Startup TV - Get on your A Game and lets make something

By Tim Norton | Jun 5, 2008

A new TV series is starting filming shortly following the stories and lives of online StartUp entrepreneurs and their businesses as they go through the high energy roller coaster experience of getting a business up and running.

Just Business, as it happens, on the fly

Starting a business while fun and action packed, is no game, people put their dreams, money, reputations and livelihoods out there, and while not every venture succeeds, you throw everything into it to give it a go. So with no scripting or staging, StartUP TV promises to shed some light on a realistic process of starting up - validating a product idea, pulling a team together, getting media attention, securing the first sales, and pitching and launching the business. And holding life together over the whole process.

Starting businesses is fun, full-on, risky, challenging and takes you and those involved on a personal journey through just about every emotion. Expectations are raised and destroyed, ideas morphed and tweaked and hammered. Hopes rise and fall and spirits are put to the test. So any of the entertainment value thats often needed to compliment good content to get TV coverage can flow out quite naturally from a show like Start Up, and everyone involved can come out all the better and full of confidence.

Focused on Outcomes

The series is based in New Zealand, and may well end up in Silicon Valley at its conclusion, when the best that come through the series will be aiming to launch on stage in the center of the tech business scene. I’m the 3rd leg in a screening panel along side world #11 blogger Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb, and Rod Drury Founder and CEO of New Zealand Publicly Listed online accounting software company Xero. We just 3 community advocates, and along with many others in the wider New Zealand web community are committed to building our own successful businesses and seeing and supporting others do the same. We’re promoting having a proper go, succeeding and ‘failing’ well - thats step 1 in succeeding. We don’t have all the answers, and I’m certainly the least proven entrepreneur on the panel, but together we help pull together some of the best people and support from the community and use our international networks and energy, so this is a chance for everyone to be at their best, and get it captured on camera for others to see.

Being Communications Centric - the value of Start Ups
I’ve started a few companies, and help out with several of my friends businesses, and are more than comfortable with the camera being around over the last year as like any entrepreneur, am just too busy making it happen to think about it, and instead choose to leverage the opportunity to communicate, promote and reflect sometimes later on.

Having a video camera around just plain focuses you on communication, something that lets a lot of tech entrepreneurs down. No mater how cool your idea is, at some early point, hopefully much sooner rather than later, you’re going to have to get it out there and present your business in as clear and simple a way as possible. Cameras are a great way of testing yourself out, improving your message, your style, your confidence and generating multimedia content for promotion along the way.

This will be a great motivator for being on your A Game, use it and enter the next stage in life with a new level of confidence and media nous.

So if you’re in New Zealand and working on a new online business, register up at Start Up TV, and make the most of the marketing, business and personal development opportunity that it is!

Other coverage of Start UP TV’s call for companies