2¹/2²/2³

June 05, 2022

Fullstack Advisory Partners with BizSpark Australia

Want your startup to make the transition to enterprise?

Fullstack Advisory specialises in help tech founders scale their venture gracefully with 21^st century entrepreneurial solutions.

You'll find we're a next-gen accounting firm which actually focus on lean startup methodology, securing government grants and providing regular CFO/strategy sessions to ensure your startup is tracking well towards the requirements of VCs.

We help refine strategy & corporate structure, implement 'best-of-breed' technology and help maximise government grants - basically your accounting and cashflow needs are optimised with Fullstack.

Our team has worked with leading companies like:

Pocketbook (sold for $8 million)
Novogen (listed bio-tech company)
Vegepod (as featured on Shark Tank)
Leadbolt (>$20 million turnover, marketing tech company)
JAR Aerospace (drone company)

and many, many more.

Professionally our team's background is from top 10 accounting firms (RSM Australia) and listed corporate environments (Lexmark, Panasonic) whilst also being excellent value for the discerning founder.

BizSpark members also have the exclusive benefit of obtain their first month CFO/strategy session for free along with a free government grant appraisal.

Any queries at all, just reach out to us on 1300 887 627 or info@fullstack.com.au.

We're here to help you absolutely win.

Best,
The Fullstack Advisory team.

Hello world!

Welcome to Developer Network. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

How to Create High-Converting Content

Guest post by Jane Hurst, https://www.lifehack.org/author/jane-hurst & https://blog.getresponse.com/author/jane-hurst

Not only do you want to have content for your website that is going to draw people in, you need to be able to create content that converts. This is not always the easiest task in the world, because people get bored easily. If they are not happy with your content, they are just going to look at something else with content that they do like. You want them to stay with you, and be long-term customers, so you need to create content that is going to draw them in, and keep them interested. Today, we are going to take a look at a few different ways that you can do this.

Create a Review Page – A good conversion strategy that a lot of companies are using is the review page, which gives customers a chance to really look over the offer and learn more. If you can give them information that they can use, they are going to be more interested, and it is going to be easier to make that conversion. Great example of successful review page is Snapsort comparison page.

Make the Value Proposition Clear – You likely have a lot of competition, so you need to offer something that your potential customers want, and that offer has to be very clear. Your value proposition could make or break your content strategy, because if people can't figure out what you are offering, they are going to be confused and lose interest pretty quickly. Before you even start producing your content, sit down and think about what you want to get out of it, and then make that very clear to your readers.

Update Content Regularly – If you are not updating your content on a regular basis, people are going to get bored and move on to something else. This is particularly important if you are using content that is time sensitive. After all, who wants to read about something that happened last month when something even more interesting is taking place now. Check out Chipotle Catering Prices example, which shows the last update at the bottom of the page.

Use Short Forms – No one wants to get something if they have to work too hard for it, especially when it comes to offers on the Internet. If you are using long forms that they have to fill out, many are going to not even bother. By using short forms, you can guarantee that you will get a lot of conversions that you would never get with long forms. After all, if they are interested enough to sign up, you should make doing it as fast and easy as possible.

Ask for Feedback – How do you know what your customers really want? Ask them! There is no better way to create an effective campaign than to offer what your customers want and need. So, in order to have a site that converts, you need to start asking them for feedback. Give them the opportunity to tell you what they want, and use that feedback, both the negative and positive, to turn your site into one that really converts. Good example is Sell Samsung with their Testimonials page that redirects to Facebook Reviews.

Test Your Headlines – If someone doesn't like a headline, they aren't going to bother reading an article, and you could end up losing out on a potential sale and future customer. So, you need to come up with headlines that grab attention and make people want to read more. This means that it will be necessary to start testing your headlines, to make sure that they are working. There is no specific formula to coming up with great headlines. You just need to try different things to see what is working with your readers.

Is Scrum the Right Thing for Your Startup?

Guest post by Jug Babić, marketer at VivifyIdeas.

When compared to any other kind of historical business entities, startups come across as almost surreally unique. They are often founded based on little more than an idea; with a nebulous customer base that is susceptible to instantaneous changes of heart; with fragile business models and limited business and management know-how of the founders; and a general atmosphere of uncertainty that still does not dissuade entrepreneurs from giving it a go.

In such "hostile" environment, startups need all the help they can get to build a viable product that will provide at least some kind of stability for the company. More often than not, the road to this viable product and the solution to the majority of aforementioned obstacles is found in a structured way to manage the product development process.

