A gamified mobile experience to connect family and help organisations analyse the metrics of customer experiences to increase engagement and strengthen loyalty.  Taking the mechanics of games and evolving it by way of integrating rules for shared family connections through an organisations real world experience, in the process creating a tool that builds bridges and strengthens relationships. Giving back to Kiwi kids, using the gamifying of shared family experience to grow community, is a key motivator for David Allen (CEO and father of three) and the team.

David lights up when he talks about the potential of this tool to connect families. Essentially taking the gaming aspect and using it to positively effect real world activities such as interpersonal relationships in families and the community.

Steve Jobs (and Pixar) is a source of considerable inspiration. David recounts the story of how Steve and his team worked incredibly hard to get Pixar off the ground and demonstrated incredible resilience throughout. “They created a formula that worked and stuck to it.”

Living and breathing a startup as a family man and father of three young children continues to be challenging. Particularly when Questo has in a short space of time evolved through three separate iterations with changes in the team. Resilience is pivotal in the fast-paced evolution of a digital startup and something David and his team are developing at lightning speed.

Teamisto – CEO Patrick O’Reilly

Teamisto is a fundraising platform for sports clubs. Co-Founder Dan O’Reilly say the companies inspiration comes comes from personal experiences playing amateur sport. Along with brother/partner Pat, they’re lifelong sport nuts who used to go door to door, fundraising for their cash-strapped football club.

They want to make it easier for sports clubs raise money from sponsorship. At the moment clubs essentially rely on donations from the business community and it’s extremely difficult to attract adequate funding. Using Teamisto’s social media and mobile technology sports clubs can offer businesses a more lucrative proposition – huge advertising reach across the social web.

“If the team has a superpower it’s the ability to be super quick and nimble,” Dan says. “Being in a startup involves building a business quickly and changing direction even faster when roadblocks are presented.”

Indeed, Dan names former All Black coach Graeme Henry as a source of inspiration. In particular the resilience and resolve he displayed under both internal and external pressure when things weren’t going well for the All Blacks. Qualities which Dan recognises are essential immersed in the world of a startup, a world which is both daunting and awe inspiring at the same time.

KidsGoMobile – CEO Pam Ward

The team at KidsGoMobile – an app for children’s mobiles facilitating independence and safety – were part of the first generation to have mobile phones as young teenagers and consequently have first hand awareness of the risks. The empathy the team has for the situation, due to their personal experience, drives their passion for combating risks like text and cyberbullying, and the detrimental affects it has on a young persons well-being.

Pam Ward (CEO) believes their software has significant potential to revolutionise the way parents supervise their children’s digital communication. The moment of truth for KidsGoMobile is seeing parents delight and obvious peace of mind when they discover how the software allows them to view important information on their child’s smartphone easily and transparently.

A graphic designer by qualification, Pam is inspired by Tim Brown at IDEO. She particularly likes the way IDEO considers design thinking and applies it to business, a world that – as a new graduate – is new to her. Speaking of being new to business, Pam describes the start up experience, particularly the amount she is learning, as an intense challenge peppered with excitement.

Startups are hard work. Anybody who’s anybody knows that. Enter interns. Most people think of interns as those who slink around and deliver coffee to those higher up the food chain, but, when used effectively interns can help produce results. Especially in a startup environment.

As a marketing intern for KidsGoMobile, I’ve entered the team with a clean slate. Sure, I may have done a few social media campaigns here or there, but nothing prepares you for the grind of startup life. Everything happens at 200km’s an hour. The amount of progress that can be accomplished in a single day fascinates me, and it’s all down to hard work, motivation and enthusiasm. As a student in my final year at university scraping the barrel to find a place to put my classroom knowledge into practice in the real world, I heard about the opportunity to work as an intern in a fast paced environment and couldn’t turn it down. I’ve learnt more in the few weeks here than I have in the past eight weeks at university.

The best thing I have learnt so far about working as an intern in a startup is that no idea is stupid. Startups are fueled by the collaboration of ideas, thoughts, people and minds. Two minds are better than one. You can bounce ideas back and forth between your team mates and watch as a simple idea turns into something great. At KidsGoMobile we take pride in learning along the way and accept the fact that none of us as individuals are geniuses. But together, we are.

I’m only working hands on with the team about twice a week. The advantage of this is that every time I come in the amount of progress that has been made is motivating. Watching the team move from step to step and seeing their progress reignites the flame to work harder to help achieve goals and targets which, once met, feels awesome! While sometimes the going gets tough, it’s always nice to know that there’s a fridge endlessly stocked with Red Bull two feet away.

