The New Agency

"So what's your exit?" is a classic question experienced investors ask  startup founders at the end of a pitch; meaning, "what's the payback?" but also, "do you plan to be acquired? Will you IPO? Is this the rest of your life or just the next three years?" Sometimes it's asked to deliberately rattle you, other times it's a gentle prod to encourage you to think about the future.

Not just the immediate future of feature requests, bugs, visitor conversion rates and unpaid bills, but also about the distant future — about how you want your startup journey to end.

It's always a good idea to have a goal for your exit. Startups are a team journey, shared by you, your co-founders, investors, employees and customers. If you don't share the same definition of a successful end to the journey it can break the startup apart before the exit arises. It can break up close friends when one group of founders/investors gets the exit they hoped for, while the others would have preferred another way out. Agreeing on how to end this before you begin is just smart planning.

So as experienced startup co-founders, it's a little embarrassing to admit that when we started The New Agency we didn't have an exit in mind; in fact, we didn't even have an entrance in mind!

At the time, we were between opportunities, knew each other well, and we knew we had some skills and experience the nascent Australian startup industry could benefit from.

We wanted to design a service business that could help startup entrepreneurs get their startups started, but we didn't know what that really looked like.

A rare TNA team get-together. Left to right: Torsten (back of his head anyway), Rai, Tony, Andy, Loic, Oliver, Jim, Jinka, Steven and Zach (the hand holding a bottle of Little Creatures).

A lean service agency for startups

The New Agency became an exercise in lean startup methodology applied to agency service design — what was most essential to servicing our startup customers? What could we leave out that would allow us to be leaner, agile, more profitable and responsive?

Most of the trappings of a traditional digital agency went out the window before we even opened the door — no glamorous city offices, no beautiful receptionist at a spotless desk in a reception area from a photo book on Italian Modernist design. No eccentric meeting rooms for our masses of employees. In fact, no employees at all, other than the two of us.

Some of what we added in was working in the cloud with independent experts drawn from the startup community around us — coders, designers and growth-hackers at first, and gradually as we expanded, adding product management, media relations, social media, even a lawyer and a CFO.

That was scary at first —for us and for some of our clients — as there's no question a room full of busy people makes you feel like work is being done. But busy people cost you salaries and desk space whether they're really busy or just trying hard to look that way. And traditional full-time employment just doesn't scale up or down as efficiently as working on a project basis with other people in the cloud, especially when they're proficient with cloud-based tools for communication, project management, collaboration and billing.

Future of employment

Yesterday, Tony and I met Bruno and Jim for quick pre-workshop coffee, and it was the first time I'd seen either of them face-to-face in months, but it didn't matter — we're so enmeshed in each other's personal and professional life streams these days there's almost nothing to catch up on when we're face-to-face.

The four of us took the elevator up to the offices of a new client, and delivered a half-day workshop intended to refine the scope of a new startup venture for a 100 year-old professional services firm taking advantage of the internet's ability to disrupt industries.

And we killed it! I mean, we totally killed it. It was inspiring to watch these guys fluently, expertly filling in the gaps, challenging the assumptions and drilling down to the core value. In the space of a couple of hours a whole new business came into focus across whiteboards, Post-It notes and drawing paper. Overnight and today it starts chunking up into sub-projects, estimates, deliverables and timeframes even though Tony and I are in Newport and the city, Jim's in Milson's Point and Bruno's back on his farm near Dorrigo.

Working this way is future of employment for more of us than you'd imagine. But as William Gibson once said, "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed". You may not get to experience it for a few more years, but it's coming, believe me.

And why the exit

While we've been killing it most days since we started The New Agency, there have been times when we've wondered how we could scale the business to such a size that maybe we could take a little money out of the business as a reward for all our hard work. We figured we had to be about 10x our current turnover to achieve that.

One alternative (call it "A") we've explored was to raise money from investors looking to back a new kind of service agency. It would mean less flexibility in the sine curve which describes our growth and more pressure, not less, to succeed.

Another alternative ("B") was to raise money from investors looking to invest in the early-stage startups we bring to market, like our mates at Pollenizer and BlueChilli have done. It's gotten a lot easier since they raised their funds, but there's still a lot of heavy lifting, and honestly, we didn't fancy competing directly with BlueChilli and Pollenizer — those guys are just too like-a-boss, and good friends.

