We are also pleased to announce that 2012 graduate Kickfolio (now App.io) have closed their series A round of $1.075 million. Entering the AngelCube program without a business idea, Kickfolio, were able to establish product market fit over the course of the 13-week program, and go on to graduate 500 Startups. Kicfolio’s series A round investors include Quest Venture Partners, 500 Startups, Geekcelerator, Maneesh Arora of MightyText, former Facebook executive Ankur Pansari and others. Kickfolio have now expanded their business from three to six people and are looking to release support to run fully native iOS apps on Facebook timelines.

This year we are focusing on targeted mentoring. Each week throughout the course of our three-month program, the startups participate in one hour sessions held by members belonging to our extended mentor network. More than 60 names affiliate with this network, meaning this year’s startups have access to a number of carefully selected individuals, each of whom contribute an invaluable wealth of experience, knowledge and perspective.

Here is the full list of AngelCube’s 2013 startups:

• BattleTrip – Travel experts battle it out to create your next holiday experience.

• c8apps – Fantasy sports apps that leverage your social network.

• CoinJar – The fastest way for merchants to reconcile Bitcoins to dollars in their local bank account.

• eTaskr -Task marketplace that solves underutilisation of resources within organisations.

• LifeGym – A mobile app to help women build their fitness through real-life rewards.

• Ozirig – Online marketplace connecting wholesalers and photography professionals.

• Tablo Publishing – eBook publishing platform for writers and bloggers.

Each year we kick off the program with our AngelCube induction day, which is hosted by SitePoint. The day forms the first obstacle in the program, where each team has to work through Anthony Mittelmark’s rigorous startup interrogation, followed by Scott Handsaker’s lean canvas session. However, it’s not all torture – Chris from AngelCube 2012 came and told the inspirational story of how the Kickfolio team entered the program without an idea and after graduating 500Startups is now set to close their Series A.

With a couple of events on the horizon, namely the mentor induction and the mentor-startup mixer, we’re looking to announce the 2013 teams in the next couple of weeks so stay tuned.

Excited for what this year will bring, we’re more than ready to expand upon the program’s successes of the last two years.  The opportunity for startups in Melbourne in 2013 are bigger than ever before, with more attention from investors and more overseas interest.

This year our focus is on providing each startup with the tools they need to be global, investable companies able to stand on their own in a place like Silicon Valley.

Our three-month intensive program will concentrate predominantly on targeted mentoring; with successful applicants given access to over 60 mentors, all of whom add their own ingenuity and flare to the melting pot. Such mentors include Scott Handsaker of Attendly; Guy King and Bevan Clark of RetailMeNot; Mick Luibinskas of Pollenizer; and former CEO of BetFair Andrew Twaits.

In addition to mentoring, we offer startups: $20,000 in seed funding in exchange for 10% equity, six months of free desk space at Richmond based coworking hub Inspire9, and pitch opportunities within Australia and overseas in Silicon Valley.

Mentor Scott Handsaker, CEO and co-founder of Attendly, adds his two cents

“I have been one of the AngelCube mentors over the last two years, and it has been an extraordinary journey. What’s it like? Combine eight great founding teams, a few big ideas, a bunch of experienced mentors, a bit of cash and the most intense three months of your life to date. That’s AngelCube. It’s intoxicating to be a part of it, and I can’t wait to see the new teams in 2013.”

Kickfolio, LIFX and Goodfil.ms

Successful applicants we’ve had in the past include: Kickfolio, LIFX and Goodfil.ms.

Kickfolio, about to close its Series A round, entered the 2012 AngelCube program without a business idea but with our help were able develop a product and establish its product market fit. After successfully completing our program, Kickfolio went on to raise $100,000 from US investors and were accepted into San Francisco-based accelerator, 500 Startups.

Furthermore, 2012 graduate and WiFi light bulb developers, LIFX, raised $1.3m on Kickstarter; and 2011 graduate, Goodfil.ms, went on to raise a further $150,000 from a number of investors after pitching at Aurelius Digital.

