Sydney Startups

What is Sydney Startups.

A community of like minded people interested in changing the 9-5 for something else – but what?

Let’s start with what is a Start-up?

A Startup is a venture that invests time, effort, energy and inventiveness into creation something new.

But it is not like the business ventures we commonly think of; opening a cafe or restaurant, buying a franchise or being a tradie’.

These business are not like Startups as the more these businesses grow the more they need resources.

Now this does not mean that you couldn’t grow to be very successful businesses and I know loads of very successful business people that earn a great living this way.

Also, it is possible to move from the original business model, for example by running a great Cafe, then expand and develop it, turn it into a franchise and be hugely successful.

But a Startup is a particular business venture because it is leveraged and scalable and this is built in from the start.

3 examples we all know well are:

Facebook, spawned from a college prank website for into a site for sharing your interests with your friends, now with over 1.2B people logging in and drawing great revenues from advertisers and now ranked 11th in the USA by market cap’ (1 iWeblists).

Microsoft, a program to run on an IBM PC that has become the most ubiquitous range of software products and is one of the biggest companies in the world ranked #32 and Bill Gates the #1 richest man in the world (2 Forbes)

Apple computer, started out as a hobbyist computer build by a mate now the #15 biggest company in the world ahead of Microsoft and Facebook and the biggest Tech’ company by Market Cap (3 Wikipedia)

What these have in common is that they were started by a small number of people, and they have grown to be multi-national companies. They all sell massive volumes of a product or a range of products aiming to suit many customers with their offering. The company invests in developing products with the intention of selling many. They leverage the development of one product, and invoke the efficiency of scale to role out the product to many – on a massive scale. Microsoft offer “Office for iPad” users and 80 million are downloaded, Apple sold 34 million iphones in 2013 and Facebook develops a means to promote through ‘Promote’ targeted promotions available to everyone on the platform (all 1.2B{provided they have meet a few minor hurdles}) – now that’s leverage.

It’s pretty easy to see how a large company uses leverage. But large companies are not a couple of garage enthusiasts wanting to create something from their own passion.

Being a Startup means starting from a very low base, and developing something that will scale up in a way the outstrips the cost of resources and invokes leverage usually by offering a product or service to to a massive customer opportunity – and this is built in from the start.

So is that where the buzz comes from, the idea that a couple of guys (or gals) can start with very little (not much more than and idea) and go on to achieve amazing things, build massive companies, live successes and experiences that only the rich and famous can enjoy?

I think so – let me know your thoughts.

Pete Cooper

Crowdfunding Entreprenuer