By Preeti Pillai
The R9 Accelerator 2.0 journey began for me when I walked into one of the Information Sessions hosted by R9 and CreativeHQ in January. Having worked in the R9 space before I was keen to help out and be part of the exciting work happening in this area. Having committed to a full time contract with ANZ, I decided that I would look to play a supporting role in the accelerator. So I turned up to the Rev-Up Weekend as a Coach, where one thing led to another…
Revving-up
…And before I knew it, I was part of the First Point team working on Opportunity 5 – a single point of contact for enquiries about exporting to China. The Rev-Up weekend was exhilarating and provided us with the opportunity to take a deeper look into the problem area. We had some great support and subject matter expertise from NZ Customs. One of my team mates Jennifer Monk and I hit it off and decided to apply as a team for this opportunity. Both of us were “Designers” professionally. Jennifer was also quite the “Visionary”, and I, the “Hustler”, so between the two of us, we had those roles covered well. And now, we needed a “Hacker”. So we went along to the Co-Founder dating session and courted a young, vibrant maths wizard. Chris Bryant was keen on taking this opportunity and we were keen on stealing him, and also his team name “Business Buddy”.
We got accepted into the accelerator! Yuhuuu! Exhilarating! (This is not only going to be my most used expression in this blog, but also in the accelerator). Prior to the Bootcamp, we were fortunate to have secured Jacqui Francis, a very experienced Advisor from NZ Customs, as a full time team member. Jacqui would play the role of our Domain Expert.
And so was born Business Buddy… (background music please). Well, we may soon be changing that name, apparently there is another one around.
Bootcamp
The week long Bootcamp was awesome! No, it was exhilarating! Learnt a lot about Innovation and some handy new concepts and methodologies – Agile, Lean, Kanban, and Business Model Canvas. Learnt how to pass around little plastic balls more efficiently each time. Learnt how to best balance a marshmallow on spaghetti sticks. I finally learnt how to create a proper paper plane! We took the time to set up our team email, work tools, social media pages, etc. With each session/challenge, got to know each other’s personalities a lot better. Learnt more about myself and my own personality. Got a good taster of how exhilarating juggling two full-on jobs over the next 12 weeks was going to be.
Week 1 and 2
In the first couple of days, we were mainly focussed on getting ourselves set up and running. We laid out our goals and set up our Kanban board. Over the week, we also started to gather some customer contacts and arrange workshops with NZ Customs, to gain a better understanding of the current offerings and the problem domain. NZ Customs have been very resourceful and have enabled a fast track customer engagement for us. We are now underway talking to exporters and third parties, and are setting up meetings with some more.
CreativeHQ is continuing to deliver training nuggets and keeps us on our toes. We also had the opportunity to pitch to and network with potential mentors and government navigators.
Being part-time meant that I was missing some of the day-time activities and playing catch up after work and on weekends. By the start of the second week, my team mates and I seemed to have established a rhythm and we are now collaborating quite well. If at all anything, we have got an excellent coverage of all the hours in a day, and coverage across two cities, with Jacqui based in Christchurch sometimes.
There is a huge sense of community and it’s an incredible environment to be a part of. The accelerator so far has provided a huge learning experience, from technical knowledge of business models and sales, to the soft skills of engaging, collaborating and supporting each other to add value.