UTS’s Hatchery Accelerate empowers early-stage founders to take their start-up to the next level. The intense three-month program guides founders through their start-up journey with the help of mentors, workshops and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence.
Two student start-up founders share their experience as they prepare to pitch their big ideas at the 2017 Hatchery Accelerate Demo Day.
FOOD4FACE
The non-pollution skin solution
Founder: Melanie Lewis, B Science (Environmental Biology), Masters of Science
What is the focus of your start-up?
FOOD4FACE®️ is a zero-waste marine degradable face scrub that gives you clean healthy skin and reduces your need for follow-on products, so that you can reduce the eco-footprint of your face.
What challenges did your team face?
Our stance on plastic-free packaging has made us think outside the square. Our mission is to deliver products that go beyond current norms, where every part of the finished product, including packaging, is designed to have minimal environmental impact and maximum social good. Not compromising on those values has made it more difficult for sure, but our product definitely differentiates itself based on our stubbornness to be a force for good!
What was the biggest surprise learning you had from Hatchery Accelerate?
What has surprised me most is that it doesn’t matter if you’re a tech, service, or product business, serial or newbie entrepreneur, the start-up rollercoaster is the same for all of us. It’s a never-ending tumultuous journey of highs and lows. The commonality is in resilience, persistence and, above all else, hard work and optimism!
What were some of your major wins?
Confidence! For this start-up and for any future endeavours. I love the start-up space and love seeing people succeed in their dreams. I’ve applied my new-found confidence to approach potential partners and even apply for an award. Fingers crossed!
It doesn’t matter if you’re a tech, service, or product business, serial or newbie entrepreneur [you need] resilience, persistence and, above all else, hard work and optimism
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever done as an entrepreneur?
People always find it strange that a marine biologist is the founder of a skincare brand! Until I tell them it's about pollution reduction, education, and inspiring behavioural change – that’s always an ‘aha’ moment for them.
theSmart
Giving engineers more time to engineer
Founder: Mark Cameron, B Engineering (Civil)
What is the focus of your start-up?
We provide engineers with online applications that speed up the most time-consuming design management tasks. Engineers should be spending their time engineering, not doing manual design management tasks. Our first product, theSmart Reviewer helps engineers to run design reviews faster, by getting them out of emails and spreadsheets.
What challenges did your team face?
One of our biggest challenges has been getting our messaging right. We're aiming to give our customers as many benefits as we can, but that meant our messaging was getting confusing. We learned to focus on just a couple of the most important benefits to the customer and that really improved the way we communicated.
What we are doing…has led to discussions with Transport for NSW and three large national construction firms
What was the biggest surprise learning you had from Hatchery Accelerate?
As a team, our biggest learning was the importance of deliberate engagement with customers. Using every opportunity to test the riskiest hypothesis in the business and therefore help to de-risk the venture.
What were some of your major wins?
We released our beta product and have a pilot project being run by one of the biggest engineering consulting companies in Australia. A win that is less measurable is that people we have spoken with over the last few months have started spreading the word about what we are doing which has led to discussions with Transport for NSW and three large national construction firms.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever done as an entrepreneur?
We have had a lot of 'unplanned' chance meetings with ex-colleagues in the industry, that weren't all that unplanned. They came as a result of us hanging out in the foyers of engineering offices waiting to see if anyone we knew happened to walk by. It gave us a much more casual opportunity to chat about what we were doing at theSmart.
See all ten start-up pitches at Demo Day on Thursday 30 November. Register now.
- Hatchery Accelerate is an intense three-month program that empowers early-stage founders to take their start-up to the next level
- UTS Hatchery will host a Demo Day on Hatchery Accelerate Demo Day on Thursday 30 November, where students will pitch their business to an industry panel and try their hand at winning $10,000 seed money