The classic definition of Product-Market Fit is if 30% of your market would be disappointed if you stopped trading. I guess we achieved that.
There’s been a lot of conversations since our last post about the future of //Startup News. A lot of people have let us know that they enjoyed it and will be sad to see it go. Shame almost none of those people donated to its production, but it appears people just aren’t ready to pay for their news yet. Lesson learned!
If your business model isn’t working, pivot. We’re trying to get a new business model off the ground at the moment, supported by some great people, and if we can make it work, we’ll be back. Stay tuned, folks.
Meanwhile, on to 2017!
I’m not going to do the usual retrospective for 2016, partly because I did that for Business News (link to come when they publish it online), and doing it again would be boring. So let’s talk about what’s going to happen this year.
There’s WWW2017 coming up. We talked about this before, but now it’s actually imminent. The people who run the intertubes are coming to Perth from all over the world for their annual conference. Think “Geek CHOGM”. We did try and get the startup community involved, but frankly no-one was interested and it’s too late now. Still, there’s lots on interesting stuff happening around the conference, and it’ll bring a lot of attention to Perth. No bad thing. The next Perth Startup Weekend is scheduled to be part of the event, so hopefully there’ll be a chance for us to strut our stuff in front of some amazing people.
There’s also the state elections. The Liberal’s WA Innovation effort has been criticised by nearly everyone for getting nearly everything wrong. Can Labour do better? Is it all going to be decided by Roe 8? What happens to the #IdeasBoom now?
Talking of boom, the continued decline of the mining construction boom will see Perth’s economy change. How many ideas guys are going to rock up to Morning Startup with a redundancy cheque looking for someone to build their amazing app this year? How many unemployed geologists are going to start learning to code? How will all of this affect the startup community?
