Pollenizer is excited to announce our latest startup: bighappy.com.au

Big Happy is a fun, fresh and easy place to buy amazing products at seriously low prices. It’s as simple as that – and above all it’s fun!

Our mission is to provide our users with a completely new online shopping experience that makes it quick and easy to buy hip products at the gleefully low Big Happy prices.

The way Big Happy works is:

1. Our curators hand pick amazing products.
2. We hold 10 minute auctions starting at lunch
3. Price goes down until sold out

Once a week we hold a Big Happy. An amazingly cool product that must sell with no reserve. Potentially selling for 99% off!

Learn more at: bighappy.com.au

We also like keeping things lean right from the start and prefer a one page business plan to reams of reading. The best ideas are clear, concise and compact. Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas is an example of a one page business model tool however it does not capture the disruptive component necessary to redefine a market.

With that in mind, I’d like to present a Disruption Canvas that draws inspiration from Ash’s model as well as Luke Williams book Disrupt. Its a one page modelling template to assist in brainstorming and presenting both a disruptive opportunity and a business concept that meets it.

The model is broken into a customer development side and a product development side however in practice they will overlap. The central components are the differentiating edge the business will start with : The unique value proposition and the founders.

This canvas is geared to concept stage and focussing ideas and thoughts towards a set of hypotheses that can be tested as part of customer development and key features for the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). It also captures information regarding the key metrics and financial measurements necessary to demonstrate a business model.

The components to the canvas are as follows:

THE DISRUPTION OPPORTUNITY
What is the unreasonable and provocative idea? A real game changer. What market will disrupted?

DISRUPTIVE SOLUTION
What are the 3 key features that the solution to this disruptive opportunity will have?

CURRENT ALTERNATIVES
What other products or solutions does the target customer currently use to solve these problems?

CUSTOMER PROBLEMS
What are the top problems faced by the target customer? Why are current alternatives inadequate or overshoot?

TARGET CUSTOMER
Who is the ideal target customer? Describe their persona.

ACQUISITION CHANNELS
How will these initial customers be acquired?

UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION
What is the unique value proposition? This is a single, clear compelling message that states why the solution is different and worth paying for.

UNFAIR ADVANTAGE
What will the unfair advantage be that can’t be easily copied or bought?

THE FOUNDERS
What is the background of the founders? What do they bring that is unique or hard to replicate?

REVENUE MODEL
What is the price? How often is this charged? What gross margin will be made on each sale?
What volume will be sold? What figure indicates success?”

COST STRUCTURE
What costs will be incurred in delivering this product? What are the direct costs such as customer  acquisition or distribution? What are the Indirect  costs such as technology, development and people?

KEY PERFORMANCE METRICS
What are the three key metrics that will demonstrate traction to founders and investors.

It’s a good intro into what Pollenizer does.

Conversations I’ve had with Michael Dijkstra around the campfire have resulted in a theory based on Greek mythology – Ethos, Logos and Pathos – to create effective landing pages.

Ethos – Do you take candy from a stranger?

Ethos is about the credibility the business portrays through its landing page. The character of the landing page needs to immediately inspire a sense of trust through the look and feel, branding, testimonials and the listing of other brands whose authority can be transferred.

Pathos – I can’t live without you

Emotionally, do the visuals and copy empathetically hook into the viewer? The landing page needs to clearly communicate what burning problem is being solved or what great benefit is being given. You need to make sure the user truly believes they need your product.

Logos – The theatre brochure

The most effective landing pages I’ve seen just show me how it works. They give me a smart image which quickly demonstrates how the solution to the problem works. Phil More once described this as creating a theatre brochure before writing the play. This technique brutally sets a stake on what the play would be like prior to its production, and allows you to have the confidence to sell your vision before it has been executed!

In conclusion, we now have a method to measure how effective a landing page is. The next time you come across a landing page, think about it in terms of ethos, pathos and logos. Are you sold? Do you want to sign-up?

The change is that, traditionally, all the software written by the Engineering Team has been locked away behind private GitHub repositories.

What confounds us the most is that we didn’t think to unlock these treasures and share them with our friends, colleagues and the web/startup community in general, a long time ago.

What upsets us the most is that Andy Coffey (Head of Design) and his merry team of trendy UI-types beat us to the punch by open-sourcing their ultra-chic and skinny-jeaned Hummingbird UI Framework (or as it’s more popularly known – “UI for the straight guy”).

However, hot on the heals of the Design Team’s success, the Pollenizer Engineering Team are proud to announce the birth of their first offspring!

The CakePHP PostageApp Lib is a CakePHP Lib class used for interfacing with the PostageApp API. It has all the mod cons including templating and attachments – and it’s even configurable via Cake’s built-in configuration class.

So go ahead – download it, use it, fork it or spoon it all night long. We’re happy to bring some noise!