Final Thoughts

This year our preference will lean more towards teams over solo founders, we’ve found that being a solo founder is too much of a big task for such an intensive program.

On April 12 applications will close for this year’s intake and a shortlist of 20 finalists will be chosen to pitch their brainchild to a selection panel made up of some of Australia’s top tech entrepreneurs and angel investors. Making our final call for web startups, we encourage startups of all shapes and sizes to apply.

Applications can be made here: http://www.angelcube.com/apply/

Also featuring in this year’s awards was Melbourne startup Tweaky, taking away the award for Best Startup Idea.

AngelCube mentor, Tony Mittelmark, opens the AngelCube bootcamp at the 99Designs "Sauna" pic credit: Nathan Sampimon.

The pace definitely hasn’t slowed since. There’s been late nights; countless hours of hard work; hundreds of customer interviews and a lot of time spent building MVP’s; testing assumptions; getting customer feedback and iterating on product and marketing.

There’s also been over 10 mentor sessions including; 

1. Alan Downie from BugHerd on “Where you should be by demo-day”
2. Steve Sammartino on “How to pimp your startup”
3. Scott Handsaker from EventArc on “The Lean Canvas“
4. Nathan Sampimon on “Creating personas and user stories”
5. Adrian Stone on “The intersection of product, market and team”
6. Melissa Shawyer from ClickPR  ”Creating PR stories, angles and content for mass media”
7. Brownwen Clune on “Disruption and creative thinking”
8. Jonathon Weinstock on “Pitching and capital raising”
9. Diesel Laws on “The importance of UI & UX“
10. Joe Ziegler on “AWS and scaling your business in the cloud”
11. James Tuckerman – “Gattie Pitches and the four things you need to know about marketing”
12. Andrew O’Brien on “Artscrowd’s story, MVP, Capital Raising and Pivoting” and

And a series of milestones that have included 

1. Developing, testing and refining their business model using the Lean Canvas
2. Running problem/solution interviews over 20 real customers
3. Creating the “Board-room as bits” style presentations each week
4. Developing and testing Non-software MVP’s and Concierge MVP’s 
5. Pre-selling their products to interested customers
6. Developing their investor pipeline and relationships
7. Working out key metrics such as COA, APRU, LTV, Churn Rate etc.
   and many more.

Overall we feel this has helped their progress dramatically and you only have to read their blog posts such as; 

1. Week two of AngelCube by David, David and Cyril of Broccol-e-games.
2. Week two AngelCube – “Become your product” from Adam and Paul from Giftless and
3. Week three AngelCube – Vinspi’s Milestone presentation. 

From our perspective, it’s interesting to see how each of the start ups are evolving and the key takeaways they’re receiving from our bi-weekly mentor sessions.

As there’s a busy month of events ahead, the pressure’s on for all teams. They’re each working hard, building their product, validating their assumptions and talking to customers it’s an exciting time.

For a peek of what’s going on within three of the four startups feel free to check out each of their posts below.

Michael’s post can be found here.
Glen’s post here
Tyson from RentWant (now TaskWant) here.

It’s been fun. It’s been intense and it’s been a great opportunity for each of the teams to learn from the mentors who’ve kindly donated their time to run a session at AngelCube.

Some of these include

• James Tuckerman – Anthill Online
• Tom Howard & Fenn Bailey – Adioso.com
• Tony Mittelmark – Venture Logic
• Scott Handsaker – Event Arc
• Darren Sommers – Meerkin & Apel Lawyers
• Gareth Adams – Private Equity Financier and Venture Capitalist

and with Guy King and Bevan Clark from Stateless systems visiting Friday; and Domenic Carosa the following week the teams are meeting and learning from great people. Each of the teams are making good strides; getting feedback from customers; iterating and improving their models and learning how to structure their businesses for success.

However, it’s not only our start ups that are learning a lot from this process.

