Anna Guerrero

This just keeps getting better and better 😍 ... As a recovering perfectionist, the scrappy early days of building something from 0 to 1 are highly uncomfortable for me. Add in the variable of about ~14 other people you need to work with to pull something off, and you've just taken that discomfort level from 10 to 100. But I'm learning to love it - this process of being OK with something evolving over time, learning and improving as you go and I'm growing a lot as a person as a result (if I can say so myself...!). I am SO proud and grateful for the amazing team of volunteer correspondents we've gathered to bring together Pulse Check (the new monthly newsletter from Overnight Success). They've been super patient and flexible as we've worked through the scrappy bits of pulling it together and now we're all seeing the rewards in the form of not only more subscribers (we'll crack 400 this month! 🤞 ), but also genuinely valuable, engaging content people are loving! 🎉 . If you haven't already, check out this month's edition and you'll find these gems... 💎 Kirstin Hunter & Preethi Mohan launching the first ever Investor Leaderboard for our 'Funding the Balance' initiative. Gav Parry offering a super insightful perspective on the role of tech innovation in the music industry. Lea Rausch's insights about Aussie startups going global, as gleaned from chats with Gecko.rent founder Ben Kennedy and Maxine Minter of Co Ventures. Berenice Chong putting a spotlight on the new Curtin University Venture Studio. Andrew Harding talking about Main Sequence's investment into the fascinating world of sustainable apparel dyeing via Xefco. Erin Howell answering the question - WTF is the Bitcoin halving...? Dickie Currer giving the 101 on how Australia's innovation ecosystem stacks up globally. Leila Oliveira with tips from Bae Juice founder Tim O'Sullivan on lessons from their recent fundraising round. Holly Clark explaining why agritech innovation is so challenging, feat insights from Olympia Yarger at the recent FutureAg Expo. AND Anna Mackenzie sharing her ever-insightful and perfectly articulated case for 'optimising for creativity' (and ideas on how to do it!). Phew..! It's a lot of amazing content all in one edition! 🤓 Check it out 👇 🚀

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In the last 18 months of building Clappit we have tested, broken and rebuilt the product extensively to rethink how we can impact engineers at scale. Today we move with a calm confidence into the journey and pivot of truly serving world class companies. The conversations in the last few months and ahead are leading us to the center of the cloud and AI world. For those who are in the cloud space, there are exciting times ahead with the added cherry of AI on top transforming the way things are done from here on.

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🚨 COMMUNITY ANNOUNCEMENT! 🚨 Our Slack community for the Aussie Startup space is almost ready to GO! We're close to unveiling what will be THE dedicated space for anyone and everyone in the Australian startup scene to connect, share, and grow together. Whether you're a founder, developer, marketer, salesperson, investor, designer, student, or anyone else - if you have a passion for startups, YOU are welcome! Whilst you'll have to jump in to explore everything, here's a little teaser! There'll be space for: ✅ General Discussions & Questions ✅ The Latests Industry News ✅ Startup Job Opportunities ✅ Events & Meetup Information ✅ Product Development & Feedback ✅ Funding Talk & Advice ✅ AND Plenty More! We're currently fine-tuning the experience based on feedback from a few early users to ensure everything's up to speed, but hopefully this won't take too long. In the meantime, if you want to receive an invite straight to your inbox as soon as it goes live: COMMENT BELOW or SEND ME A MESSAGE! We can't wait to see you there, and are so excited to see what this can become! *Disclaimer* - This community is separate to what we do at Scouut and is not associated with our services. It's sole purpose is to provide a platform for individuals and businesses in our ecosystem to learn, connect, and thrive!

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Talent is not the scarcest resource for early stage startups. Numerous companies have thrown money at superstars who end up disappointing. Why? Because they don't *care* The scarcest resource in the early stage startups is aligned vision. Hiring someone that is bought in to your vision and mission creates synergy, a kind that drives them to be consistently adaptable, embodying a bias for action and extreme ownership that will return 10-fold in the long run. Instead of chasing talent money can buy, seek vision and mission alignment. The qualities we all love and value in startup hires will surely come if you get someone who believes in what you're doing. If you want to know more and find out the 'how', ping me! 📥 #startuphiring #talent #ownership

