I’ve had a few good chats lately with Patrick Macfie from Start-up.co.nz about what they’re up to with the Start-up venture. This is a great New Zealand based resource for people needing startup advice, info, resources or simply to see who else in in ‘startup mode’ as well.
Whilst our company ProActive Software, developers of the ProWorkflow Project Management Solution aren’t in startup mode any more, I wish this website had been around when we were. There’s a lot of great material worth checking out. I asked Patrick to send through a bit more in-depth info about the website and what they’re doing. Here’s what he sent through.
Why Start-UP?
The idea for Start-UP came about as a result of our own online startup experience/ failure. A friend and I tried unsuccessfully to launch an online service and in the process lost a whole heap of cash (I’m talking six figures). During our Startup journey we spent a lot time scouring the Net looking for any information that could point us in the right direction and people that maybe able to help us. I quickly realized that there was a real lack of locally relevant content and that there were some really big barriers online companies faced to being successful here so we decided to do something about it.
We were really determined that others wouldn’t suffer the same indignity we had gone through on our startup journey and wanted as many people as possible to get access to the right info and advice and decided the best way to do that was through a mainstream media channel like TV. We had always remarked that our experience would make great TV so I pitched the idea of a documentary television series based on the journey of a group of kiwi online entrepreneurs trying to break into the international market to a long time friend that was a TV producer.
Through the series we wanted highlight the challenges that we had faced and hopefully offer up some answers on how to do it better. The plan was to utilize that mainstream TV coverage to drive people back to the Start-UP site where they could get access to more practical information. So really we’re now just in the early stages of execution on our go to market strategy, the TV series went into full time production last week, the website is up and running and the community is building nicely and somehow we managed to launch a magazine in the middle of it all.
What do I hope it’ll do for the industry.
I really hope that we can draw attention to the potential that the online space has to offer the NZ economy, we’re not looking to be industry spokespeople or anything like that (I think that’s wanky in a web 2.0 world) but I do passionately believe that the online space represents the single largest export opportunity that this country has in the near future. We want to encourage growth and investment into the sector and we want to shout about the successes and learn form the failures. We want to provide a mainstream media channel for online startups and create a community of online entrepreneurs that share knowledge and experience for the benefit of the community that results in better online businesses coming out of NZ and impacting the World.
Patrick MacFie
Founder Start-UP – http://start-up.co.nz
Keep up the great work guys… I’ll keep coming back and watching with interest! We need more resources like this.
Republishing Note:
Anyone is welcome to republish this article as free online content, provided that the paragraph below is included in the full form as shown.
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About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for: ProActiveSoftware.com, ProWorkflow.com & Julian101.com
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