Which meant there was one alternative left — "C" smash our shit together with somebody who'd already successfully made option A or B work.

Which is why yesterday, you may have read that The New Agency has been acquired by BlueChilli, effective immediately, with a transition over the next four months in which we hope to complete ongoing client projects, some new short-term project leads, and set some up to be delivered by BlueChilli's services arm, BlueChilliX.

I'm going to revel in the glorious title of Chief Growth Hacker at BlueChilli, responsible for helping our startups market themselves, communicate with audiences of customers, partners, investors, industry and media. As COO, Tony will be the rock upon which systems, processes and people build BlueChilli's startups, just as he has done for the past two years co-founding The New Agency. CEO Seb Eckersley-Maslin will be able to focus more on 10x-ing BlueChilli's growth, investment and relationships with industry and government.

Left to right: Tony Burrett, Seb Eckersley-Maslin, and I announcing the acquisition.

So two years into The New Agency journey, we've found an exit. We didn't set out with an exit in mind, but the next step in the journey for what we wanted to achieve is an exit. 

Tony and I like to thank an awesome cloud of expert startup practitioners and supporting professionals who have helped us build a new kind of business for a new economy:

Adam Trouncer

Alejandro Gurovich

Andy Coffey

Andrew Karrasch

Bruno Mattarollo

Charlemagne Trindorfer

Danielle Hickie

Dominic Wroblewski

Ellen Ferris

Emily Dawson

Felicity Reynolds

Gary Barker

Oliver Maruda

Oliver Rozynski

Jagadeesh “Jugs” Vijayakumar

Jessica Dunn 

Jim May

Jinka Meagher

Jo Sabin

John Beale

Jon-Paul Broom

Kate Brady

Karen Bond

Kurt Falkenstein

Lindsay Tagg

Loïc Golliard (#thisisbulsheeeeet)

Maddie Pitkanen

Matt Chapman

Melissa Turnock

Nat Bradford

Nyree Corby

Peter Fellows

Paul Manka

Pratibha Rai

Robert White

Robin Miller

Ryan Wardell

Simon Bond

Stephen Steneker

Stuart Dawson

Svetlana Hammond

Tim Lumsdaine

Torsten Lachman

Wayne Wang

Zach Kitschke

One of the most inspiring pitches delivered at this year's Tech23 startup event in Sydney on 29 October was from Marita Cheng, the dynamic and inspiring founder of 2Mar Robotics, which designs and manufactures a voice and iPhone-controlled robot arm for people with spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cerebral palsy and Parkinson's.

This 2012 Young Australian of the Year has made amazing progress on delivering her vision for a simple, cheap and effective prosthetic limb in the short time since establishing her venture in April 2013 and for the progress she's made we awarded her our Best Growth Hacking and Bootstrapping Prize to the value of $4,888.

For months now we've been planning to write a lengthy blog post featuring all the cloud tools, mobile apps and stuff we use to deliver lean startup success rapidly and remotely.

But the days keep ticking by and the post doesn't get published. So we're breaking the task down into sub-tasks and we'll make more progress by updating you on a tool-by-tool basis that you can follow along via the hashtag #toolday.

Today's tool is Redpen.io, a simple tool for collecting feedback on visual design work. Like our favourite bug tracking tool, Bugherd, Redpen lets technical and non-technical users alike just click somewhere on the page to drop a pushpin and popup a comment box that automatically records who's commenting and when.

To share a design and collect feedback, just drag your image file onto the Redpen page and it'll upload and give you a short URL to copy and paste into an email, message thread, etc. You'll be notified of comments as they're posted.

As most people in the Australian startup community know, The New Agency does a lot of work with early-stage startups; mentoring founders and running workshops and training programs (as well as building web and mobile platforms, marketing, media relations and investor prep, of course).

But some of our bigger projects have actually been for corporates, including AAP's Medianet, EI's EmploymentHero, IBS's NicoleByOPI and projects still in stealth mode for GPT.

Through working with our corporate clients and their connections, we've found many other larger Australian enterprises are keen to explore startup methods in their own businesses, to quickly validate and build new businesses, products, services and revenue streams, and to tap into the innovative nature of startups and the startup process.