As an intern at Lightning Lab you have the freedom to take a great idea and run with it. There are no university style rules put in place as boundaries and no superior CEO judging your every move like a hawk. At Lightning Lab you make it your own and bring small ideas to life.

- Femke van Schoonhoven

twitter: @femkesvs

That’s a fact and it’s even better for the Startups at Lightning Lab’s. What qualifies me to say this well for starters I have been involved as a mentor & participant with at least six accelerator programs all around the world in India, Austin TX-USA, Poland, Wales (UK), Iceland & Netherlands and the bottom line was that at the end of the show there just was zero investor interest & most of the startups were not accelerated. To put it bluntly the ecosystems never picked up as it takes two to tango & the startups did not find their partners in the so called angels & investors there

What makes New Zealand awesome is the fact that it takes multiple players with equal participation to make this ecosystem vibrant and that’s happening! The highlight reel example is all the action at Lightning Lab’s and the support startups are getting from mentors & investors. A few startups have already got their investment act together with a funding pledge & relationship in place with angels. Also, considering demo day is approaching all of last week mentors & investors came in to help the startups with their pitches and they literally spelt out what they look for and how they invest. That’s more like knowing the questions before the exams and clever startups would capitalize.

I would also like to take the example of the lean startup events organized by webfund, its very un-conference style where the startup founders do most of the talking and ask for help. I attended the lean startup clinic this week and it was awesome where there startup founders pitched and over twenty five attendees offered them help in some way or the other

Honestly all this was missing in all the other places & though the startups were game the mentors, angel investors, enthusiasts  & accelerators just did not play their part

As an observer of emerging global startup ecosystems I say this ‘The New Zealand Startup Ecosystem is coming around & shows promise’ moreover the investors, mentors & accelerators have played their part and now it’s up to the startups to make it happen. Its pretty much the other way around & I think what New Zealand startups should realize is the going is comparatively good here and they should capitalize.

Blog post by Ashwin Bhambri

Adeez is a specialised mobile solution that puts ads in other apps & mobile web pages. Co-founder and chief executive Michael Harbott explains that they’re driven by a desire to use mobile marketing to get more out of less, to achieve better results and reduce waste. Mike’s take is that mobile marketing is still evolving and the Adeez team pioneering this type of technology bridging physical gaps with digital solutions. ‘We’re working hard to close the loop for retailers in the physical world, using mobile technology.”

Building a process of super smooth sales is the inspiration beneath the team. What lights up their customers is an appreciation of how Adeez can help them get the same or better results for businesses for one third of the price. As far as personal inspiration goes, Mike looks to the story of Victoria Ransom of Willdfire. He is impressed by the timing and structure of the enterprise and seeks to do a similar thing with Adeez in a different industry.

What does the startup experience feel like? Brutal and unprintable honesty come to mind, but Mike grins as he outlines the experience as amazing, exhilarating, and challenging all at once. “It’s like nothing else I have ever experienced.”

Creating positive change in the world is what ultimately Expander is about; a company developing a tracking and analytics platform for global products. Chief executive Ollie Langridge says the company’s niche is protecting brands from the scourge of counterfeits, while creating a new channel to connect the manufacturer and the consumer and capturing data in emerging markets.

If Expander has a superpower, it is resilience and agility – rapid adaptability in a rapidly changing market. And as far as business superheroes go, Ollie says he is inspired in equal measure by Richard Branson and Deepak Chopra. High growth and scalability is obviously front of mind, but the Expander team is very clear about and conscious of doing this for ethical reasons in addition to building revenues.

The startup experience at Lightning Lab has been “absolutely amazing”, Ollie says. He adds it’s also like ‘being punched repeatedly in the face and shot out of a cannon whilst being set on fire’ i.e. an absolutely intense experience but a transformative one.

Publons – CEO Andrew Preston

An academic by trade, physicist Andrew Preston is co-creating an online repository for the peer-review of academic publications.  He and his co-founders are ultimately motivated and excited by making tools which enable people to be more productive and he sees Publons as a tool which absolutely needs to be built.

Publons plans to disrupt the academic publishing industry by focussing on key aspects of online publication that previous attempts have overlooked, he says. The potential implications of the tool and how this could speed up science creates possibilities to really drive the full potential out of the academic literature space.