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How Dovetail grew to a $970M (Australian) valuation in 5 years—and created a new SaaS category: I chatted with 4 members of their team, and 4 UXR leaders, to learn the details. 1. Product-led growth, design-led company Dovetail's business model is decidedly product-led growth. The company relies on the product, and inherently viral features like research reports, to acquire, convert, monetize, and retain users. But design-led is its culture. CEO and co-founder Benjamin Humphrey has been in the details of the design since its beginning. And the product "feels" like it as a result. 2. Creating a hub for a neglected persona Rewind to 2016. While engineers had JIRA, Designers had Sketch, PMs had Google Docs, and analysts had Tableau, User Researchers had... nothing? Their workflow was a mess of hopping between different software. Ben had lived it as a product designer at Atlassian. There was a plethora of software focused on how to build, but there was almost nothing about what to build. So, after proving out the idea with an MVP, he recruited his Atlassian Engineer friend, Bradley Ayers, to join him. 3. Mastering the PLG motion Dovetail excels in all layers of PLG: → Acquisition: they don't use any outbound sales, focusing on product acquisition → Core problem communication: the home page emphasizes improving how you make product decisions → Reduced friction: its onboarding is focused on a standard walkthrough, but it is 10 steps → Activation: Dovetail has an intuitive product, examples, and templates to take you from setup to habit → Retention: as a system of record, the product gets stickier as more (qualitative) data is put in it → Monetization: the free plan has unlimited functionality, but only 1 project → Expansion: it has a natural growth of free users, who eventually become editors 4. Creating powerful, reinforcing growth loops Dovetail 2 two core loops: • More paid seats helps them build a better product, which helps UXRs succeed, which drives more UXRs and paid seats                                 • UXRs succeed, driving collaborators to join, which go from free to paid seats As well as 2 ancillary loops: • The more paid seats, the more it can invest in inbound sales • The more free seats, the more expansion products like Channels (to analyze customer support data) it can build 5. Building towards a category of one While there are competitors in the research insights space, Dovetail is building out its own category. It's not quite transcription. It's not quite a hub for research. It's that and more. This has helped it create its own, new category in SaaS. As Benjamin, still the CEO, told me: "We're building a system of record for all insights... It's a friggin' long, 20-year journey. You need to be a little nuts to have that level of ambition. "

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I keep pinching myself over the partnerships we're building in our business. It surely can't get bigger than this? Gymshark, LVMH, Lounge Underwear - even the Sydney Roosters are powered by Patchworks. To be partnered and working together on solving customer experience problems for their Shopify clients is next-level exciting. Jim Herbert and the team have built a world-leading platform. While we're still young at Order Editing, it's a massive vote of confidence that we've built a robust app that the biggest brands on Shopify need. They spoke to their merchants and learned how much time is wasted in customer service each day changing addresses, applying discount codes, merging orders and every other ticket we self-service. This partnership is a no-brainer. With Patchworks, we create an editing period that gradually tightens as we get closer to the same-day shipping cut-off. This small window will self-service all your support tickets and drive upsells as customers add products to their orders. Turning order editing tickets into thousands of dollars. #Shopify #Ecommerce #Customerexperience

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"Business is tricky, but we have seen this movie before. We must ensure that decisions are not made from a place of fear." In today's economic climate, this statement couldn't be more relevant. New Zealand is grappling with a technical double-dip recession, marked by back-to-back GDP contractions due to rapid interest rate hikes​. The recent economic challenges, including inflation and a sluggish recovery, have put many businesses in a difficult position​ However, history has shown us that fear-based decisions can lead to suboptimal outcomes. In these challenging times, it’s crucial to: Stay Informed and Agile: Keep up with economic trends and adjust your strategies accordingly. Focus on Long-term Goals: Short-term pressures shouldn't distract us from the bigger picture. Stability and resilience are key. Innovate and Adapt: Embrace new technologies and practices to stay competitive. New Zealand businesses have faced tough times before and emerged stronger. By avoiding fear-driven decisions and focusing on strategic growth, we can navigate this tricky business environment and thrive. If you are feeling STUCK taking a CALCULATED Risk can pull you out of a rut!

