33 lessons from helping the top startups from Sydney University
Last week our 12th class of startups graduated out of INCUBATE’s 14-week accelerator program. It was our most hardware-heavy class of startups, 70% hardware, and one of our most successful.
As a group, they acquired 365 customers and earned $348,000 in revenue in just 3 months — quite an achievement for early-stage startups working off $5k grants each!
We’re also proud of the diversity of the cohort. 45 per cent women co-founders, wide ranging founder-backgrounds including researchers and alumni and founders from 9 nationalities meant we always had an interesting backstory as to how they ended up in Australia and working on their problem.
Below is a summary of each company and what I learnt helping them through the accelerator as Program Manager for Class 12.
Want to apply to INCUBATE accelerator and access funding, mentors, our startup alumni network and co-working space in our new startup hub? Apply here. 🚀
Green Atlas
What do they do: Green Atlas uses technology to help farmers (e.g. apple growers) to analyse and count their crops with machine learning and machine vision and to ultimately help them grow more produce.
What’s impressive about the founders: Green Atlas is co-founded by two of the world’s leading field robotics engineers, Steve Scheding and James Underwood. Between them, they’ve built autonomous mines and farms and have years of experience developing software in this space. It’s a great example of globally competitive talent sitting in your backyard.
Why is this globally important: It turns a completely manual task into a relatively fast software solution and enables ‘precision agriculture’. Currently, farmers around the world manually count their crops. It’s a hard problem to get cameras and A.I. software out in the field in a practical way and these guys have figured out a solution.
What did I learn:
- A lot of artificial intelligence and ag-tech startups don’t have a good understanding of what farmers need and think robotic automation is the first answer — it’s not. So much value can be delivered through helping them with the boring manual tasks and giving them actionable data.
- It’s really hard to get out to farms to talk to growers. It’s a huge strategic advantage to have someone on your team that knows the growers well and how they behave.
- This is a data and software play more than a hardware play — no tech company has access to dataset Green Atlas is collecting. The insights you’ll be able to glean from this over the long term will lead to many more applications and benefits including automation of the farm.
ShopGrok
What do they do: ShopGrok provides big retailers e.g. grocery stores with pricing data so they can determine when to lower (and raise) prices against their competitors.
What’s impressive about the founders: Aaron Cowper, the founder, is an expert in pricing. He worked in pricing at Woolworths and McKinsey where clients included retailers across Asia. This is a great example of a founder solving a problem they experienced while working in the industry.
Why is this globally important: It used to be, before Amazon, that pricing was something you might look once a month or so. But now with eCommerce pricing changes daily, and sometimes hourly, and there are no good online tech solutions for experts.
What did I learn:
- Pricing is an extraordinarily complex space. Take a simple store that might stock 1000 different items and will want to compare those ranges, prices and what their competitors are doing on a daily basis. There are no good ‘tech-first’ tools out there to do this yet.
- Amazon and Google have developed their own internal pricing analytic tools but retailers do not have access. Giving them a tool helps make the industry more competitive (better for you, the consumer).
- A lot of (expensive) pricing data offered by incumbent companies are out of date or highly skewed. An online world requires a different approach.
PetiteBeat
What do they do: Petitebeat are developing a bonding pillow for pregnant women that amplifies the baby’s heartbeat through light, sound and vibration.
What’s impressive about the founders: The three co-founders are impressive local and international students from Sydney University. They were introduced to this problem area by talking to hundreds of women and bring a fresh approach to an industry that’s dominated by gimmicky toys.
Why is this globally important: Many women suffer from problems connecting with their baby during pregnancy. The solutions out there (I’m guessing made mostly by men) seem to miss the mark in many ways and some aren’t safe to use.
What did I learn:
- Pregnancy is an area dominated by gimmicky toys or hard to use medical devices. Bringing a user experience perspective to the design of devices for this space is much needed and can be a competitive advantage.
- The problem is much bigger than we realise. The team found 40% of women had trouble connecting to their baby during pregnancy.
- The problem also extends to partners and family — helping share the experience is an area that has lots of potential (just look at baby photos of Facebook).
Pocket Graphics
What do they do: PocketGraphics is creating the world’s smallest high definition display.
What’s impressive about the founders: James Bailey is the founder and the classic ‘crazy inventor’ type. He has a string of super interesting products and inventions under his belt but this one is the first one he is taking to market at scale.
Why is this globally important: When we think HD displays we think of very expensive LED screens, but learning how to harness projected light more efficiently will usher a new era of projectors that can be used during the day and in more places.
What did I learn:
- There are lots of products that you wonder why they aren’t more popular. Small projectors are one of these. They have never taken off because they’re pretty crap (low-quality display and design), clunky and only useful in dark places. This changes that.
- It’s a good signal when people want to buy your crappy prototype — make sure to demo where you can with whatever you have.
- Hardware is hard! Offload work/advice to experienced contractors where you can e.g. industrial designers. There are so many moving parts such as suppliers, manufacturers, industrial designers you need to outsource.
EasyWheel
What do they do: EasyWheel are creating a new mountable motor to convert manual wheelchairs into electric wheelchairs.
What’s impressive about the founders: Hamid Torfehenjad is the founder and has two decades of experience in transportation research. It’s great to see a researcher inventing a product and jump into starting a business.
Why is this globally important: There are a lack of solutions for accessibility that are affordable and adaptable to existing products.
What did I learn:
- Australia is very lucky to have a healthcare system that will subsidise the cost of wheelchairs for many disabled people, but for most of the world this is not the case and we need more economically viable solutions.
- While Hamid’s original invention was novel it became clear there were many similar products in the market. However, through his customer research, it seems they weren’t addressing many of the user needs.
