“I’d say 90% of the time we find that the assumptions we make are not correct. We’re happy with that because, it means we change it, we flip it so that it is right.,” says Bronwen Clune, Customer Development Manager at Pollenizer.

Pollenizer co-founds web businesses and is behind stand out web businesses like Spreets. “Someone comes to us with a fairly early stage idea and we work with them to establish whether there is a business around the idea. We work off what’s called lean start-up principals,” says Clune. “We’ve found that the most successful way to build a company and also the most safe way to build it, economically, is to really test out the principals behind assumptions. Often we’ll start a Facebook group or try and sound out what the market is around these things and then when we’ve learned some basic things, we build what’s called a minimal viable product. We test that in the market and see how people use it and really build a product from there, so we’re building it so it’s market responsive. We invest in all companies we work with, so someone can’t come to us and pay us money to build a website, we don’t work that way. We really see ourselves as co-founder, so we’re there running the business alongside founders and we’ve got that emotional investment as well, which we think means we’re more enthusiastic and the work we do is something we’re really proud of.”

Big Ideas

Pollenizer see a lot of ideas. Some, like Spreets, take off. “Dean McAvoy literally said at lunch one day, ‘Shall we try this?’ and Mick [Liubinskas, Pollenizer co-founder] said, ‘okay, we’ll build it for you, but you have six weeks to prove that we can make money.’ On the first day Dean sold a deal and once we got to those six weeks and we’d proven that it was profitable, we built it and it was the first of its kind to be in Australia. That’s it, was an idea at lunchtime that someone had.”

Not all ideas are like McAvoy’s Spreets (which was purchased in January by Yahoo!7). From the many ideas which are brought to Pollenizer, few are tested, and some of those which are tested, fail. “Sometimes it’s really hard, when we’re doing what we call customer development (which is the phase of testing an idea) to get to the end and think, ‘you know we’ve tried everything and maybe there’s nothing in this.’” says Clune. “We’ve had a few like that and a recent one was group buying for mortgages. We did a lot of testing around it and in the end we just felt that it was something that could be good, but it required so much to get off the ground. We’d invested a lot in looking into it, sometimes just having to say no is hard, but we only do it if we really think we’ve tested an idea as much as we can.”

Making it happen

Once an idea is tested an approved, start up partners with Pollenizer to develop it. “Your start up is put onto a pod, where there’s a customer development manager, a lead engineer, a product engineer and a designer. We also have a team of four developers for every pod in India and what that means is we’ve got a team which can take an idea and very quickly produce things and push things out very quickly. That’s a fairly new thing we’ve set up at Pollenizer and we think we’ve really hit on something that’s working very well. It means we can iterate on things very quickly and we’re all working very closely.” Clune’s pod is currently working on an internal project called ‘woo board’ and startup Friendorse.

Starting up in Australia

Many Australian start ups bemoan the risk- averse nature of Australian investors, but Clune sees this as an advantage. “You go to the US for example and you’ve got an idea, the investors are happy to invest in ideas and ten people might have the same idea and in the US they’ll invest in those ten companies and one of them will succeed. I think over here, to get valuation on an idea has been much harder, it’s been a much more traditional look at web companies which hasn’t always fitted, but I don’t think that’s been a bad thing. I think what it’s meant is we’ve had to show profitability much earlier on. People in Australia wouldn’t have been willing to invest in something like Facebook for example, because they wouldn’t have been able to prove that it was something that was profitable. But here we have to prove those things and we don’t think that’s particularly a bad thing, it means that the start ups that we do have and that succeed, we have had to really work hard, harder to get them working, but when we are successful it’s much more rewarding. We’re in a much harsher landscape to get funding and to get things up and running, but that’s not a bad thing.”

In any case, Clune believes that investors who have invested in successful start ups are reinvesting the money into new startups, “We’re seeing almost another generation of start ups coming through,” she says. Together with Australia’s relatively good weathering of the GFC also helps with available investment dollars. Nonetheless, Clune doesn’t think the approach to building start ups should change. “I think the basic principal of making sure the businesses that we create are validated still exists and that’s not a bad thing. I think that’s a strong thing.”

www.pollenizer.com

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Twitter role:

Featured: Bronwen Clune: @bronwen, Friendorse: @friendorse, Pollenizer: @pollenizer, Mick Liubinskas: @liubinskas

Article by: Lou Pardi: @loupardi, @smkapac