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I've asked most founders recently what their board looks like. And 9/10 times I hear 'we have a board'. Your board shouldn't be a governance checkbox. It's a valuable opportunity to have people onboard (no pun intended) that will give you substance outside of your day to day: 1. You want an objective and accountable view. A board that makes up a part of your sports team, that see the game from a different angle. 2. People that show up and help guide the ship. There's no point if they can't turn up to meetings due to other commitments. 3. A diverse board. Diversity leads to more innovation and generates more energy. The 'ex-big company' board member may know the industry well 20 years ago, but so might the exited founder who had to hustle their way in the last 5 years. 4. Consider your board as you would your investors. If you know you what you want out of your perfect investors, then double it and triple it for your board. 5. Value on the table when you need it the most. Set responsibilities and expectations early on. They're not just here to make your pitch deck look strong, your board should create growth opportunities for you. Ironically, the governance is the easy bit. Need to have, but hardly as valuable.

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Venture-backed founders sign up for a binary outcome: Go Big or Go Home. Which is why it is so puzzling to see so many of these founders pivot away from growth to "sustainable" low-growth profitability, according to Tim Doyle, founder of Eucalyptus. Low-growth, sub-scale venture-backed companies have no future -- even if they are able to turn a small profit. Don't waste your life force building a zombie company! -- It was heaps of fun getting some of Tim's hot takes in today's BONUS episode of The Startup Podcast, with me and Chris Saad.

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From Nothing to Something: The Pantech Hustle My biggest achievement? Building pantech. digital from absolute ZERO to where we are now! 🙌 Those early days were straight-up STRUGGLE TOWN. 😰 No office, no money, just two broke co-founders and BIG dreams. Risking it all on our bootstrapped startup. I'll never forget those first 6 brutal months after ByteDance shut down. Pantech was our last shot, our Hail Mary. Using our personal savings to pay rent and salaries while clients ghosted on payments. Begging family to borrow money just to keep operations alive. But that soul-crushing grind is what transformed us. Finally running the full P&L show after being just another cog at big corporate machines. No more siloes or hand-holding - sink or swim time! We hunkered down and made the tough calls. Cut all unnecessary costs, went remote-first, hired smart interns on contracts. Started sweating every dollar to protect that P&L at all costs. High performers, who truly DELIVERED for the bottom line? We rewarded them with ownership, letting them lead major projects. 🌟 Gotta spread that hunger if you want a sustainable hustle! From those dark days, Pantech started Rising Like a Phoenix! $1 million revenue last year, projecting $2-3 million this year. UNSTOPPABLE plans to hit $10 mil in 5 years! 🚀 The grind never stops though. That frugal, efficient mentality is burned into our DNA - can't relax when you're still just getting started. Wasting money is the anti-hustle. But seeing what I've built from NOTHING to a thriving biz in just a few years? Blood, sweat, and hustle all worth it. This is just the beginning... 😈 Stay hungry, kings and queens! Your startups are what YOU grind them into. Are 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝟏𝟎𝟎𝐗 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡? 𝐃𝐦 𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐫 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐚 𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡 𝟏𝟎𝟎𝐗 𝐢𝐧 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐟𝐞𝐰 𝐝𝐚𝐲𝐬 !! #startup #entrepreneurship #grindset #sidehustle #passionandhustle #buildingfromzero #frugality #bootstrapped #revenuegrowthhack #ownyourempire

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Was chatting with a product leader from a Y Combinator company last week. 🚀 He'd reached out because they needed greater control and flexibility around pricing & packaging, specifically bundling & unbundling features. 🔄💡 He explained it like this: "The issue we're running into is that it's actually really difficult for us to attach features to plans and quickly move features between plans. Any changes we want to make require dev cycles to support. The goal is to be able to move feature A to plan B or feature B to Plan A rapidly & without code changes, so that we can be a lot more agile with testing optimal packaging." 🔗🛠️ #pricing #packaging #featuremanagement