We’ve always emphasized the fact that AngelCube is a startup too and that whilst it’s exciting we’ve started; have a great community of people helping us and encouraging feedback from the startup community there’s many area’s we can focus on improving.

The first one is the selection process. Whilst we had a great number of entries, we feel we didn’t do enough to help teams that applied understand how to apply effectively to AngelCube. We hosted a Lean Startup event, wrote “how-to” posts in Startup Smart and distributed this to all applicants and then followed a G-Score based rating process to select the shortlist but in hindsight we could have done this better.

The main problem we feel was that we didn’t know enough about each of the teams. There could’ve been (and I’m sure there is) some great teams we didn’t interview. While part of this was due to competition, part of it was not having enough information about each team. To improve this for round 2 we’re doing the following

1) Redesigning our selection form to allow startups to provide more information (and include attachments).

2) Offering a “How to apply to AngelCube” workshop for a nominal cost to interested applicants.

3) Partnering with events like StartUP Weekend – and inviting the winning teams to our shortlist.

4) Running a “Co-founder” meet-up to help people who are applying find a good co-founder.

5) Extending the  interview process from one-day to two-days so we can get to know each team better.

6) Creating a Yammer Group for all applicants so they can interact, ask us questions and we can get to know more about their start up

We don’t think this will perfect the process it’s inevitable great teams will always miss out but we do think this will help us make more informed decisions.

The other main area of improvement we’re focused on is the mentoring process.

When we started AngelCube we assumed that we’d pair each startup with an Individual Mentor – whereas in reality – the teams are getting value from a wide variety of mentors and predominantly via our bi-weekly sessions and our Yammer account.

Neither the startups; or the mentors seem to be interested in a one-on-one relationship which we’d assume they may have been. This is an interesting discovery as it means we’re effectively crowdsourcing mentorship to a community of entrepreneurs and subject matter experts who add a tremendous amount of value without a lot of time and effort required. As our mentors are all busy and succesful people in their own right. This is a good thing.

Also too we believe the bi-weekly sessions are adding a lot of value. We liken them to an MBA on steroids.

Two times a week the teams get to meet and learn from a great entrepreneur (or Subject Matter Expert) about one very specific topic. Topics covered so far have been; “How to get the most from an accelerator” “Start up Legals and IP” “Hypothesis testing using the Lean Canvas” “Developing and Tracking Marketing Metrics” “Introduction to Venture Capital” and many more. These sessions are really valuable, you can almost see each team absorb and incorporate their knowledge into their businesses.

Whilst these sessions are very valuable (and with many more to come) they alone don’t make the entire accelerator experience. We also run bi-weekly pitch practice where the teams concentrate solely on practicing their pitch. This was a direct suggestion by  Michael from one of our teams http://lexim.com.au after a pitch practice session with Tony Mittelmark  and is becoming a valuable part of improving each start ups pitch, focus and strength of their business plan.

We concentrate on two types of pitches; a 60-90 second elevator pitch without slides and a 5-6 minute pitch with slides. The first is really a sales pitch. The second has to be more robust and indepth with an emphasis on the metrics rather than the product.

Initially Adrian and I underestimated the importance of this; preferring our teams to concentrate on customer and product development BUT  watching the teams create a well articulated and compelling story (with metrics, customer validation and evidence) has been very valuable.

This leads to our other key learning. The importance of testing EVERYTHING.

We’ve learned to take the Lean Canvas and Hypothesis testing seriously. For example, one of our founders has pivoted their entire business model based on a single test. I won’t spoil the surprise and will let the founder tell the story – but I will tell you know it involved 300 flyers generating 15 calls from paying customers – without a single line of code being written.

Our other key learning is focused on Creating Pathways. To be truly effective Australian based accelerators need to be a conduit to further funding opportunities both here and in the United States. Adrian is off to the states for a fortnight from early November to continue building out AngelCube’s networks in the US, whilst my focus has been on Australia.

The first opportunity for our start ups is to pitch at the AngelCube Aurelius Digital dinner on November 17th and the AngelCube demo-day here at Inspire9 on December 1st.

