$1.36 million funding round led by Steve Baxter and Tank Stream Ventures.<\/a><\/p>\nBarnes says it\u2019s important to be smart with this money, and to think about where it will be best spent before even approaching investors.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no point raising capital before you know you can deploy and grow the business, otherwise it\u2019s akin to gambling,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou should put money into areas where there is concrete return and avoid putting money into things that simply make you feel good.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor us having an office in the middle of Circular Quay is not important.\u201d<\/p>\n
He says 80% of this capital injection was used to grow the startup\u2019s sales and marketing team because they didn\u2019t have enough feet on the ground to drive this.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt feels easy to solve problems by hiring more people, but that can increase costs without increasing productivity so you need to be careful there,\u201d Barnes says.<\/p>\n
The remaining 20% was reinvested in the company through R&D.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re very lucky to have ongoing support from Y Combinator and Steve Baxter being on the board,\u201d Barnes says.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Baxter] provides mentorship and strong advice around opportunities in the market. We don\u2019t view our investors as external; they really are part of the company.<\/p>\n
\u201cTogether we can make better decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zero in on potential clients early on<\/h3>\n
GO1 boasts the likes of Seek and Oxford University as clients, and Barnes says a lot of work goes into finding partners that are the right fit.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have been working with them for a while about what the future of training and education feels like and they shared the same vision and it was a natural fit,\u201d Barnes says.<\/p>\n
In order to find these potential clients, GO1 has its internal business development reps find promising opportunities and once they determine a good fit an account executive will take over.<\/p>\n
Barnes says there are two different ways to go about finding the customers.<\/p>\n
\u201cStart off by going very broad in a scattergun approach to find which customers it resonates with and then sharpen focus,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe other approach is to start with very sharp focus and then iterate until you find a better match.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no one size fits all approach.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barnes also says that Australia\u2019s position on the doorstep of New Zealand and South East Asia and strong ties to the US gives local startups a great opportunity to build global ventures.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do have a competitive advantage against the likes of US in many respects,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can avoid some of the overheads. There are a lot of customers out here.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving a mix of international customers from day one is really important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Follow StartupSmart on<\/em> Facebook,<\/em> Twitter, <\/em>LinkedIn <\/em>and <\/em>SoundCloud.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"GO1 co-founder Andrew Barnes Queensland-founded edtech startup GO1 is leading the way for disruptive Australian tech companies. It was recently<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60520,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,13,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42121"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}