Looking for Australian startups to feature on my new blog | Hacker News Reader

Looking for Australian startups to feature on my new blog

59 pointsdawilster60 comments

Hi HN,

I'm starting a blog dedicated to Australian startups, I'm going to concentrate on interviewing startup founders, getting insights into starting Australian companies and as well as the business aspect question them on how they were able to tackle the technical side.

Just looking for Australian startup founders/companies to be featured in the opening weeks, so please if your based in Australia I would love to hear from you.

website: http://aussiestartups.com (Currently in Prelaunch)

You can contact me directly at william@aussiestartups.com or you can use the contact form at www.aussiestartups.com/contact

Thanks a lot

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The Australian startup scene seems to have more 'startup hubs', startup accelerators, startup workshops, startup advisors, startup publications, would-be startup gurus, etc. as it has actual startups.

At times the mental image I have is of a tiny handful of miners surrounding by an enormous throng of hundreds of merchants eagerly promoting their particular brands of picks and shovels.

hahaha this is brilliant! At the moment that is probably the way it is - "We need to build the forest before putting the animals in." is how I would describe it.

The biggest startup industry in Australia is certainly milking other startups.

Hello! We're a tiny Indian startup: Kabutar! - its kinda like reddit for the real world. Try us out, pretty please? :) www.kabutar.in | http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kabutar!/id477970251?mt=8

Stuart from Crowd9 here, we have a few products (plus quite a few unfinished ones):

StoreCrowd, Couponzor & Thinng. Melb based, all bootstrapped, all profitable.

Check me a line on @thegyppo if you want to chat.

There are some excellent example pages here. We had a lot of fun reading out selections from http://fleshlight.couponzor.com/

Have these companies signed up, or did it just seem like a particularly good idea to use Fleshlight as an example?

These are purely examples, and run off an affiliate basis. There's a bit of education needed in this particular marketplace as to why hosting your own coupons locally is a good idea :)

Nice one Will.

I've written a couple of lists that might be a good starting point though the first is a bit out of date being from 2009: http://www.mynameisned.com/awesome-melbourne-tech-startups http://www.mynameisned.com/australian-innovative-startups-ke...

We do a bit of inhouse product development though I wouldn't call them startups just yet: http://talkbackapp.com, http://fanbomb.com + http://themepivot.com

I'm keen! I'm the founder of Goodfilms: http://goodfil.ms

We're based in Melbourne and building a site to help you figure out what films you're going to enjoy. We're about to step out from behind a private beta into a public one, and it's great to see such support for Australian startups.

You should check out our blog post about what we do and why we're different (http://blog.goodfil.ms/blog/2011/10/07/a-better-way-to-rate-...), and if you think we'd be good to feature on your blog, get in touch.

All the best, -Glen Maddern @glenmaddern

Hi William,

I'm the founder of TestPilot CI — Heroku for Testing.

We're based in Melbourne and gearing up for a launch in a couple of weeks. I'd be more than willing to take part in your blog and answer any questions about what we do, problems we've solved and the hard life of being a startup. Feel free to contact me (ivan at testpilot dot me) or @IvanVanderbyl

It would be great if you didn't include any clone me-too companies.

I'll try not to, at the moment I'm trying to get into contact with some of the startups that came out of Startup weekend Melbourne.

Hey I'm Andrew, co-founder of Noosbox (http://noosbox.com). We were one of the first batch of Startmate companies. Happy to share some insight and war stories. Reach me at ajessup _AT_ noosbox.com. We're based in Sydney @ Fishburners.

AJ has already plugged noosbox, but the other Startmate companies are

Chorus http://www.getchorus.com - in this batch at 500 Startups

Grabble http://grabbleapp.com - just sold to Walmart

IRL Gaming http://www.irlgaming.com/ - not sure what they're up to...

and us BugHerd http://bugherd.com - were in the last batch of 500 startups.

I'd also recommend getting on to Startmate directly, http://startmate.com.au and speak to Niki. There is a new batch coming up in January (applications close in a couple of weeks).

Co-Founder of Grabble here. IRL Gaming are going well. Another Aussie company that has just moved to the states is http://recoveryrecord.com - an eHealth startup. Disclaimer: I helped build their MVP.