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More things I've learned after interviewing 100+ Bootstrapped Startup Founders. If you want to get into ecommerce but are unsure what to sell. The stepping stones for ecommerce businesses are dropshipping and resale businesses. Dropshipping, for those unaware, is finding an item already sold in bulk in one region and working with the manufacturer to bring it to another. For example, you see that the Chinese are selling a really popular brand of can opener in mainland China. You decide you want to get this can opener into the US. You get the manufacturer to agree to the deal and start listing it on Amazon. Every time you receive orders, you pay the manufacturer for the cost of the item+shipping and they ship directly to the customer. The benefit of dropshipping is you put the cost of shipping and warehousing entirely onto the manufacturer. All you have to do is find the market, and place the ads. The downside is you'll only earn a small amount per unit. Little risked, little gained. You'll also go out of stock frequently since you'll probably only want to order after you have a certain order volume for a bulk discount. That's why dropshippers eventually evolve into resellers. Resellers are like dropshippers but they take on more risk. Resellers order items from manufacturers in bulk ahead of time, warehouse them and send them onto the final customers. Because you're taking on logistics and purchasing in massive bulk, you can "find" more money. Normally, it's better to start as a dropshipper because becoming a reseller without knowing market need is risky. Once you have a successful reselling business, you have everything you need to move into ecommerce. You'll already have warehousing, logistics, and probably a good supplier figured out. You may even have your own website. Now you just have to figure out what to sell. Fortunately, you've probably seen what's popular and already chosen a niche demographic for your reselling business. Heck, you can even ask your customers what they want to see in your store. One of the best examples of this kind of process was an Australian business I interviewed called Ozdingo Shopping run by Mal Badawi. They pretty much did exactly the process I listed above. However, instead of manufacturing their own products, they started using their reselling store to give local creators a national market. Now they have their own warehouse and are making a huge mark on Australian ecommerce. Read their story here: https://lnkd.in/gXDh7SNy I'm posting insights from my almost 2 years writing about founders every day until I run out and then I'm gonna do reruns. Check out my stores on bootstrappers.com!

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OpenAI scandal around clawing back vested equity if employees don't sign non-disparagement is a good time to talk about similar bad behaviour at *Australian startups* -- expansive "Bad Leaver" clauses that claw back vested equity for all sorts of reasons that aren't justified. I've seen template ESOP docs by prominent Australian VCs & law firms that absolutely shocked me. Idea that employees have their vested equity forcibly bought back, for anything less than the most egregious violations (e.g. crime) is completely unacceptable. Startup employees: read Bad Leaver clauses closely. Push back on anything unreasonable. DM me if you're not sure. Founders / Employers: if you have expansive Bad Leaver clauses, get rid of them. Your employees *work* for equity, and its wrong to claw it back on a whim. I'll happily call out companies and their supporters (e.g. VCs, law firms) doing this, because it needs to go away, to protect Australian startup employees and the innovation potential of our startup ecosystem.

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Invariants are key to building great distributed systems. They keep the mental model simple. Over the last few weeks Mike Cugini has been building an “Eye of Sauron” to keep track of our invariants and any inconsistencies that occur in our state machine and data model. We’ll be blogging more on how this is built at a later date. The why is easy though - We did this because having seen complex billing, storage, and serving systems we know these will occur. We also know waiting till it’s too late means your customers suffer, tech debt increases and it’s hard to debug. Customers on Prodvana can be assure we do the work to ensure the system is #trustworthy. #distributedsystems #sre #devops #infrastructure #cicd

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Did you know it’s possible to get paid $17 to deliver someone McDonald’s fries? 🍟 Google Maps are amazing until they aren’t and I got a platform warning for stealing an order. Here are some of the interesting things I learnt when I jumped on DoorDash to deliver food for 3 days in a hope to better understand the delivery landscape. One of the most surprising things I learnt is that the relationship between size of order and the money I got paid didn’t seem to exist at all. As an example I got paid $5 to deliver 4 full sized bags of Woolworths groceries 🍎 and $17 to deliver someone an order of McDonalds fries 🍟. Pricing seems to be completely driven by demand and distance travelled. This seemed a little bizarre for the fact that the McDonald’s fries were being delivered for a $12 loss and the Woolworths groceries delivered for a $12 profit to the companies involved. I’m still trying to find out more information here on who is making a loss and profit in these situations and I’ll keep you posted. Maps, Maps, Maps… the most important tool you have in your delivery arsenal can also be your worst enemy. Google Maps seems to absolutely dominate here and while it’s good for 90% of deliveries there are just things it has no idea about. A big one seems to be gated communities or multi dwelling properties, while it can get you to the front gate, its up to you to possibly walk for 20 mins solving a cryptic puzzle on non sequential unit numbering where Unit 5 is located somewhere between Unit 35 and Unit 140 and nowhere close to Units 1,2,3 and 4 🧩 Next up, if you think most houses are numbered, think again! There seems to be a direct correlation between people who don’t like to add numbers to their letterbox and food delivery. Thankfully the app shows you photos from past deliveries so most of the time you get a chance to play a game of “match that door” 🚪 Last up a big learning was as the last person in the line of delivery everything is your fault. If someone gets pickles on a burger it’s you who is getting a big thumbs down and a chance to say goodbye to your 5 star rating. For me I got to discover this when I received a platform contract violation that I stole someone’s ice cream when in fact it was never in the bag as the store had sold out. Communication seems to be core in delivery and it will be interesting to see how apps improve over time to handle this. That’s all for today and follow for the next update where I’m going to talk about the actual business opportunities I see and some of the solution ideas I think need to exist.

