week. There are arts and crafts like stained glass making and printmaking, as well as ethnic food workshops like Turkish street food and Indonesian banana leaf wrapped rice. Gardening and DIY are also popular on the site- but there really is something for everyone- from fly fishing to zombie apocalypse makeovers.
“Prices on the workshop range from in the hundreds, to free- people can charge what they want” said cofounder Burcu Cakmak. “We even have a lady in MacAndrew Bay offering to teach Kombucha making with a take-home starter for non-monetary exchange- so you can offer to bake a cake or do some weeding and attend the workshop- it is really fun”
Pikaado has started in Dunedin, but aims to take the business to other cities in New Zealand. “Dunedin has been a fantastic place to launch” said Ms Gray. “The community is amazingly supportive of new ideas and start-ups in general. Organisations have been really helpful, the council has been great, even private businesses- Petridish for example has been incredibly generous.”
Pikaado hopes that Dunedin will embrace the concept, and that through the site there will be more to do around town in a more connected community. Their web address is www.pikaado.com - there is lots on in Dunedin- go and take a look!
[1:00] 👉 Audio begins 🔊
[6:30] 👉 Prue and Nigel talk investment 📈
[40:00] 👉 Tony Cutler pitches Eat Inc 🍴
[49:44] 👉 Bloom pitches 🌿
LIVE] Join us for FoundX live tonight from Innov8HQ - Dunedin!
Angus Pauley sits down with the technical manager of the forward thinking agriculture company, Next Farm.
Can you give a brief elevator pitch on Next Farm?
Next Farm is a water and effluent management company. The effluent product is something that we currently have, it's an existing product, and that irrigation control product is something that we're in the process of developing. The whole purpose of these are streamlining the labor input and just making farm efficiencies better while adding environmental stewardship as that becomes an ever increasing, not necessarily concern but point of importance as we move forward. If you like, I can give you a brief rundown of our history?
That'd be great.
It all started 2014/2015, I came on board January 2016. The guy that came up with the idea that had these frustrations; he worked on a dairy farm outside of Oamaru but came down to Dunedin, to try to work with the Polytech and get some different grants and funding, and that went horribly wrong for him.
At that point, he got in touch with Hadyen Court here in town. He owns 104 Bond Street, New Zealand Heritage Properties down there. He took over and that's when Next Farm was actually registered. It was Farmlinc Systems before, I believe was the name. Anyway, Next Farm got registered. Hayden Cawte started trying to shape things up and they found a contractor to start developing the product. Hayden Cawte obviously had his own company to run as well, so wasn't fully dedicated to it. He found a group of investors to put a bid in, in the beginning to just pay for product development type stuff, keep things ticking along.
Then it would have been, I think, January ... January 2016, Hayden got busy with his stuff, so that meant they needed someone else that could have a bit more focus on the business. I just arrived in New Zealand in November 2016. I'd been here a couple of months, and I went over to a test farm in Central where they were trialing one of the prototypes that didn't end up working. It was a bit of a flop over there, and so I got more involved since then, and kinda took on, actually, shaping the business up and getting the accounts in order and starting a bank account and doing all those things that it takes to actually create a business' processes and systems.
We scaled back testing from the 325 units that we had just to small groups of 20 to start working through things with the contractor and then that, actually that contractor stopped doing contract work, so we were in limbo for a little bit, and then started working with Callaghan Innovation with their radio lab in Wellington and got a grant through them.
It's been taking off since then.
Where did you move to NZ from?
From Washington state. Dunedin's a big city for me. My hometown was 15,000 people. I grew up on a small family farm just outside of town. Although, I did go to uni down near Silicon Valley there, so I definitely got a bit of the big city vibe down there too.
So how do people currently solve the problem Next Farm solves?
There are a couple different methods to do it. One of the main irrigation installers that we've been working with, how they do it and many other farms I've seen; they've repurposed residential irrigation timers. They've got a little LCD screen on them and a couple of buttons.
“...if we’re talking about some hill, country stations, you’ve got 300 to 1000 different units out there, you’ve got batteries you have to change every year, there’s quite a bit of time drift in these devices as well, so you may have programmed them all, which takes a considerable amount of time.”
What you do is you put in the days that you want them to turn on, the times you want them to turn on and what time you want them to turn off. You set that at the beginning of the season, and that ticks along for through entire season. That's how it's currently being done. Those products work great in a residential setting when you have, maybe five to 10 that you're controlling. They're on the side of your house. They're easy to go out and adjust. But if we're talking about some hill, country stations, you've got 300 to 1000 different units out there, you've got batteries you have to change every year, there's quite a bit of time drift in these devices as well, so you may have programmed them all, which takes a considerable amount of time. You programmed them all to run five sprinklers at any one time, but with time drift, by the end of the season you may have eight to 10 going at different times, because some get slow, some get faster, and they all do it at different rates.
That's quite a big problem currently, and they're reprogrammed and a lot of times have new batteries put in every year, so it's incredibly labor intensive just to do that component of it, but on top of that, once you have those times set, they're set for the season. You can go out and adjust them, time consuming, but there's no easy way just to pause them if rain's coming, or if you have stock on a paddock you can't easily pause that one paddock and then start it again, or easily adjust the time for a one-off type irrigation job.
A lot of times they can, obviously, shut the whole system down. Mostly that's going to be draining the entire irrigation system and then they have to fill back the water so they've got to charge it again, and they do have pressure releases to let the air out, but still often air will build up in the lines. Obviously, as the water flows in that pressurizes and that can blow valves and sprinkler heads completely off the posts and into hundreds of pieces.
It sounds incredibly time consuming?
I was talking to one of the guys at the company a little while ago and it took, I think there were three guys and it took them two or three days to reprogram just 325 units, so that was just one property. They have many properties that they have to go do this on with more units than that. It's not an efficient or effective way to do it currently. There are, obviously, it works to get water on the field, but there are better ways to do it.
What is the most frustrating part of building a digital product?
The most frustrating part is getting it almost working and having problems pop up that don't pop up on a regular basis, as can sometimes be the case in technology. If the stars align just right it decides not to work, but sometimes it can work and you can't always repeat those faults that you find.
I'd say just in general the difficult part about developing this how we're doing it because Callaghan's based in Wellington and we're down here in Dunedin and our test site's over in Alexandra, is it's difficult to do that real world in situ testing, and we've had problems with that, where you test it, they test it in the lab, I've tested in the office. Everything's worked great, and then I've taken the data into the field and well, nothing worked at all. It's like, "Hang on. Where'd we go wrong?" Because we didn't have any hitches up until this point.
Is there a part of the product development you particularly enjoy?
The most rewarding part has just been development, Next Farm's development, knowing where we were at when I first got introduced to it and that was a test of prototypes and it was a huge flop. Now we're here. We've purchased the Efflu Track product. We have cashflow from that.
Obviously we haven't fully launched our irrigation controller, but we're making more steps in that direction. It's rewarding just to see how far we've come, to see cash coming in. It'll be even more rewarding when we actually launch the irrigation control product and we see them picking away out in the field.
Not that it hasn't been worth it up to this point, but that's when we'll all sit down and have a drink and celebrate together.