(I'm DaveT from Chorus)

Technically we're not based in Australia any more.

Hi William, I'm the founder of Jasondb, a cloud NoSQL database based in Melbourne, although we have just registered in Delaware as Jasondb LLC. We have spent the past 2 years in dev mode and are planning to launch early next year. Went to SF as part of AnzaTech last year and to TechCrunch in SF this year, and I have to say the focus seems to be on startups that can whip something up in a week and launch in a month. After spending over 2 years in dev mode on a database written in C/C++, I have gotta say it seems that we are the exception rather than the rule in the startup space. Love to hear from anyone who has experienced similar. Our back story is at blog.jasondb.com

Hi William, I'm Co-Founder of Barkles (http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/11/13/barkles-is-twitter-for...) based in Australia.Would love to answer a few questions for a different angle of what we do.

I would recommend getting in touch with these places (all on Twitter) @inspire9, @yorkbutter, @angelcubemelb and @startupaus. There are so many amazing Australian Startups coming out of the woodwork through these hubs and teams and they will surely give you enough companies to profile.

A great time to feature Aussie startups - The melb scene especially is on the rise.

You can reach me @diesellaws on Twitter if needed.

Excellent idea for a startup hub. I'm the founder of Axle Technologies : http://www.axletech.com.au - GPS Vehicle tracking and fleet management for the masses (Web based, that's where the fun is right).

Based out of Brisbane we've spent the last 12 months in software development, hardware development, penning legal paperwork and sourcing customer feedback for features. Bootstrapped through self funding, personal savings and some rusty dreams. We've just finished all our new advertising material designs and are going straight into launch next week.

If you want a chat you can get in touch with me through our contact form on the site.

-Leon

I work for what you'd have considered a start-up but we're successful now so I don't know what you call us? http://envato.com/

We still qualify I think, we're one of the ones that made it! We've been featured on 37signals' Bootstrapped, Profitable & Proud series: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2594-bootstrapped-profitable-...

We're an education aggregator and reseller out of Sydney http://coursesnow.com.au/

Also checkout http://wearehunted.com/ out of Brisbane.

BTW, we have an awesome shared office space at Mermaid Beach on the Gold Coast. Balcony, 100m from surf, cool tunes. Space for a couple extra people if anyone is interested.

Hi,

We launched http://www.cheapstart.com.au last month to help small business select cloud software. We're Melbourne based. Being the dreaded 'business-guys' (70%) from a tech background, we crowdsourced everything very successfully, which is busy spawning the next startup! Happy to chat about how to tackle the technical side.

Hey William - nice idea. I'm Jenna, Stanford Institute for Entrepreneurship 2011 grad, PhD Clinical Psychology dropout and Aussie Founder of early stage E-Mental Health startup http://recoveryrecord.com. Would love to chat about the Australian startup scene, and my experiences in it.

Hi William. Great to hear the booming Australian start-up scene getting some deserved dedicated coverage. I work for Flippa.com - worlds largest website marketplace (over $61M websites sold so far) and BRW Fast Starter + SmartCompany Innovation Award Winner. We're based in Melbourne so happy to shout lunch if you're ever in the area!

Hi, thanks for the support I'll be in New Zealand for the next month but I'll be at RMIT uni next year and would love to meet for lunch then.

You can email me and I'll stay in touch. Cheers

What kind of startups are you looking for? My father runs Tyro Payments (http://tyro.com) and I could try to get in touch with Mike Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian), although I don't know if he would be willing. Are those startups too old/big?

As long as they are based in Australia I would love to hear from them, big or old they all would of started somewhere and that's where the valuable information lies.

So if you could get a hold of them for me that would be excellent.

Ok, I will look into it (no guarantees :-])!

Just so you know your contact form is broken, "Failed to send your message. Please try later or contact the administrator by another method."

Since I couldn't post it there I shall here.

Sydney based here. Currently running http://searchco.de/

I managed to get the contact form working so if you like to have a chat about your product please give me a holla.

Hey Boyter,

Is your whois info correct on searchco.de? If so, you should have gotten an email from me. If not, would you mind emailing me?

Thanks, Alex.