Talking inspiration, Andrew points to Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel’s question “What’s something you believe to be true that no-one else believes?”.  It’s a surprisingly challenging question and one that reveals his spirit of exploring, problem solving, innovating … a spirit which is at the heart of start-up business, something Andrew admits is one of the hardest things he’ll ever do.

Rollo Wenlock, James Findlater, Matthew Lee, Nicholas Green. 

We are part of the first intake of lucky entrepreneurs to go through the wringer at the Lightning
Lab in Wellington, New Zealand. It was fortuitous that the inaugural Lab began just a couple of
months after we first came up with our business and we were thrilled to secure a place for our
team of four.

In the weeks after the initial flash of inspiration we hurried to build the product, talk to a load of
video makers and start getting early users. Once we arrived in the Lab a lot of our building and
learning was halted as we met with the hundred or so mentors who were ferried through. This
intense speeddating experience introduced us to potential personal mentors and future advisors
and investors.

Keynote speakers have come through the lab in person and via video chat and have been
enormously interesting, often resulting in quite deep discussions afterwards. The range of topics
have covered the gamut of starting a business and finding your market.

The environment has been immense fun, being crammed in with eight other companies, all vying
for space and shouting over each other to be heard. The desperation of trying to move forward
faster, get more traction and achieve more things in less time has created an electrifying
urgency among us all.

As the weeks have gone on, it has become clear that the people running the Lab are learning as
much as the rest of us. What started out as a ‘them and us’ situation has fallen into a general
mishmash of opinions and ideas. I enjoy this; communication is clearer when it’s understood that
we’re all just trying our best to understand what’s going on and where everyone should be for the
fabled Demo Day.

And Demo Day looms – a mere twentythree days away. We are all aiming to have fantastic customer growth, a revenue stream, a killer story and a few investors already signed up to our term sheet by then. So far no one has, but I think the next few weeks will go down in history as
the shortest time in which nine companies have made the greatest expansion.

As the lab comes to a close I feel a twinge of sadness – the shared space, the variety of people from the nine companies, the facilitators, and the mentors. Although many things will continue after the Lab, this little pocket of time will be over and we will all look back in years to come and think ‘we all did something that was bigger than the sum of us all’. It might not mean anything in the greater scheme of things, but for this group of people, these memories will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

“An ability to see the future and step quickly towards it or ‘future vision’ is WIP’s super power, says WIP Video CEO Rollo Wenlock.

A cloud collaboration platform for video makers, WIP is all about helping them work faster and smarter so they can make better work – this is ultimately what drives and motivates the team.

What lights their customers up is the sudden understanding that they’ve been experiencing a significant challenge without realising that there could be another way. The cut through has been in debunking the status quo, something video makers assumed was ‘just the way it happens’ in the industry. WIP has shown it is not the only way and brought a cost effective and time saving solution to frustrated video editors.

Rod Drury and Xero is an inspiration for WIP, Rollo says, for taking accounting – not the preferred task of so many – and turning it into something which is almost fun. WIP is planning to have a similar effect on distinct niches in the video making industry.

Rollo has been a video maker for the past 15 years and he describes new video projects as essentially being startups. The excitement of covering new ground is intoxicating – both exhilarating and uncomfortable – and he can’t imagine working any other way.

LearnKo – CEO David Cameron

LearnKo, an online tutoring service setting its sight on the Asian market, has a collective superpower to ‘impact’. The team is driven by the size of their idea, the potential reach and leverage their company will have. Their student customers’ see this as access to an army of tutors, making learning easier and more cost effective.

David Cameron (LearnKo’s CEO) says as a team they’re motivated by a shared passion to do something truly scalable in the educational space.

LearnKo plans to disrupt the online education industry by offering real people to support online processes, which offers a highly accessible and cost effective educational opportunity.

David and the team are inspired by companies who can make spaces interesting, such as Mega (the New Zealand company with a completely new take on file sharing) and world-changing tech luminaries like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, demonstrating the impact an individual can have on an entire industry.

Such inspiration along the startup journey is essential to achieve this. Running a digital startup intent on disrupting and reinventing education access, user by user, as David describes it, is a “fun and challenging juggling act”, always keeping multiple things up in the air at once.

