Phase One Community - Year in Review 22/23 ???
Emelie Verseput
Community Builder ?? | Skipper in Training ?? | Breathwork & Meditation Practitioner ???
As I reflect on the past year with Phase One Ventures I have to say I’m super proud of the community we’ve built Mahesh Muralidhar . We’ve been able to witness and support the growth of so many amazing, innovative and bold startups in Aotearoa and I’m so grateful for that.??????
2022 has been a year of creating, testing, pivoting, sharing and celebrating for our community and I’m excited to keep working with all these amazing founders in 2023. The support they create for each other and the example they set for the ecosystem will take us all to another level.???
For Mahesh Muralidhar , it all started in the living room, for me as Community Manager it all started with the Phase One Welcome Room. Founders that approached Phase One had a 1:1 meeting with Mahesh and me to figure out if they were the right fit for the community we were building. You don’t quite know from the first conversation so we worked with them over a period of 2-3 months in the Welcome Room to see if they fit the Phase One Philosophy of taking it slow and focusing fully on customer and problem discovery.???
To reach out and meet with founders from across the country we decided on a roadshow to Christchurch, Dunedin, Queenstown and Wellington. As Mahesh is based in Auckland and I’m based in Tauranga we have those areas well covered.????
The roadshow was very successful and we connected with over 50 founders, many of them joined the Welcome Room with 4 of them joined the Phase One Community.??
The roadshow was also great for connecting Phase One with other support organisations and regional supporters of the NZ startup ecosystem. Building relationships and sharing our vision for the future.???
After we spent a significant amount of time with founders in the Welcome Room, the ones that stood out and showed up consistently, putting in the work, were invited to the Phase One Community and gained access to us and our resources 24/7 via Discord.???
33 amazing founders are the final number for our first cohort that closed in December. Most founders in this cohort we’ve been working with for over 10 months now and it’s been an absolute blast.???
Phase One support starts with Strategy Sessions, these are 1:1 sessions with Mahesh where founders unpack their business, their challenges, and their to-do list and go into radical prioritisation.???
Gaining new perspectives and mostly clarity and focus on where to go next.?
I’ve been lucky sitting in on many of these sessions, learning the steps and the strategy behind them and seeing a founder get that lightbulb moment never gets old.???
Founders have access to at least 4 half-day Strategy Sessions when they join with many of them having done over 10 by now!?
We like our founders to have access to knowledge and expertise from people who have ‘been there and done that’ so every fortnight we organise an Expert Session. We’ve had founders, operators, investors and ecosystem players from NZ, AUS, Canada, USA, and UK speak at our sessions and take questions from our founders. We then comprise this knowledge and add it to our Phase One Handbook for founders who join at a later time or for review when they’re at the right stage.???
A powerful part of the community that has really made some waves for founders was the connections made in the startup ecosystem, whether in NZ, AUS or the USA Phase One has been able to connect founders with senior operators to pick their brains, get advice, access their expertise and network. For some startups, this even resulted in ongoing support and investment.???
A group of these operators are now Phase One mentors and are along for the ride, they’ve been joining us at events, been available for startups for advice and hosted expert sessions for the community.?????♀?
Proven the most valuable part of the community is learning from each other. Founders post questions in the discord channels and get answers from different perspectives. Founders jump on calls together to review each other’s pitch decks or strategies. Founders host community sessions to talk the whole community through how they did something and what their journey has been.???
Therefore we decided to create fortnightly Phase One Group Sessions, these sessions are like Expert Sessions but with a group of founders that are operating in a similar industry, have lots to learn from each other or are at a similar stage. It’s been a successful way to connect the community even further and have founders grow together.???
Soon after joining Phase One the imbalance in the amount of female and male founders became apparent. We also were well aware of the knowledge gap for female founders and wanted to create a safe space for women in and outside of the community to connect with us and have access to our resources. We launched the Phase One Female Founders Forum. A fortnightly online meetup supporting women on their business journeys whether it is a side hustle, small business or tech startup they were building everyone is welcome.???
The Female Founders Forum resulted in the community having a vast growth of female representation with now over 45% of our startups being led by a female founder or co-founder.???
Phase One events and social hour have been massive connectors and have caused lots of ripple effects and relationships between founders, operators and investors. We’ve hosted regular founder drinks in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, and did social events in every city we went to on our roadshow. Hosted a week's worth of events and excursions the week of Blackbird’s Sunrise in Auckland. Created larger celebrations for founders and the wider business and startup ecosystem where we held speeches and gave updates from the community to the public. Hosted dinners, breakfast and the Phase One Speaker event with major headliners Honourable Nikki Kaye, Sir Graham Henry, Adam Flynn and Jaikumar Ganesh.?????
To our founders, it’s been such an epic year with all of you and I feel super lucky to be part of building this community. I see you all as my friends rather than “founders I work with”, this community has something truly special about it, the support, the connections, the uplifting vibes, sharing of knowledge and so much more. ???
I can’t wait to see what you all will be up to in another 12 months. I hope to be a sounding board, supporter, connector and someone you can trust to draw on whenever you need a chat. I also hope to work with all of you ongoing in many different ways. I trust in the process of this new world that we’re all creating together. Most of all THANK YOU so much for everything this year, I have no words for the amount of learnings, new insights, ideas and inspiration you all give me on a daily basis. ??
Mahesh and I have been working Phase One like a startup and doing unscalable things to work out what actually works and to set up a community that fully supports kiwi founders building a high-growth startup from their home grounds. We’re so excited to tell the world about our experiment and the fact that it worked. We’ll keep updating you on the exciting stuff that is happening in the community. Our founders are making big moves and so are we. ??
Much love to this amazing community and all of it's supporters ??
Emelie Verseput - Phase One Community Manager?
领英推荐
???? Shoutout to the amazing founders / startups in the Phase One Community:
Amplifier - Casey Davies-Bell
Dummi - Giulia Dressler
Edapt - Jack Shennan
Tradewise - Sam Browne ??
Vistr - Tristan Adams
Founder Roof Space. Bootstrapped
1 年Thanks for all the effort and energy you have put into the community you have been amazing - looking forward to following your next journey!!
Founder of Vistr: Next generation insights for the tourism industry
1 年Such amazing work Emelie Verseput My favorite moment has to be the first meeting that we had, talking you and Mahesh Muralidhar through what I'm doing and feeling your collective enthusiasm for what is becoming Vistr!
Co-Founder at Contented | Turning meetings, conversations, brainstorms into extraordinary content and insights
1 年Your unwavering dedication, kindness, and enthusiastic support has meant so much. Excited to catch up soon.
Co-founder @ Bio Fab NZ | Sustainable Packaging | Waste2Value
1 年Just getting to connect with other founders is so valuable and being in a group with others on a similar path. Such an epic community and it's only the start!
On a mission to make sure no one worries about money again
1 年Sad that its coming to an end in some ways, will really miss everything you've done for the community. Thank you for all the support Emelie, more than we deserve!