We’re also exploring relationships with other Australian based angel groups like Melbourne Angels whilst he US opportunities are yet to be finalized. However, the networks we can build but with the support of our mentor community, and great people like Amanda Price from Advance Australia, Guy Bracher formerly of Commett and Adrian Vanzyl from Blumberg Capital, we’re confident we can build great pathways for AngelCube start ups.

The final lesson – Don’t Underestimate the Value of Regular Communication & Content

Being a startup too, we’re currently guilty of a lot of “doing and not telling”  I’m embarrassed to say this is our first blog post in a month and that we haven’t communicated regularly enough with our community of awesome mentors.

Part of this is us being new to the process; and initially a little overwhelmed by the workload but, it’s important we build more regular and open communication so people can have a better idea and insight into what’s happening at AngelCube.

To improve this we’re aiming to

1) Develop a better calendar of events and share it on a Google Calendar

2) Host a fortnightly “open invite drinks” starting next Thursday 27th October

3) Post the mentor sessions to the Yammer group, and invite mentors to attend

4) Asking each of the teams to blog their experience and share some insights

5) Update this blog each week – and let you know what’s happening inside the Cube

Well, that’s about it for now. It’s been an awesome first month, and a huge thank-you to all that have participated by running a session, posting ideas and links in the Yammer Group, attending events, meeting our start ups and being part of the Angel Cube community.

We’re still learning and always looking for ways to make AngelCube more valuable for both our startups, mentors and the Melbourne startup community. If you have any suggestions or feedback, please email us hello@angelcube.com

We look forward to seeing you next Thursday for a drink, a bite to eat and a re-run of the pitches from each of the teams. We hope you see the improvement and look forward to additional feedback that helps them continue to grow and evolve.

The venture, called AngelCube, is the first of its kind for Melbourne in recent memory. Applications open 29 July, with the first partnerships expected to roll out in mid-September.

The folks behind AngelCube include co-founders Andrew Birt, creator of the marketing agency StartUP, Adrian Stone, an angel investor and self-described web.2.0 startup junkie, and Nathan Sampimon, founder of web development company Inspire9.

In a cafe conversation with Anthill editor James Tuckerman, Stone explained that AngelCube expects to invest about $20,000 in each enterprise in exchange for around 10% equity in the company. The valuation methodology is not dissimilar to the  models of seed fund pioneers Y-Combinator and HackFWD.

(To see how they work, check out the video below.)

AngelCube plans to bring to Melbourne the mentoring and kickstarting power that incubators/investorsPollenizer and StartMate have brought to promising ventures in Sydney.

The ventures will benefit from targeted mentoring and free startup space in Inspire9?s new Melbourne office.

It’s a six-month accelerator program that includes an opportunity to pitch to next-stage investors in Australia or the United States.

The fund also is gathering a group of effective mentors. The growing list already includes Scott Handsaker of Event Arc, David Wei and Ying Wang of Crowdmass and Adam Cunningham of DoMore.

“Sydney has StartMate, Pollenizer, Push Start and an active early stage angel community,” Stone says in a news release. “Melbourne has a clear lack of investors willing to support early stage web companies.

“We wanted to learn as much as we could about incubators like Y-Combinator, Techstars and StartMate, and apply our learnings in the Melbourne market. The result is AngelCube.”

Source: Anthill Online

Birt, who founded marketing agency StartUP Marketing in 2009, is also the founder of start-up job board Snowballer and co-founder of small cap investment firm Catvielle Capital.

He’s now focused on the early stage investment market, as the lead investor and chief executive of AngelCube.

In addition to Birt, the AngelCube team consists of co-founder Adrian Stone and Nathan Sampimon, founder of web development firm Inspire9.

Initially, AngelCube will have about $200,000 to invest in four to five online ventures. It’s believed the group’s first project is Cub.io, which lets users win prizes among their friends.

