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Hey Startmate Fam,

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Startmate is on a mission to make Australia and New Zealand the best place to build a startup.

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How?

Founders have to jump over hundreds of hurdles in the pursuit to build a successful startup.

We’re brining these hurdles down - one by one.

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We’re helping Founders along their whole journey:

1. Launch Club >> validate a problem, start your company
2. Buildmate >> build your MVP alongside other ambitious founders IRL (SYD / MEL)
3. Accelerator >> get hundreds of customers and raise your next round
4. Growthmate >> learn from Series A+ peers in intimate groups (SYD / MEL) - I’m launching this one with 5-10 founders in Oct, hit reply if you want more info

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The point?

Startmate is there with you along the whole journey.

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Building a startup can be a lonely and hard journey, but it doesn’t have to be.

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Also, whilst I have your attention - we’re hiring!

• Founders Associate - here 
• Growth Marketing Associate - here

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What’s coming up at Startmate?

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🙏 Asks

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REFER your friend to any of the above Startmate programs - HERE

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Programs - applications are open for:

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Investors

• First Believers - here (by 11 August) - become an angel investor!

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Founders

• Launch Club - here (by 4 August) - start your company with us!
• Buildmate - here (by 5 August) - build alongside ambitious founders.

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Operators

• Women Fellowship - here (by 26 Aug) - get a job in a startup!
• Ladymates Collective - here - are you already in a startup? surround yourself with peers.
• Ladymates Leadership here (by 12 August) - exec coaching alongside peers.

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🚀 GREAT alumni news

• Jigspace gets a full 60 seconds video shoutout by Tim Cook / Apple - here
• 4x alumni at Tech23 - here

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😀 Good

• 🐞20 Ladymates Leaders are part of our Executive Coaching Membership Trial and we’re now making it an ongoing All-Year round Membership: The 20 leaders just completed the ‘pilot’ this week with some cracking workshops on ‘Effective Questioning’ (Syd) and ‘Power’ (Mel). The pilot may be coming to an end, but we’re extremely hyped for this to now become an ongoing all-year round membership for the best women leaders in startups.
• 🧱30 Buildmate founders have been co-working alongside each other and we’re making it an ongoing All-Year round Membership: Great feedback from the founders who loved building alongside each other so we’re going to have all-year round competitive 30 spots for Builders partnered with Stone & Chalk in Melbourne and Sydney.
• 🧑‍🚀 80 Launch Club founders started businesses and yet again loved the program: Launch Club feedback from the Autumn 24 cohort has come in, with the program receiving an average rating of 9/10 (NPS = 68) from founders.
• 🚀 The Winter 24 Accelerator kicked off with 11 startups - from AI, to Climate to Hardware - it is all in there: The kick-off week: 11 startups. 13 founders. 17 sessions. 5 days. And a whole lot of madness! From a highly competitive scavenger hunt to seriously ambitious goals being set for the next 12 weeks. The Winter 24 cohort is absolute 🔥. Keen to see who the founders are? Watch this space for our cohort announcement! 
• 🧑‍🎓With a mind-blowing 300 students the Student Fellowship finished with an NPS of 70: Even with over 300 Fellows, this was one of our best cohorts yet (NPS = 70 with no detractors). There was also a strong interest in founder pathways, with 40+ companies created for the Founder Challenge, 82% of Fellows considering becoming founders, 96% of Fellows saying they feel more confident to found a startup, and a 50/50 men/women split.

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🥴 Bad

• Our “Expression of Interest” to “Finished Application” funnel needs fixing: Thousands of people Express their Interest to join our programs every year. But we only run our programs twice a year, so if too much time elapses between interest to application deadline interest wanes and the program forgotten. We need to be more proactive to bring people into Startmate when they need it. We’re now working on (1) email drip campaigns to “stay warm” in the EOI funnel and on (2) all-year round memberships so you can join Startmate any time >> Founders (Buildmate, Growthmate), Operators (Ladymates Leadership, Collective) and likely more to come.
• Finding a place for 1,000+ people for Demo Day: ugh, I never thought we’d be doing such large scale event planning twice a year, but it genuinely is hard to find a large enough venue in Sydney to be within budget and have the Startmate vibe. Should be go back to virtual? 🫠 So yeah, we still don’t have a venue locked in for the 17th October, Demo Day.

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😵‍💫 Ugly

• Gave the wrong person a bunch of money: Ok we’ve been lucky to have had some big secondaries and exits returning one of the funds in particular 6x DPI in the last 12 months, BUT in the process of paying hundreds of people millions of dollars in distributions we’ve paid the wrong person a chunk of money. Yep, it went straight on the risk register, lessons implemented, four eye checks etc etc and the money is coming back, so no harm done as we know our LPs well - gotta learn from the mistakes.

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👏 Kudos to the Community!

• Special shout out to these community LEGENDS for jumping on customer discovery calls with the team 👉 you’re helping us build an even better Startmate Nation:some text
  • Alex Naoumidis, Rizvi Mridha, Aaron Vanston, Kelsey Way, Victoria Cook, Steven Miller, Phoebe Davis, Laila Grace, Alessandra Alessio, James Crowley, Tiffany Guan, Lachlan Robinson, Keith Lang, Ashby Field, Elsie O’Gorman, Jae Lubberink, Mat Velcic, Philippa Scholl, Nathan Giang… and so many more!

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Hope you enjoyed the read, fam!

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