How to Make Melbourne a Global Entrepreneurship Hub

GetViable was invited to the first Making Melbourne a Global Entrepreneurship Hub conference on 31 March 2012 at the Fitzroy Town Hall to share the GetViable startup story. It was rewarding to experience the energy from the primarily student based audience and the hunger for learning. The topics for the day included “HOW I MADE A DIFFERENCE”, one panel on “Community”, a second on “Games and Sports”, and two startup showcases, being WeTeachMe and us, GetViable.

The competition panel discussion created a lot of questions and interest. I particularly enjoyed the energetic debate around digital natives, and the financial and teamwork training inherent in Gaming. The distinction between boys and girls — “boys like to beat the snot out of each other and girls like to collaborate” — was an interesting take on how to design games (online and otherwise) to address the gender differences in approaching a gamer audience.

I also support the view that games accelerate life skills and learning,

Tip of the day:

The best all round game for whole brain learning? Play more Starcraft!

Once the floor cleared (good thing — plenty of interest ;-), it was GetViable’s turn.

We covered off the company background, our purpose for existing, and then discussed some of the lessons we have learned while helping eleven founders through their startup creation process so far.

Some key takeaways:

General

• We’re in the business of building startups, focussed on solving the problem of startups that can’t find a technical co founder, and helping create and launch their products in 8 to 16 weeks.
• Between us we’ve built and successfully exited a few startups, worked In the digital customer experience space and spent many years doing offshoring, outsourcing and crowd sourcing
• We’ve distilled the startup process into 5 phases to get your idea built and ready for launch.
• We start with the clarifying the idea, formulating and testing the customer story, looking at the branding and design elements you need, the building of the actual product and finally the exciting bit — the launch!

We incorporated on 11 January 2012, and in just 12 weeks we have signed up 17 high quality offshore development partners, we’re working with 11 new startup founders to turn their ideas into reality and we’re proud that we’re already able to loan to Kiva.org, are supporting 3 children via ChildFund and have done some pro-bono work for an anti-child detention campaign.

Panel Takeaways

• There’s massive commitment and energy to build new knowledge based businesses — both from the audience and the presenters
• Our future is in good hands
• Expand fast
• Fail fast
• Finding funding is #$&* hard (thanks Scott ;-)
• Gaming and Sports are merging
• Collaborate and network constantly

It was great to see quality time being made available to participate in the conference, with the contributors for the day being

HOW I MADE A DIFFERENCE

Russell Yardley Marita Cheng Andrew Brough Stef Kuypers Charlie Day

Community Panel

Jon Yeo Nerida Lennon Scott Handsaker Phillip Kingston David Hood

Games and Sports Panel

Cameron Rambert Peter Spence Gareth Adams Marigo Raftopoulos

Startup Showcase

WeTeachMe — Demi Markogiannaki & Kym Huynh GetViable — Leslie Barry & Dougal Edwards

Thanks to Amir and Nawin for organising the conference.

The first one, although not well attended, has set the groundwork with the quality of speakers and great content.

Looking forward to presenting next year on “How GetViable created 20 startups in 12 months” ;-)

And nice to meet some budding startups.

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