In true startup fashion, this year we’re going to be completely open and transparent about everything we’re doing at Startup News — from vision and strategy to the actual results and learnings from everything we do.
This comes with a lot of risk attached for obvious reasons. However, we think that showing the behind-the-scenes side of how we do things could be a fun experiment. A lot of what we do throughout the year will likely fall flat and not achieve the results we desire. But that’s kind of the point — not everything hits, and that’s okay.
The vision
We’ve previously said that we have big plans for the year and those plans are driven by our big, hairy, audacious goals:
For the last ten years, Startup News has championed the WA startup ecosystem — from founders to supporters and everything in between. It has a strong, respected voice inside the WA startup community and we want to amplify that voice. But we want the rest of Australia and the world to know more about the brilliant founders who are operating in WA. So our first goal is to expand our audience and story coverage outside of WA, firstly promoting WA in Australia’s other key startup hotspots like Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne.
Our big goal in the coming years is to become the top startup publication in Australia. This isn’t going to be easy as there are several leading publications who do an amazing job of covering the Australian ecosystem across startups and tech. However, you have to have big goals that are almost impossible to achieve as that’s how we learn the most.
What we have planned for 2024
There are a few programs and initiatives that we have planned and have started putting together to grow this year. Everything that you know and love about Startup News will continue — from the news coverage to the Startup West podcast. We will be adding to that and telling more stories in the process, starting with:
The Drunk Ideas Podcast
How many times have we been out with friends and after a couple of beers, had the best, most creative business idea ever that solves all of the world’s problems and makes us a gazillionaire in the process? Then, the next day we reflect on it and we say to ourselves, in the famous words of Netflix’s Reid Hoffman, “That will never work.”
In March, we’re launching a podcast (audio and video) which will be taking a deeper dive into some of these ideas and exploring the creativity behind them, why they will and won’t work, and how those ideas could be turned into the next Netflix.
The show will be hosted by Natasha Prevot from Techvisa and myself, and on each episode, we’ll be joined by a guest or two sparking some creative and insightful banter around the thought process that goes into building a startup. Each episode will tackle things like:
- The merits of the idea, including why we think it will and won’t work.
- What problem does it solve and is there a big market for it?
- How would we go about getting our first 100 customers?
- Is it a venture scale company and would we consider raising capital or would we bootstrap it for as long as possible?
If you have a drunk idea that you’d like us to explore and break down, let us know below!
"*" indicates required fields
Founded, the podcast
As you may have gathered, we’ll be starting a few new podcast series. This one will be doing a deep dive into the founder’s journey. Starting at the very beginning, it’ll explore how each guest came up with the idea they turned into a startup, how they then got started, all the way through the journey to where they are now, talking our way through the hurdles and what they learned along the way. Because of the detail, each episode will probably be quite long!
We’ll be doing a callout for founders who would like to be a guest on the show so stay tuned.
Growing our community
This is something that’s been a hot topic over the last 12 months and at West Tech Fest last year, there was a great panel discussion on building a community.
In the next instalment of our series on building Startup News in public, we’ll talk through our strategy for growing our community, where we are now, and where we’d like to be, come West Tech Fest week in December.
