Welcome to SiliconNews
Every startup begins with a Pitch.
What is SiliconNews?
SiliconNews is a publication of Australia’s Silicon Beach community.
Our primary aim is to provide a media platform for startup founders, innovators, investors and thought leaders within Australia. SiliconNews will also serve the Aussie founders scattered around the world who “still call Australia home”. And anyone else wanting to get in amongst the recent explosion in startup activity down under.
If you are wondering what on earth is Silicon Beach, scroll down to the bottom of this post.
If you write a blog post that nobody reads, does that make you a blogger?
Why is it on Medium?
As a Publication on Medium, SiliconNews will feature content created by you, our members, partners and supporters with minimal ‘gate-keeping’. It’s an online magazine, with an editorial team consisting of volunteers from Silicon Beach communities around the country. We hope to leverage Medium’s built in social tools and the vast community of writers and readers to get your post (and your startup) in front of people you wouldn’t otherwise reach. Including investors, many are on Medium.
Sites with User Generated Content (UGC) are the most visited sites on the web (after search) — Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter & Instagram. Medium is only 4 years old, but the signs are promising.
We like what Medium is doing to democratise journalism, or should we say disrupt it. Bootstrapping startups in our community don’t have the money to engage PR professionals to get on mainstream media. Whereas it’s easy enough to get on dedicated Startup media, in Australia, they seem to have limited reach.
On the other end of the scale, there is social media. Cheap but time-consuming. People tend to have a love-hate relationship with social media, switching on and off depending on their mood. There are many founders in our community who aren’t crash hot with social media, growth hacking or vanity metrics.
We at Silicon Beach believe Medium offers a happy medium — pardon the pun. Our wish is that over time, SiliconNews will evolve into a platform where we can truly live up to the Silicon Beach motto — “Empowering Startups”.
It is hoped that founders, investors, incubators, accelerators and other startup enablers around the world discover the amazing talent down under via SiliconNews.
SiliconNews completes the trifecta that makes up SiliconMedia. The other two being Silicon Beach TV and Silicon Beach Radio.
Do you have to be a member to contribute?
Certainly not. We know that everyone isn’t on Meetup.com and not every startup founder wants to network with others. Although we think they should.
While Silicon Beach meetup organisers will have priority access to blog about their events, everyone else is welcome to blog about their startup or anything related to the problem they are solving, validation, local eco-system, opinions whatever … it’s your platform. Own it.
How do I submit a story to SiliconNews?
Have a quick browse of Medium’s Rules, Guidelines & Principals, and the Terms of Service. Those are the same rules we go by.
Open a Medium account. It is free. Link your social networks, if you have them. If not that’s fine. This is not about “growth hacking” or vanity metrics. This is about being authentic. Be yourself on Medium.
If your post is already published on Medium, just email the link to us at — siliconnewseditor@gmail.com and we will take care of it.
If not, start writing. Write direct into Medium if you are online. Saves to cloud as you type. If your internet drops out, Medium will warn you so you can save your work locally.
Keep good SEO practices in mind. Try to keep the length of your blog post to a 5-minute read or under. That is about 1,250 words considering the average reading speed of 250–300 words per minute.
PitchBlog anyone?
You are welcome to write a PitchBlog — that’s a blog post with an embedded video pitch. Smartphone video is fine, as long as the audio is good. We believe “done is better than perfect”.
If it’s a capital raising pitch for investors, keep it short. Under 3 minutes. 90-seconds is best. Include key elements of a good elevator pitch in your video and/or the blog. Keep it brief. Extra information can be written in the blog post. Idea validation, customer feedback & co-founder wanted videos could be longer but try and keep it under 5 minutes.
Try not to get fancy with the video. Investors want to see you, the founder and your team. Keep it simple and authentic. Be yourself. Keep the audio clean and clear. Don’t forget to include your contact info. A link to your website or at least a landing page is a must. Build a beautiful landing page yourself at Strikingly. No coding required. Basic page with Strikingly domain is free.
Upload the video to your own YouTube, Vimeo or Instagram account and embed the video into your blog post. If you want to include a Pitch Deck, upload it to SlideShare or Prezi and embed the link.
If you are happy with the post, save it and read it again. Copy & paste the text into Grammarly. Unfortunately, Grammarly won’t work within Medium at this time. Edit your post as indicated.
Hit the green Publish button and publish it. Email the link to us at — siliconnewseditor@gmail.com and our editorial team will take care of it.
If you have questions email the Editorial Team on siliconnewseditor@gmail.com
We are building the Editorial Team. If you would like to volunteer, please drop us an email or better still, come on to our Slack channel. See below.
Startups are hard.
Do it with a community that supports you.
What is Silicon Beach?
Legend has it that Elias Bizannes, a Sydney-based startup founder, now a prominent member of the Aussie Mafia in The Valley, started the Silicon Beach Australia Google group and registered the domain siliconbeachaustralia.org in 2008.
In 2010 few tech entrepreneurs gathered at a pub on a Thursday night for regular Silicon Beach drinks — which gave birth to the original Silicon Beach meetup in Sydney. Melbourne followed in 2011 with a monthly meetup which now attracts 100–200 members every month. Melbourne Silicon Beach (MSB) is now the largest Silicon Beach meetup group in Australia with 7,600+ members. SiliconNews is a project started by MSB.
Brisbane, Gold Coast, Perth & Adelaide followed soon after. Recently, under the guidance of Melbourne Silicon Beach, Geelong, Ballarat, and Launceston Silicon Beaches were launched. All except Adelaide are alive and active. With a combined membership of 16,700+, we could safely say we are the largest tech startup community in Australia.
Now, we know that the number of Meetup members is a vanity metric. Not all those ‘members’ are active and engaged. SiliconNews will be emailed via meetup mail server to all of those members. It is hoped many inactive members will engage with us once they start to see we are more than meetups.
We have a good foundation to build something unique in the startup world. A united & connected network of startup communities across Australia. We don’t think there’s anything like this anywhere in the world (let us know in the comments if there is).
We are considering various ways of scaling Silicon Beach — rolling out new Silicon Beach communities around the country (specially in regional and rural areas where we can have most impact), supporting social innovators, educating and informing future founders and becoming financially sustainable via a non-profit structure so that the work continues well into the future. Expect a blog post soon on our plans for the next 20 years — according to Brad Feld’s Building Startup Communities (the book we use as our bible), that’s how long it takes. We are in this for the long haul. This is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Okay, a marathon with many sprints within it. Isn’t that the Agile way?
Join us on Slack
We have started the process of building this virtual community on our Silicon Beach Oz Slack channel. If you are keen to be in on the ground floor of something BIG, join us on Slack. We’d love to hear from you, no matter where you are. While Slack is our primary communication platform, we are trialing Zoom for our “meetings”. It’s going to be a truly virtual beach.
Tap the heart icon to recommend this post. Follow SiliconNews to join us on the journey and ..
See you on the Beach, soon :)