- Like with many hardware products distribution is key in this market, not product feature set alone.
BioScout
What do they do: BioScout are creating a artificial intelligence based airborne disease monitoring platform for agriculture which they put on drones or in fields.
What’s impressive about the founders: Lewis Collins, the co-founder, came up with the idea through his research and built an impressive team of engineers to help test it in a short period of time.
Why is this globally important: We lose 20% of our crops in Australia to disease and it’s entirely preventable if you can monitor disease outbreak. This number is higher globally.
What did I learn:
- Farmers lose a huge amount of their crop to disease and just accept this, but through this type of technology we can significantly reduce losses and help the global food supply chain.
- Prototyping ag-tech and testing on the farms is extremely time-consuming! BioScout team would lose a couple of weeks just for testing on a couple of farms but it’s essential to do this early. Be strategic about when you do this and don’t leave it till last.
- Be flexible with your customer segments and test multiple customer segments. The BioScout team tested a few different applications of the same tech but landed on agriculture as the best first entry point.
Mearth
What do they do: Mearth are creating super cool electric scooters and bikes. Designed in Sydney, manufactured in China.
What’s impressive about the founders: Ming Ye, the founder, and his team are great hustlers. They launched a bike ride-sharing marketplace (on a shoestring) only to realise that selling direct in Australia would be a better option to get going.
Why is this globally important: eScooters and eBikes are booming in China. The western world will follow suit but there is a lack of high-quality and reliable brands out there.
What did I learn:
- eScooters and eBikes will help alleviate a lot of the short-distance transport problems cities face where there is a shortage of public transport options.
- eScooters are booming space, while there’s a lot of attention on rental marketplaces many people actually want to own them outright and be able to customize. Learning how to acquire these customers at scale is key.
- Like with many hardware companies, having the manufacturing connections in China is a huge strategic advantage for any startup. Mearth can design and build far faster than many other startups (hence why they shipped over 200 units in 3 months).
BrillUp
What do they do: BrillUp is a platform to help you take control of your own talent development and gain new skills.
What’s impressive about the founders: Cathy Raffaele is a sole founder and impressively driven to solve this problem. She has thought deeply about this space and it’s clear there are significant issues in how we approach talent development.
Why is this globally important: Understanding what your personal values are and where you want to go in life is an important question for everyone, and rarely explored or answered.
What did I learn:
- There are lots of problem areas where ‘unbundling’ the service from traditional service providers has lots of consumer advantages. Historically the generation before would leave talent development up to the organisation they worked in. Today, with young people having more than one career path, it’s clear that enabling individuals to do this for themselves is vital.
- Look for problem areas where existing solutions are either very expensive e.g. talent coach, or generic e.g. online courses. This is an opportunity.
- We don’t ask ourselves what we care about and where we want to go in life enough. We should.
Visospace
What do they do: Creating a hoverboard for virtual reality worlds that allow you to move around in a natural way.
What’s impressive about the founders: The founders have built an impressive team in a short period of time and managed to prototype and manufacture the first versions on a shoestring budget. Respect!
Why is this globally important: VR and AR is an important evolution in computing but the interactions are still super clunky. This helps solve this.
What did I learn:
- VR is not just about headsets. There is a whole industry emerging in services, arcades and devices and thus lots of opportunities.
- Locomotion, moving around in VR worlds, is a fascinating and fun experience but there are significant hardware challenges to overcome. Striking a balance between usability (e.g. do I have do 10 things to start using it) and portability (e.g. do I need a dedicated room) is important.
- Your go to market strategy is very important for emerging industries — sometimes there are other routes than just selling direct to consumers (which is problematic if the market does not exist!). Selling to other businesses or branded partnerships might be a great first step.
Ardal
What do they do: Ardal has created a community fund that allows members to access interest-free home loans.
What’s impressive about the founders: Ardal’s founder, Gabrielle Durney, is one of those super smart quiet achievers that just goes out and learns what she needs to. She is passionate about making housing more affordable and understands the alternative solutions to make it possible.
Why is this globally important: Sydney house prices are some of the most expensive in Australia and continue to rise. It’s a trend being reflected in all the modern major cities. New approaches are needed.
What did I learn:
- Questioning existing practices is very important. Why do we pay so much interest in what is essentially a fairly low-risk service today? Startups will be disrupting every part of the ‘home buying stack’.
- Banks are not the only option for providing home loans. And interest-free home loans are not a new idea. It’s just no one has done it at scale outside of religious communities.
- Getting a home loan is all about saving for a deposit (regardless if it’s from a bank or community fund). Consumer apps that can help people easily budget and save are needed.
BacPoc
What do they do: BacPoc help large organisations, such as shopping centres, manage their lost and found process through a cloud web app.
What’s impressive about the founders: The co-founders, Jingle Guo and Ben Jelavic, have serious hustle and made incredible progress in their first startup. They built product, tested and acquired customers all with no funding.
Why is this globally important: As more people move into cities globally the processes organisations such as shopping centres use to manage their ‘boring’ services, such as lost and found, need to move to software.
What did I learn:
- Niche problems (and SaaS startups) FTW! Lost and found is an incredible time waster and manual process for most organisations but few people see the problem unless you’re front-desk staff or someone that has lost something.
- There is estimated hundreds of millions of dollars in ‘lost value’ of items in cities. Connecting up the databases of buildings, shopping malls and police could have lots of benefits beyond helping place the items back with their owners.
- Selling solutions of niche problems into large organisations is a tricky process — you have to understand what problem is at each level. From the Directors right down to the front desk staff and what the benefits are for each level to successfully sell and integrate.
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