One possibility is the scrum framework and, today, we will be talking about what makes this approach one that holds huge potential for startups.

Scrum 101

Scrum is a work management framework that was first mentioned in a Harvard Business Review article in 1986 and by the turn of the century, mostly due to the work done by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, scrum adopted a relatively defined structure that made it one of the most popular approaches to agile project management, especially in software development companies.

As a framework, scrum features clearly defined roles and events with the goal of allowing for a flexible approach to software development (not exclusively) where tight-knit, cross-functional teams collaborate closely to deliver smaller, demonstrably completed iterations which are completed in boxed time frames - sprints that last between one and four weeks (usually two).

By adopting the premises that no product can be absolutely correctly defined beforehand and that requirement changes are inevitable, scrum adopts an approach where transparency, inspection and adaptation enable an efficient and agile software development process. Furthermore, scrum teams become better over time thanks to the open approach to communicating about obstacles and possible ways to improve their functioning.

Already, you can see how much of this can be helpful to startups, but let's break it down.

Quick Release and Early Feedback

One of the most common and devastating problems that startups encounter is finding out that their product is just not what the people want. They spend months or even years working on the first release, only to find out that their product solves no one's problems or does it very poorly.

In scrum, one of the tenets is speeding up the release process by finishing deployable iterations as frequently as possible and getting them in front of the users. As a result of this, a startup can put out a working version of their product (not a complete one by any standard) which allows them to get early feedback.

With this early feedback, they can find out what the users think about the functionalities that their product features already and which path they should take in the future. That way, the startup can abandon work on stuff that no one works early in the process and minimize time wasted on unwanted features.

Greater Adaptability and Better Prioritization

No product goes from the initial idea to the finished product without any changes. There are simply too many factors that influence the journey of a product and, for startups, this is even truer since they work on products that have not been done before and there are very few lessons to learn from other people who tried the same thing.

This is where scrum is particularly good as it is based on incremental work in short sprints that usually last two weeks. In such a framework, it is possible to adapt to new realities (technical, marketplace, financial) very quickly. By enabling this, scrum helps startups change course in time and avoid catastrophic outcomes.

Scrum also addresses another issue that startups often encounter when developing a product - prioritization.

Namely, startups sometimes tend to go off on a tangent and spend inordinate amounts of time on ideas that should have been handled further down the line and with much less time spent on them. This often causes a snowball effect where a few wrong decisions interrupt much more of the process down the line.

With scrum's insistence on constant inspection and communication, the chances of this are reduced and with its iterative approach, wasting time on non-critical work is minimized.

Developer-Friendly Environment

Let's be honest – startups are rarely able to pay serious money to the people they employ. In fact, quite the opposite is usually true, especially in the early days. When this limited compensation is paired with an environment that is not particularly developer-friendly, it can lead to unhappy and unproductive teams that end up mailing in their work.

Scrum puts developers first (although some people who have had experience with bad scrum will argue this) and helps build an atmosphere where people can have their say, work to the best of their abilities and, perhaps most importantly, improve their skills.

Namely, scrum values transparency and honesty and encourages developers to openly say what they can and cannot do, how much time they need to do it and what the things are that are preventing them from putting in their best work. Developer teams set their goals for sprints and they hold themselves responsible for meeting those goals.

Since daily communication is also an integral part of scrum (daily scrums), this promotes exchange of ideas and allows team members to seek out help from their colleagues in a way that doesn't make anyone feel uncomfortable. The end result of this close-knit structure is that people grow their knowledge much more efficiently and become better professionals.

In startups, this can be a huge thing.

Where to Start

Before doing anything, it is important for startups (founders, teams) to remember that scrum is not a dogmatic methodology or a practice that has to be followed to a T. It merely serves as a framework within which a startup can find the best way to work and deliver a product that will find and amaze its audience.

There are a number of organizations and websites where you can find out more on the different concepts and ideas associated with scrum, as well as learn the best ways to adopt them. Scrum.org and Scrum Alliance are definitely the best starting points.

You will also want to talk to your team and find out their opinion on scrum. There is little point in trying to push the concept on people who will not get on board as this will greatly diminish the potential beneficial effects adopting scrum can have on your startup.

If everyone is on board, you can check out free scrum tools like VivifyScrum and give it a test run. It is important to point out that it takes some time before scrum starts showing results, especially if no one on the team used it before.