Successful applicants will be given an average of $25,000 and free office space in StartUP Marketing’s Melbourne office. They will also undertake a three-month mentorship program.

Mentors include Scott Handsaker, co-founder of online event registration system Eventarc, and Crowdmass co-founder David Wei. AngelCube also hopes to take participants to the United States to meet investors based in Silicon Valley.

AngelCube’s program is based on local and international incubators such as Startmate, Y Combinator, TechStars, Seedcamp and 500 Startups.

“We’re looking to back a handful of exceptional, Melbourne-based web entrepreneurs and help them get to the next level with funding, mentorship, marketing and pathways,” Birt says.

“Our focus will be on getting customers onto the start-up from day one and building product around those customers, then learning to pitch to investors.”

Birt says many entrepreneurs are convinced their product or service has a wide appeal, but the key is to identify a niche market and develop a loyal band of passionate customers as a base for growth.

“Probably the biggest thing I have learned is that people need to scale the idea down,” he says.

“Nearly every time I have seen people fail is when they get ahead of themselves and the idea is too big and they spend too much.”

“If you’re going to fail, fail fast. Make any mistake a small one and learn from it quickly. I have seen customers go too heavy too early, which doesn’t give them a chance to refine their product.”

“You need to build something lean and mean. It doesn’t matter what industry it is in; just build it lean and create the demand and get some initial customers.”

“Once you are at the next phase, then you can dip into the pocket and start spending but don’t go too heavy too early.”

According to Birt, the other fatal mistake made by many start-ups is overspending on the launch.

“You’re in it for the long haul, so it is not about one big bang; it is about slowly and patiently building credibility and the brand and building that passionate user base,” he says.

Birt, who founded marketing agency StartUP Marketing in 2009, is also the founder of start-up job board Snowballer and co-founder of small cap investment firm Catvielle Capital.

He’s now focused on the early stage investment market, as the lead investor and chief executive of AngelCube.

In addition to Birt, the AngelCube team consists of co-founder Adrian Stone and Nathan Sampimon, founder of web development firm Inspire9.

Initially, AngelCube will have about $200,000 to invest in four to five online ventures. It’s believed the group’s first project is Cub.io, which lets users win prizes among their friends.

Successful applicants will be given an average of $25,000 and free office space in StartUP Marketing’s Melbourne office. They will also undertake a three-month mentorship program.

Mentors include Scott Handsaker, co-founder of online event registration system Eventarc, and Crowdmass co-founder David Wei. AngelCube also hopes to take participants to the United States to meet investors based in Silicon Valley.

AngelCube’s program is based on local and international incubators such as Startmate, Y Combinator, TechStars, Seedcamp and 500 Startups.

“We’re looking to back a handful of exceptional, Melbourne-based web entrepreneurs and help them get to the next level with funding, mentorship, marketing and pathways,” Birt says.

“Our focus will be on getting customers onto the start-up from day one and building product around those customers, then learning to pitch to investors.”

Birt says many entrepreneurs are convinced their product or service has a wide appeal, but the key is to identify a niche market and develop a loyal band of passionate customers as a base for growth.

“Probably the biggest thing I have learned is that people need to scale the idea down,” he says.

“Nearly every time I have seen people fail is when they get ahead of themselves and the idea is too big and they spend too much.”

“If you’re going to fail, fail fast. Make any mistake a small one and learn from it quickly. I have seen customers go too heavy too early, which doesn’t give them a chance to refine their product.”

“You need to build something lean and mean. It doesn’t matter what industry it is in; just build it lean and create the demand and get some initial customers.”

“Once you are at the next phase, then you can dip into the pocket and start spending but don’t go too heavy too early.”

According to Birt, the other fatal mistake made by many start-ups is overspending on the launch.

“You’re in it for the long haul, so it is not about one big bang; it is about slowly and patiently building credibility and the brand and building that passionate user base,” he says.

This article first appeared on StartupSmart, Australia’s top site for entrepreneurs starting a business.

Source: Smartcompany.com.au. 21st July 2011.