Week 4 Wrap-Up! River City Labs Startup Accelerator

Welcome to our wrap-up of week 4 in Brisbane’s River City Labs (muru-D) accelerator. This week was a bit quieter on the guest speaker front, which meant more time to work on our startups, plus spare time for some sweet press features.

The photo above comes from Nicky Moffat’s Sunshine Coast Daily write-up featuring Puntaa’s Nick Heaney and I – the two Sunshine Coasters on the accelerator. Thanks Nicky!

Here’s what we got up to this week…

Matt Rowan tried to sell honey to a former QLD Premier

Matt Rowan from ProcessPA, who you may remember selling honey in our week 3 wrap-up, met with former Queensland Premier The Hon Peter Beattie AC at a Brisbane breakfast on leadership lessons, change and the commercialisation of Australia’s great innovations. Not sure if he bought any honey, but big congrats to Matt this week for invoicing his first ProcessPA customer. Woohoo!

 

Fiona Robson and Daniel Cheilyk – Corporate Governance

Telstra’s Sydney-based legal eagle Fiona Robson, together with Sparke Helmore Lawyers’ Brisbane-based Senior Associate Daniel Cheilyk, briefed us on the do’s and don’ts of corporate governance. Their takeaway messages?

1. Keep every boring legal document filed in a “data room” (which is Agent86 speak for “a logically arranged online filing system”) that a potential investor or acquirer could quickly access for due diligence.
2. Get yourself onto Matt Rowan’s ProcessPA to keep intelligent records of all your official meetings and action items. (Well, they didn’t actually say that, but I’m trying to support the honey guy.)

 

 

Andrew Cameron asked: “Do you really own your IP?”

Andrew Cameron (Brett Oaten Solicitors), who does a lot of work for startups that go through BlueChilli, flew up from Sydney to teach us about IP. He warned us about when founders hit investor hurdles because the investor due diligence process revealed the startup did not actually own their IP. Tough lesson to learn the hard way, so this was definitely one masterclass to pay attention to.

Other bytes from Andrew:

• You cannot protect an idea – only the way it is expressed
• Never try to do your own patent application. These are highly detailed documents that you should only trust to be put together by experts in their field – who also know how to write patent applications.
• You cannot apply for a patent after you make your idea public
• If your company is called “OrangeFarm Consulting Services” it’s better to trademark just “OrangeFarm” – for potentially broader application
• In Australia, you don’t actually need to register a copyright for works because it’s automatically assigned once you use it. You can just add the copyright symbol, but that’s not even a requirement.
• It’s imperative to have a clause in contractors’ contracts where they “assign” all IP and copyright to your company. Otherwise you could pay $100k development fees and find you don’t actually own what you paid for (it happens!)

 

 

MBA Students from China came for a visit

…and somewhere in the translation, ‘GreenSocks for lawn mowing’ was interpreted as ‘GreenSocks for peer-to-peer lending’. MMmmm, okay, let’s validate that idea… Anyone want to lend GreenSocks some spending money for next weekend? Haha.

 

 

ParkFit rocked the River City Labs Bootcamp

With the normal Personal Trainer away for a few weeks, ParkFit have taken on the running of the RCL Weekly Bootcamp. The regular core group of Maria, Chris and Don attended this week, along with Britney and Jacob from ParkFit. Want to see how your fitness stacks up against the smiling faces on the ParkFit leaderboard below? Join the ParkFit crew in the basement at River City Labs on Thursday at midday. But beware, if you prove yourself fit and worthy, GreenSocks might just get you out mowing lawns soon.

 

 

Outbound App – Scored a “Best New App” listing!

The Outbound guys had a win – their app was featured in the “Best New App” category in Apple’s App Store, alongside big hitters like Star Wars, Twitter, Target, Digg, Tinder. Congrats Mark, Ryan and (new guy) Brent! If you haven’t downloaded and rated their app yet, help the guys out here ASAP.

 

Open House Friday

In Friday’s Open House drinks (with River City Labs residents, guest and our accelerator teams) Aaron and Matt tried to recap some of our learnings for the week. If you’ve never been to River City Labs, why don’t you drop in next Friday, 3-6pm? Drinks are on the house! Unless of course this post goes viral and the drinks run out. Smile.

 

 

Know anyone who might like to intern with GreenSocks?

As per Peter’s shout-out below, we’re looking for some awesome writers to help write lots of site content for GreenSocks. All referrals/shares welcomed. Thanks in advance. Details here

 

StartupWeekend Women enjoyed the BlueSky view

Full marks to BlueSky Funds for giving Brisbane’s first StartupWeekend Women the absolute best-ever StartupWeekend views on level 46 of 111 Eagle Street. With views as far as the eyes can see, and an impressive glass elevator to showcase the lights of the city as you zoom up and down at night, the 50 eager participants at StartupWeekend Women knew from the start that they were in for a treat.

 

 

 

Someone even pitched GreenSocks for car washing (instead of lawn mowing)!

 

 

Brazilian Day Street Festival serenaded River City Labs

From around midday on Saturday, those of us working in River City Labs were serenaded with feel-good music from the Brazilian Day Street Festival out the back door. I tried to track down the musicians for a photo of (what I assume to be) them singing in colourful costumes, but $20 just to get in to take a photo seemed a bit rich for our lawnmowing startup, so this is the best photo my shoestring budget could afford, sorry.

 

GreenSocks visited the Brisbane International Garden Show

We called in to the Brisbane International Garden Show at Strathpine. With hundreds of exhibitors spread across the huge green lawns of Pine Rivers Park, it took a lot of walking in the hot sun to see everything. Not surprisingly, the most successful stall at the garden show seemed to be the hat stand – where visitors queued up to buy $50 hats (reminded me of the Uber surge fee) just to get some respite from the heat.

 

GreenSocks researched the German lawn care market

…well, that’s if Richard dancing at Oktoberfest on artificial grass counts?

It’s amazing what you can crowdsource nowadays.
Even the ride home presented multiple options. Gute Nacht.

That’s another wrap!

And on that note, let’s call that a wrap for week 4 of our River City Labs accelerator. If you haven’t already, we invite you to join GreenSocks on Twitter so you can be one of the first to read our week 5 update. Thanks Everyone for your support and have a fabulous week!

Miss our previous epic wrap-ups? Week 1, Week 2, Week 3