Are you including New Zealand startups? There's lots going on over here, Wellington especially.

I'm actually from New Zealand going there this Wednesday so I would have no problem featuring New Zealand startups

Hi,

I'm the Founder of Lexim (http://www.lexim.com.au), eLearning software designed for teachers not CIOs. We're based in Melbourne, and would love to help.

Feel free to reach out to me at michael.shimmins@lexim.com.au or @michaelshimmins on twitter.

Cheers,

Michael

Hi William, I have contacted you by email.

I would love to discuss with you about http://goalstribe.com, a startup that helps people achieve their goals (and democratize coaching).

We are based in Sydney.

Thanks!

Of course @kaggle (Melbourne-launched, though I hear they're at least part moving to SF) would be a highlight for your start, given they just raised $11m from some very high profile investors in the Valley.

Hi great idea.

I've currently moved to Perth and I'm looking for any regular meetups / shared office space. I'm bootstrapping 2 products right now.

I think I'd benefit massively from some type of shared work space. Anyone know of anything?

I'll come to a Perth meetup! Recently moved to Perth as well and tinkering around with my own apps.

Hey, Tom here, co-founder of Bindle (http://bindle.me)..

I'm based in Melbourne---the other founder is in SF. Happy to catch up whenever/however. tom _at_ percolatestudio.com

Looking forward to reading the blog. It'll do a lot of good to give the Aussie startup scene some exposure. We've just formed a team, with one founder based in Melbourne, Australia and me in Boston, US...

Good luck!

Awesome news. So much going on in the Australian tech scene at the moment, the coverage it can get the better. We're launching our beta Friday (ggBet.net), if you need content :)

I'd be interested in hearing about the legal hoops you guys have to jump through to launch a betting agency in Australia.. I'd imagine it wouldn't be easy?

edit: oh and by the way, I only knew what your site was from the title bar, though I'm sure you'll have more up there on Friday. Good Luck!

We use virtual currency, its fantasy, so we havent had to deal with many legalities. All will be revealed Friday. http://ggbet.net

Hey,

There isn't any nice way to get in contact with you via the website, and you didn't leave an email address here. What's the best way to get in contact with you?

Setkick.com

Online pre-production for film and television. Helping to schedule shooting and communicate with cast and crew.

We are in private testing right now.

I'm a co-founder and happy to talk about anything. Thanks.

I work for Pollenizer (@pollenizer on twitter) - I'm engineering lead on Pygg. I do a lot of stuff out of work hours too, would be more than happy to chat.

I'm @arcwhite on Twitter

And I should probably link to the project ahem: http://pygg.co

Cool. I'm Alex from OrionVM. I just sent you a message on your contact form. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to email me. Talk to you soon.

Check out FilterSquad (makers of the Discovr apps), they are based in Perth. http://discovr.info/

hi - we are a boot strapping startup, http://geodica.com Our touchpass product helps business & individuals conduct eCommerce more securely. We can certainly provide insight into starting a business on the side, registering patents, the constant decisions and tradeoffs of a new start and the Australian market place Cheers Ben

I would love to see more sites like this. Please don't let it end up in a graveyard of empty wordpress sites like I have on my server!

Excited for a this exact thing. Is there any other resource which lists Australian Tech Startups in a readable and up-to-date manner?

Here are some blogs:

http://www.startup-australia.org/blogs

Not sure how current it is. There's also:

http://www.startupsmart.com.au

who have posted a few stories here and anthill which does a lot for the AU startup scene.

If you're interested in narrowing the location to just sydney - there's a growing FB group called "Sydney Startups" (https://www.facebook.com/groups/sydneystartups/) and a related monthly newsletter which features Sydney Startups -> sydneystartups.com

I'll double check, but I'm pretty sure http://99designs.com would be interested.

We're always up for a chat. Sydney based, been in the marketplace since Q1 2011.

http://pinion.gg

A friend of mine is a cofounder of Rome2Rio.

They are in Melbourne, nominally. At the moment I think they are in LA, or Florida or somewhere.

Great! Looking forward to reading this.

I've enjoyed working with https://stillalive.com/

Hey mate! Great you are doing this! XHTMLized.com and X-Worlds.com are some to add to the list.

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