Remember, it is all about becoming better in small increments.

Instead of a Closing Word

Finally, if you find out that scrum is not working out for you despite everyone being engaged and committed, there is nothing wrong with that.

Scrum is not a silver bullet that works for everyone. It is an option.

Most Common Mistakes Growing Startups Make

Guest post by James Burbank, editor in chief at BizzMarkBlog

Trying to put all of the growing startups in a single bag is probably a big mistake since startups grow in size, workload and revenue for all kinds of reasons and under all kinds of circumstances. Still, the mistakes these growing startups make tend to make are so very similar that one feels there is definitely some logic to seeing them all as one relatively homogenous group.

These mistakes need to be identified and talked about as often as possible, hopefully helping startup owners recognize the various potential hazardous paths before they make too many steps on them.

Not Introducing Structure

For the most part, startups tend to be somewhat chaotic entities whose inception is often quite improvised and which can survive the early days without having too much structure. When a startup consists of a few close people, they do not need clearly defined procedures for every little thing. It develops in an organic way and even if there are problems, they are identified quickly and can be solved without too much backtracking.

Once the startup starts to grow, this is no longer true. Once you have half a dozen more people working on ten times as many processes, lack of structure turns into the worst kind of chaos â€" destructive and time-consuming. There is too much going on at any given time and there are too many people involved.

Informal communication can only handle so much.

Every growing startup needs to adopt some structure and set up standard procedures for all kinds of tasks, from the smallest to the biggest. It may feel to some people as if their beloved startup is going corporate, but the basic human and business truths dictate that structure is crucial for any growing startup's success.

Changing Too Much of Too Little

Running a successful startup is all about balance. The mere fact that startups are mostly lean companies means that they have to do quite a bit of balancing to simply stay alive. Once a startup is 'out of the woods', its founders and/or management have to do perhaps the most difficult balancing act.

Namely, a growing startup simply cannot remain that same company that it was in its earliest days. Its customer base is growing, its product is evolving, its financial situation is entirely different. Sticking to what had worked in the past would be the safest way to ruin, the only variable which aspect of it would fail first.

On the other hand, startups that decide to change too much are also risking a lot. For example, a startup that makes too significant modifications to its product risks seeing its most loyal customers leave. An irresponsible handing out of equity can cause early holders to start rethinking their position which can lead to a whole slew of various problems.

In essence, a startup needs to understand its changing realities, move with them, but still remember what it is that makes it unique and what has put it in a situation where it is growing.

Making Personnel Mistakes

Depending on what a startup is about and how it is making money, its personnel needs will differ more or less from other startups. Often times, these are tiny differences that one could easily oversee. For instance, one startup that develops machine learning software might need an extra coder or two while another startup that develops machine learning software might actually be in need of a tester.

One of those startups might also need someone on the business side of things, handling stuff like cash flow issues while the other might need an HR person more since their employees are leaving at an alarming rate.

Things only get more complex once you start factoring in the experience, the skillsets and everything else that usually goes into the hiring process. Add to this the need for senior management and adjunct departments and you got yourself a personnel minefield that you cannot tread carefully enough.

That does not mean you shouldn't try. You should always try. Read up on it. Perhaps even hire an outside advisor or a company to handle your personnel needs.

Closing Word

A growing startup is more fragile than it seems. Sure, it has survived the growing pains, but the next step is just as sensitive.

Remember what your startup is about, instil structure to it and be smart about who you bring on.

It should be enough to prevent catastrophes.

Object Consulting Offer for BizSpark Members!

Guest post by Tim Hastings, National Partners Manager at Object Consulting.

About us

Object Consulting is Australia's leading ICT consultancy firm supporting organisations through their digital transformation journey. Object has a strong focus on delivering business solutions and specialise in start-up technology development and business commercialisation. With nearly three decades of experience, Object has launched several successful start-ups from the ground up. Object is a recipient of several industry awards including Microsoft Cloud Partner of the Year and a finalist for the Microsoft Cloud for Good award in 2017.

What makes Object different is that we partner with you to achieve results, can help guide your technology decisions, and can build your product technology. Our development team based in Melbourne and Sydney has worked with enterprise level clients including MYOB, Telstra, Westpac, NAB and Racing Victoria. Our technology expertise includes Java, .Net, JavaScript, Microsoft Azure stack, and Node JS.

Experience

With nearly three decades of experience, Object has a long history of successful start-up launches and working with start-ups and ISVs. To learn more, view our website.