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?