Why has this not happened yet? This should be a trend every startup / small business should jump on to so let me make a case for the immense benefits of having customers on board as advisors

#Every startup struggles initially with getting customers as the product is not established. The Lean Startup methodology advocates getting customers even before the product is built and creating around their feedback. Getting customers on board as advisors pre-product is an effective way to get your first customers and product advocates

# The customer usually knows the product better than the company and its management and there are a zillion instances where we have gone to the customer asking for advice ranging from our next advertisement, new tagline and yes in some cases it’s the customer who has also engineered the product for us

# We brought in Jim on the boards of advisors as he has years of operational experience and demonstrated excellence in the operations management. On similar lines here’s our introduction to our new board member the customer, we brought in Rikk as he has years of experience in usage and consumption and is the best person to advice us on price points, usability and buying decisions.  No other advisor has the multiplicity of prospective that the customer advisor does

Easier said than done is what you might be thinking & I shall follow up with a how – to post around getting customer interviews and getting them on board as advisors

About the author:

Ashwin is co-founder in residence at Lightning Lab helping our nine portfolio startups with user acquisition & business development. Prior to this he did a few startups, has a few years of corporate experience and has also won two global innovation awards for his work in the product space.

Both Mitch and Melissa have been deeply entwined in the entrepreneurial ecosystem for years, and as they take their ventures to the world they are forging a path for the next generation of digital entrepreneurs going global from NZ.

Mitch Olson, co-founder of Small Worlds

Co-founder of Small Worlds, Mitch is a serial digital entrepreneur who is actively working to scale innovation across regional ecosystems. His initiatives pushing the potential of Kiwi creative entrepreneurs in the gaming space and working as part of New Zealand’s team in the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (REAP) showcase a huge array of talent and drive to see a bigger future for the smarts behind Kiwi digital startups.

Mitch is a mentor in Lightning Lab’s 2013 programme and helped Creative HQ run their inaugural Gaming Bootcamp in 2011, as founder of GameDojo.  His belief in the potential for digital exports to create a future for New Zealand that primary sectors can never do makes his insight into what we need to achieve a true digitally-friendly business ecosystem extremely valuable.

With SmallWorlds projecting US$100m revenues this year after breaking even only four years ago, he will share his views about how to build more of that sort of success at Lightning Lab Demo Day.

Melissa Clark-Reynolds, co-founder of Minimonos

At 15, Melissa Clark Reynolds was the youngest woman in New Zealand to attend University and made her first million by 35. But her true colours come through in her determination to engage with Al Gore’s mission to highlight climate change and her latest venture, an eco-savvy online world for kids, Minimonos.

Melissa was intrinsic in the foundation of the Lightning Lab as a board member at Creative HQ. Her expertise as founder of Minimonos going through the Springboard UK accelerator convinced her of the need for a similar business growth model for Kiwi digital companies.

Relocating her team from Wellington to the hotbed of digital startups in London for three months and subsequently securing  1 million Euro investment off the back of it showed how valuable the pressure cooker environment an accelerator brings is.

Melissa’s insights into her time at Springboard, the foundation of the Lightning Lab and what acceleration can bring to New Zealand’s startup scene will set a a fabulous context for the Lightning Lab Demo Day.

David Cameron is a founder at LearnCOACH – An Education based startup that offers customised tutorials to students online. David was previously a secondary teacher, ran education seminars at the University of Otago and has co-authored two education texts.

In his current educational venture, David plans to make learning more accessible and affordable, whilst maintaining the personal and relational aspects that are so crucial to the learning process.

Photo: The LearnCOACH Team – from the left: Mark Cameron, Matthew Harris, David Cameron and Dirk Verboom

A key lesson being learned by all startup founders at the Lightning Lab is the importance of creating and nurturing a strong culture within the team.

While many books and startup blogs stress this point, it is hard to fully appreciate the importance of culture until you have taken the plunge, signed up a team and are trying to go to market.

Every startup founder, including myself, wants to win. Startups are like the ultimate game of monopoly, with longer game times and higher stakes. My team is a team of competitors, who want to give it everything and get results. But it is when the pressure comes on that the cracks begin to show.  So it can be a subtle, but crucial, distinction to realize that our startup should be competitive when looking to burn our competition; however, we cannot be looking to burn the people within our team.

A culture of nurture (within the team) and a culture of fiery competition (within our market) can feel like an oxymoron. But having a culture where all team members are pointing in the same direction can create some unexpected results. A clear culture and vision means that everybody can be running with synergy. It is only then that you have the strength to actually try and tackle the competitive marketplace.

As we progress through the Lightning Lab, we want to make sure that this culture begins with our founders, so that we can determine the tone, character and values that our company reflects.

If startups are like a long-haul game of monopoly, it is incredibly important to love the ride. Culture embodies and amplifies our love for what we do and makes sure that we can be happy running in the same direction.