Startup Weekend Brisbane 2017

Media Release

20 November 2017

River City Labs and Fishburners together for Startup Weekend Brisbane 2017

River City Labs and Fishburners Brisbane joined forces putting on one of Australia's largest Startup events. Both organisations worked together to bring together industry mentors, experts, judges and attendees bursting with ideas to execute into a potential business within 54 hours. The goal of Startup Weekend is to inspire, connect and encourage attendees to launch a Startup in 54 hours.

Peta Ellis CEO at River City Labs said "It's positive to see the growth in attendance and collaboration at Startup Weekend over the years. This year we collaborated with Fishburners, one of our Startup Community neighbours to partner with us for Startup Weekend Brisbane 2017. It is important to showcase the camaraderie of our ecosystem and bring together multiple organisations to support future Startups and founders".

Over the weekend ( 17 November - 19 November ) more than 100 attendees gathered at River City Labs to take part in three days of business creation. Friday night saw over 130 attendees, 90 participants, thirty-four ideas pitched culminating in thirteen items formed.

Teams worked on their ideas on Saturday, gathering data validating their assumptions by talking to potential customers and creating business models ready for presentation on the Sunday evening.

Sitting on the panel of judges was:

Dominic Holland - CEO of high-growth, Brisbane based, Tow.com.au, and co-founder of private tech accelerator Alicorn Ventures.
Nikki Durkin - Founder of Codemakers ( an online coding school for kids) and previous owner of 99dresses - an online fashion trading platform for women.
Rebecca Hay from Optus Innov8 a business and investment specialist helping startups.
Esther Gergis - Startup Program Manager for Microsoft across ANZ. Esther runs the Microsoft BizSpark and BizSpark Plus programs locally.

Dominic Holland said "It was so great to see such a large number of people pitching at Startup Weekend Brisbane 2017 who had commercialisation at the core of their pitches.

It was a great turnout, and I'm so happy to be part of the blossoming tech startup world in Brisbane; a huge shout-out to River City Labs and all the organisers involved for their work".

All weekend, ideas pivoted until they found their place. Team VitaminMe was a proposed app designed to tackle Mental Health issues in founders proposing to assist individuals in important moments to bump into the persona needed at a particular time.

Team Daisy Chain was a block chain enabling an end to end tracking system of your beef, Tribly a tool to help humans make genuine connections by connecting people before an event so they don't have to go alone.

It was team Pegasus Equine Management who took out first place at Startup Weekend Brisbane 2017. An information storing and data management between service providers in the equine industry ( horse ).

In 2nd place was team Hearty Habits - using gamification to increase activity, and team Flytly was awarded third place for their idea around software droning imaging.