Australia is great, but sometimes greener pastures lie overseas. Many of the entrepreneurs in this year’s Hot 30 list have spread their talents and expanded their businesses internationally.
Expo Centric, a business providing integrated communication structures for trade shows, speciality retail spaces and museums, has recently expanded to New Zealand. This is just the next step in the business’s growth, with it doubling in size each year. Last year its revenue hit $4.5 million.
Like Expo Centric, Jane Lu’s Show Pony, an online fashion retailer, is receiving interest from overseas. Lu is receiving orders from the United States and as its market grows Lu intends to develop country specific web pages and start sourcing directly from China.
Young millionaire Nick D’Aloisio (Summly) and Anthony Goldbloom (Kaggle) also took their businesses overseas with great success. Kaggle, originally a Melbourne-based start-up, is now based in the United States and has attracted clients such as NASA, Mastercard and Facebook. D’Aloisio, who created an app which summarised news stories, sourced funding from international investors such as Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing and celebrities such as Yoko Ono and Stephen Fry. Not only can entrepreneurs sell their product or service overseas, they can also look for funding.
Ned Dwyer didn’t have to look far to come up with a business idea.
His company, Tweaky, is aimed at helping small business owners make small changes to their website instead of huge, sweeping redesigns.
“I’m building an innovative business in a competitive market that generates real value for small businesses. I like to think that’s important,” Dwyer told SmartCompany.
Mitchell Harper was similarly inspired when starting up Bigcommerce.
After setting up an online store for selling computer hardware, he discovered there was no service to help small retailers set up an online store.
Bigcommerce has recently secured $35 million in venture capital funding and as of March this year has helped 30,000 small businesses in 65 countries.
Dwyer and Mitchell’s stories show inspiration for innovation can be very close to home.
The entrepreneurs on the list are willing to throw out a good idea in favour of a great one.
For example, Jonathan Barouch transformed his consumer-focused app Roamz to the B2B-focused Local Measure after feedback from businesses.
The original idea for Roamz was to have an app that pulled in public data from social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, which customers could look at to see what people are saying about a particular restaurant.
Soon, Barouch was approached by businesses, who he assumed wanted to advertise on Roamz. Instead, they just wanted to know what people were saying about them.
“Our app was really valuable to them,” Barouch says. “As such, a little over two months ago we relaunched the same technology with a business-facing website and we’ve had really great tractions, securing both SMB clients and larger regional multi-store outlets”.
When the Hot 30 entrepreneurs spot a niche, they pivot their focus, or form a new company entirely.
SponsoredLinx CEO Ben Bradshaw says remaining agile is the major challenge in his industry.
“Unless you embrace change and can adapt, the industry will have evolved before you’ve even started,” he says.
That’s why SponsoredLinx has so many brands. It allows him to shut down, expand or pivot them as he needs, and so provides a crucial risk-mitigation strategy in the notoriously fast-moving world of SEO.
Cara Waters is the editor of SmartCompany. Cara was previously a senior reporter at the Financial Times website FT Adviser in London and has also worked for The Sunday Times.
