How writing this blog changed my life
**2024 Update: I now publish Aussie capital raising content on Substack here **
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As I sit here writing the next Aussie funding report for founders, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on my journey thus far. This is the story of how writing this blog changed my life during the height of COVID-19 when the world was in turmoil and I was looking for a job.
The Story
It was mid-December 2019 when I flew back to Australia after finishing my third year working and studying in China. Purely by coincidence, I left China 2 weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic thrusted itself upon China and subsequently the world.
Up until March 2020, things were still good in Australia which meant that I was taking it easy and looking for the perfect job (in venture capital or a high growth startup). Then COVID hit Australia and all of a sudden, my focus changed from perfection to survival. With the world starting to fall apart, I was lucky enough to get a part-time role leading growth at an AgTech SaaS business called Mobble with Jock Lawrence.
Unfortunately, Mobble was still in its early stages and unable to employ me full-time and with the job market in tatters I needed to find a way to make my applications shine. That’s when I had an idea to build a searchable list of Australian startup investors.
After 2 months of research and development and with help from my best friend Matt Hartshorn, I launched Startup-Funding.com.au on the 16th of June 2020. It was my way of showing the world what I could do whilst attempting to solve a big problem that Aussie founders face. It combined my desire to learn to code, explore my interest in private equity markets, my love of innovation and startups as well as address the frustrating lack of coherent and actionable early-stage startup funding information in Australia for founders.
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In the first month of launching Startup-Funding.com.au, 1,000 people visited the website and completed 1,000+ investor searches. However, providing a list of investors and some capital raising resources felt like I was helping founders solve a small part of their problem. So I started brainstorming what else I could do to speed up the capital raising process.
In July 2020, I wrote my first blog article. It was an analysis of venture capital firm Our Innovation Fund. The piece was my attempt at distilling the less known venture capital firms in Australia, the aim was to produce a report in a quick and easy to consume format so that founders raising capital can strategically assess whether an investor is right for them in a couple of minutes (below is the infographic for the OIF article).
In August 2020, Euwyn Goh from Sailist.co and I started writing a weekly newsletter for founders detailing news and events in the Australian funding and accelerator landscape.
The Impact
This series of events changed my world. Here is some of what transpired…
- I got a job! — The founders of Melbourne based MedTech startup Nutromics, Peter Vranes and Hitesh Mehta read one of my articles and contacted me. A couple of months later, I joined their mission full-time heading up finance and operations.
- We found an investor — One of Nutromics’ investors read an article and reached out.
- I made my first angel investment — I recently invested in a company that found me via an article.
- Met so many amazing founders and people — Every week really passionate and interesting founders reach out to me on LinkedIn after reading an article or searching for investors of Startup-Funding.com.au. These people keep me energised to pump out more articles as I love hearing their stories, frustrations and suggestions.
- Meeting investors and ecosystem builders— Because I write about investors for founders, I get to meet investors and those nurturing the ecosystem. These articles are a great way to show my passion and knowledge in the space which is a conversation starter.
- Practicing my writing — Reading and writing are not my strongest skills so I have a reason to constantly practice with topics that I’m passionate about.
- So much learning and growth — I’ve learnt such a great deal about the Australian early-stage startup investment space that I use regularly in my job.
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The Stats
Since starting this blog, 3,400 have visited with 1,050 of those visitors reading articles. Collectively, they’ve spent about 124 hours reading the articles which equates to about 7 minutes per reader (to get 7 minutes of someone’s time on the internet feels like a lot!).
Articles to date:
- Australian Seed Stage Funding Analysis — For Founders!!!
- Australian Startup Ecosystem Funding Analysis — For Founders!!!
- Folklore Ventures (Tempus Partners) — Analysis
- Equity Venture Partners (EVP) — Analysis
- Our Innovation Fund — Analysis
Since starting Startup-Funding.com.au, 3,800 have visited the site with 2,000 investor searches been completed. There are now 87 investors profiled.
Over the last three months (Q1 2021), the stats look like this:
- Visitors: 250 avg per month
- Investors and lender searches: 55 per month (1 in 5 visitors)
- Most Searched Sectors: All Sector (33%), Software (24%), Health & Medical (5%), Aerospace (4%), Environment (4%), Travel (3%)
- Search Capital Types: Investors (95%), Loans (5%)
- Most Searched Investor Types: All Investor Types (45%), Angel Group (19%), Venture Capital (15%), Family Office (10%)
- Most Searched Tech Types: All types of tech (66%), Software (24%), Hardware (3%)
- Most Searched Funding Stages: Seed (53%), Pre-seed (27%), Any stage (18%)
Stats like these make me extremely happy and I hope are also insightful for founders and investors around Australia.
So if you are thinking of starting a blog or building a website then remember this story of why you should do it! You never know what could happen.
I’m the Aussie Startup Capital Nerd… My name is Warwick Donaldson and I specialise in Australian DeepTech and FinTech Seed and Series A capital raisings. To date I’ve worked on over 150 Pre-seed, Seed, and Series A fundraises. Hit me up if you’d like to chat.