You can now leverage the domain expertise and specialist skills of our team in a variety of workshops, designed to take your best-and-brightest people through a series of practical, hands-on workshops in lean startup methodologies.

        The workshops are run by members of  the extended TNA team, many of whom are investors or startup founders themselves. We can also call upon some of our friendly 'startup industry celebrity' friends you'll recognise from the covers of business magazines to share their experiences more broadly and provide inspiration for teams.

All our workshops are bespoke and available at dates to suit you, but some of our more popular programs include:

Lean Canvas Workshop: Lean Canvas is a tool for building a one-page business model that helps business owners validate ideas simply, quickly and cheaply. Our team will train your team on the use and development of lean canvas business models in a one, two or three day workshop program.

Lean Entrepreneurial Ideas: Generating ideas that make money and/or create value from a blank sheet of paper (or whiteboard!). Where do entrepreneurial ideas come from? How can we increase the number of ideas we conceive and how do we develop businesses from them?

Growth Hacking: This is "startup marketing". It focuses on the sales or lead funnel and implements a step-by-step, incremental process towards increasing conversion and decreasing the cost of customer acquisition. It's data-driven and involves experimenting with the online product and marketing channels to work out where customers are "falling out" of the conversion funnel, how to retain them and how to extend the customer lifetime value.

Lean product management: This outlines the key tips and processes around managing projects in a Lean Agile environment.

How do I find out more?

We're excited to return for our second year as a prize sponsor of Tech23, arguably Australia's biggest tech startup event in terms of rewards on offer to the startups pitching and exhibiting.

Our "Best Growth-Hacking and Bootstrapping" prize package goes to the startup we judge has done the best job of using minimal cash, resources and time to prove their lean canvas hypotheses and find a product/customer fit that will get them to early revenue.

We'd like to thank the teams at Bugherd and General Standards who've kindly donated their services to make our total prize package even better for the winning startup team.

The package includes:

$3,000 in tailored workshops at The New Agency;

12 month premium plan from Bugherd ($1,188);

$500 credit with General Standards on legal and accounting services; and

$200 credit for co-working at NewportNet.

Tomorrow we will be running a workshop on pitching for startups at the inaugural Tasmanian Startup Bootcamp in sunny Hobart* leading up to a big competitive pitch event on Friday night. If you're in Hobart (and somebody clearly is) please do come along.

The bootcamp is part of a broader initiative by Startup Tasmania to promote and support startup businesses across the state.

(*"Sunny Hobart" is defined as any day over 10 degrees centigrade)

Despite the inclement weather we're always keen to be early on the ground any time a new startup community kicks off in regional Australia. We were there at the beginning of Newcastle's startup community and more recently, Adelaide's.

TNA's Alan Jones will be joining the roster of mentors helping Brisbane's tech startup entrepreneurs develop their startup ideas at iLab October 3rd.

Register free for MentorBlaze here.

If you can't make it to MentorBlaze but would like to get some mentoring time anyway, don't forget you can book time for live videoconference mentoring with Alan on Clarity.

Seasoned startup product manager Pratibha Rai ("Rai" to most of us) is one of the guest speakers at Products Are Hard, a one-day conference "for people who make things" in Melbourne October 30th.

Learn about lean startup product development, the way it's practiced at The New Agency as well as leading startup brands such as FitBit, Moore's Cloud and Redbubble.

One of the few true veterans of lean product management in Australia, it's great to see her giving back to the startup community!

When the AFR's James Hutchinson called yesterday afternoon to ask if we knew any Aussie startups considering crowdfunding, it was good timing.

At that very moment we were shuttling all around Sydney shooting video interviews with opinion leaders in the innovation industries (including Nicola Farrell, Ian Gardiner, Remo Giuffré, Peter Huynh, Cathie McGinn and Oliver Weidlich).

Edited segments from these video interviews will go into a longer promotional video as part of a marketing campaign focused on Kickstarter, the global crowdfunding site.

So we got some great coverage for vTalk* in advance of startup's Kickstarter campaign. But it took courage to be that open about the product (still a prototype) and about the marketing campaign (still a storyboard) and talk to a journalist from a major daily newspaper.

Courage we'd encourage you to have as a startup entrepreneur. In an industry meant to be about gut instincts, shooting for the bleachers and risking everything on a crazy idea, people can often be surprisingly reluctant to talk.