We spent 2011 in talks with a number of media companies and explored all kinds of models. They all seemed too hard, and pulled our process too close to how media companies work today. A direction, we felt, would compromise our ability to succeed.

In the middle of 2011 we started discussions with the team at APN and found our ideal partner for prototyping a new model for corporate innovation that works. We have now announced our pilot projects.

First, APN has invested in Friendorse, our business that helps local people find what they need in the places that they live. This strategic investment will bring startup speed and agility to the APN portfolio to develop a new channel in their local markets. It helps us grow the business at a crucial time in its life and gives APN access to a new asset before it gets crazy expensive.

Second, we will launch a new business with APN. This is terrifically exciting because we have found the model in which to do it. Simply, it is no different to any entrepreneur that works with us. We co-invest and Pollenizer provides the execution team needed to validate the new business. We accept the power of what we each bring and begin our partnership focused on the pursuit of value. That’s all that counts.

This feels like an important step in the development of our ecosystem. Traditionally, large corporates have not contemplated work with early stage businesses. There are various reasons for this, including the following paraphrases:

“Any deal we do, large or small, needs full due diligence and costs tens of thousand in legal fees. So we don’t do deals under $2 million in value.”

“For GST reasons, we need to own the company fully so that we can avoid charging GST on media contras.”

“Anything we do, we need to do properly” = big study, full team deployment including usability team, focus groups, etc

“It needs to move the dial on our EBIT line before we can look at this.”

All these and more, gently shut the door on early stage entrepreneurs.

The problem is, the internet economy has changed. Two people in a lounge room with a wifi connection and a laptop each can launch a real business for less than a large business spends writing a scoping document. I don’t need to go over the reasons for this. You know. Powerful tools and libraries mean most of the hard software engineering stuff is done, people spend money on the internet like never before, the global market is ours for the taking, mobile web use has overtaken browsers (and people pay on mobiles) … by the time Goliath looks up, David has eaten his lunch.

We startups know how to live in this place. We work fast, we learn, we are happy to be a bit scrappy if it gets us to the next proof point faster. If we stuff up, we dust ourselves off and get back into it rather than face a media backlash about our big corporate failure. We don’t over-think things. We just do it and measure what happens. We can materially help big companies make new assets.

We startups have reached a new level of autonomy but let’s not get cocky. If our business model needs more than a few thousand users to get traction, we need help. As our startup evolves and needs to become a company (more than a validated idea), we need help. If our business needs a sales team to test selling new products nationally, we need help.

We are very excited about this new partnership. We help each other to pursue value using the tools that we each have and together we are stronger.

It was a huge process. Working on a startup is tough in the most ideal contexts, but a geographically displaced team from another culture made this harder. We knew we could not do this casually and we needed to make an investment. We worked closely with the Jugs to:

• grow the right kind of engineers (attitude, experience, career path) around a senior team who knew our platform and companies well
• implement scrum for rapid iteration and speed of learning
• implement a training program (Pollenizer University) to train new recruits before placement on a business
• commit to a single development platform (PHP/Zend) and a core framework of tools for rapid development of Pollenizer projects
• implement processes for dealing with language barriers and requiring clear, proactive communication via Jira and Skype.

The transformation over the three years was substantial and inspiring.

In mid-2011, we re-configured the Pollenizer model around the idea of “pods”. Pods are small, cross-disciplinary startup teams that sit together in our Sydney office. They use our methodology to conceive, launch and validate new web businesses in tight 4 month cycles. The Sydney team started to move faster and the overhead of international communication and late nights for the team became unsustainable.

With regret for the guys in India, we decided to move our entire operation to Sydney. Now all of our platform engineers sit inside the pod.

The economics of web businesses mean that we need to be pragmatic. We need to find some way of getting it done. 4 engineers in India can cost less than a single engineer in Sydney and this is helpful for an entrepreneur with limited resources. It is the difference between doing it or not doing it.

Pollenizer India has become X-Minds. If you need a way to get things done offshore with a group of engineers you can trust, I’d drop Jugs a line (jugs AT x-minds.org) and have a chat.

It won’t be a perfect experience. You will be frustrated with the timezone difference and struggle to communicate sometimes. But it might be the difference between doing it or not doing it and I always opt for the former.

• Techrice
• Technode

Both are published in English while being based in China.

We have asked around our network and there are people travelling from far and wide to attend. It may be a great opportunity for you to get the DEMO experience (for a fraction of the cost of the US) and introduce your business to Asian investors and media. Also a very efficient way to mainline your way into the community from across the region.

See you in Singapore at the end of February?

Dates to note:

• 25th January 2012 – Applications Close
• 1st February – Shortlist will be notified via email and invited into Pollenizer for an interview.
• April 1st 2012 – Autumn Semester begins