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Big changes. March was the end of my time at soona and the end of a full-time job. It's only been about 6 weeks but so much has changed. The Startup. I've been busy getting my own SaaS product up off the ground. Stealth for now but the hope is it won't be there for long. The last few weeks have been extremely formative. - Formalized my partnership with one of my best friends of over 20 years to come on board as CTO and co-founder. We should've done this sooner and it wasn't the easiest of things but we're through it stronger! - Navigated the business formation. I tossed and turned over LLC vs C-Corp. In the end I chose the LLC path knowing that a C-Corp transition can happen whenever the situation demands it. (DID I MESS UP?) Still ended up working with lawyers though and paying $$$$ for formation, operating agreement, and some other docs. - Finalized the UX. I'm the marketer turned product person, turned UX designer all without stepping on anyone's toes! - Started User Research/Validation. Between reading the Million Dollar Weekend and The Mom Test I was determined to get feedback quickly but with as little bias as possible. I think we did well and our first interview was promising. In May, development really begins and I'll be turning more attention to the growth plan - particularly laying down some SEO now. I've started to share more frequent updates about the startup in the newsletter and am looking for any advice I can get! https://lnkd.in/g5NaSbEw

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A team working with us closed a ~$500K seed round recently. They have done a fantastic job at building a solid business with identified growth levers. But they almost screwed up their fundraise. How? They were literally at the end of their runway by the time they closed. They were late to launch the raise... And this happens far too often. And in many cases thats fatal! Even if not fatal, it will have implications - you will be desperate in your negotiations and it shows. And people will take advantage of that! What a founder needs to understand is that fundraising is a process - and that takes time! This 'process' has three modes: 1. Cultivate mode - building the core of the business + building investor connect 2. Hunt mode - seeking to engage & convince investors 3. Kill mode - close it with those who like you The art is in understanding what mode to switch-on when. It helps massively to be aware of your mode and time yourself right. #Fundraising #Startups #AnshulG

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Sam Altman said we're not far from a one-person billion dollar company. What he didn’t expect was that it would be started by Aussie designer Rhett, who 2 weeks ago almost fulfilled this prediction, with Turbo reaching a market cap of AUD $908 million. Rewinding: in an interview with Sam Altman in Feb, he said “In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends there’s this betting pool for the first year there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would’ve been unimaginable without AI. And now [it] will happen.” Two weeks ago, Aussie artist and designer Rhett Dashwood almost fulfilled Sam's prediction, with his memecoin Turbo, which was created using ChatGPT. On May 29th Turbo reached a market cap of USD $610.74m, which on that day = AUD $908 million. Turbo is not a "company", but it rings true to the premise. Before gen AI you needed a large team to reach a Unicorn valuation. Now, you can use tools like ChatGPT to help start and run your company, and the bots can be your virtual team. While writing this post, I DM’d Rhett to get his thoughts and he replied; “I had been thinking a lot about this quote from Sam and wondering what this would look like, until it hit me, wait, maybe I'm the guy he's talking about.” Will Turbo become the first one-person “unicorn”? One more crypto market bull run and we’ll find out!

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2 Months ago I joined a start-up founded by a pair of 20 something year olds. Midlife Crisis? I have converted to Discord instead of Slack which is the tech bro equivalent of buying a Hot Rod.... it's better (and free). Hamish McKay and Kiril Climson continue to prove it wasn't a crazy decision. There was some concern that I wouldn't be able to work for someone else after 20 years of being my own boss... but actually its very easy if they are good / inspirational. Their Shopify app, and the guys as founding team I believe will be working with all of the UKs best merchants, we have onboarded some huge brands this month (watch this space). I'm hearing merchants gush over the results they're seeing and excitement in customer experience managers eyes on every demo. If you haven't seen or heard of Order Editing - the app lets customers amend their order details after purchase and upsells product recommendations as it happens. I'm seeing brands get it live and the next day receive 15% fewer support tickets and pull in thousands of dollars of upsell revenue over the month. Total no-brainer

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