Some startups would rather not talk about their product or service before it's available for sale, some would insist on us signing an NDA before we even take a brief from them. Recently a founder in one of our pitch workshops wouldn't allow us to upload their pitch to Vimeo or even share it with the other participants in the workshop. Madness.

In our experience, startup founders insisting on secrecy correlates closely with failure. In a small industry like Australia's, talking about what you're up to is the only way to find out who might be able to help you and how.

Great news: TNA client Bugcrowd has announced a USD1.6M seed funding round including 1x Aussie VC, 2x US VCs and some angel investors, including TNA's own Alan Jones.

Learn more about what Bugcrowd does, and why this 9 month-old company is so interesting to investors and corporate customers in this story on Forbes. 

There's also been some coverage this morning in Techcrunch.

The New Agency first started working with Bugcrowd as mentors when the founders Casey Ellis and Serg Belakomen were accepted into the 2013 Startmate program (but Casey had been trading laksas for our advice for some time prior to that).

Responding to growing demand from our startup clients for co-working and workshop space, we've moved upstairs in the same building, taking a corner of the floor occupied by co-working startup Newport Net.

Not all of these desks (and none of these fancy Herman Miller Aeron chairs) are ours, but come up to work with us on your next product pivot, UX exercise, marketing plan, brand development or investor pitch and this is where we'll work with you. A day in this space is $45/day but if you're a client of ours, it's on us.

There's coffee, bike storage, a shower, free (100Mbps up/100Mbps down) high-speed fibre internet, and a sunny balcony that almost always has beach towels hanging over the rail (200m to the beach). It's about an hour on the L90 express bus from the city or you can park for free in the outdoor carpark beneath the balcony. There's even free wifi in the whole neighbourhood, which has several great cafes and a couple of decent bars.

Traditional marketers use “advertising”. At The New Agency we teach “growth hacking” — the science of using small, cheap, measurable testing to find the right offer, creative, and call-to-action to sell something via the cheapest marketing medium at the highest price to the most valuable customer.

Phew, that was a mouthful! But what do you expect, when our Growth Hacking 101 Workshop runs for a half-day ($950) or full-day ($1,500)?

Our workshops are ideal for when:

You're launching your startup soon but don't yet have a launch marketing plan;

You have an idea for a startup and want to test how much it might cost to launch and acquire customers; or

Your existing marketing efforts aren't delivering results.

It’s been pitch training season at TNA lately, with group pitch training workshops for BlueChilli’s current crop of startups and a two-day pitch workshop for startups housed at Adelaide’s Majoran Distillery, as well as a series of custom workshops for The Photo Diner. In the past year we’ve also helped startups in the Startmate program and some in BlackbirdVC’s portfolio, so we’re in demand across the startup industry.

In an increasingly competitive startup industry, a good idea pitched well will win more attention than a good idea pitched poorly, simply because potential co-founders, employees, investors, partners and media are short on time and long on alternatives.

We often see founders underinvesting in their pitch content and delivery and then crashing-and-burning in front of an audience at InnovationBay, Tech23 or Sydstart. Perhaps you’re telling yourself that a great product sells itself (it may to your customer but it may not to an investor). Maybe you think a great pitch is something you can do the night before (not even if you’re the reincarnation of Steve Jobs). Or maybe you think you’re already great at pitching (everybody can improve).

At the Majoran Distillery Startup Pitch Workshop (L to R) Jason Neave (Puntclub), Alan Jones (TNA), Trevor Stafford (Stealth startup), Stuart Austin, Michael Reid (Majoran Distillery),John Kamachu (WebFlame), Gary Beamish (Penchant), Orren Prunckun.

Our pitch workshops can be run for a single startup or as a group (up to a maximum of five pitches) and run from between three hours to two half day sessions. We’ll start on the principles of great pitching, before reviewing both the content and the script of your pitch. Workshops are hands-on and usually involve recording a video of your pitch several times, finding ways to improve both the content and delivery of your pitch with iterative cycles of refinement and rehearsal — just like a lean startup product cycle!

"Thanks for a really good Course on 1 and 2 Aug. You edited my pitch deck and improved it greatly." — Garry Beamish, Penchant