How Aussie startups can follow in the footsteps of the country’s biggest unicorns

Despite a tightening funding landscape, Australia continues to be a hotbed of startup activity. Many local VC funds still have capital to deploy, presenting an opportunity for innovative founders looking to grow their business.

For those entering the ecosystem, founders face an intimidating set of hurdles: building the product and finding a market fit, accurately defining their audience, generating revenue, raising funds, and building a team — in addition to all the business admin required. Thankfully these days, setting up and managing the tech stack is so much easier, as most digital businesses are now born in the cloud.

Being born in the digital realm has its advantages, such as the lack of legacy baggage providing startups with the ability to be more agile than traditional rivals seeking to cope with disruption. 

That said, a headstart is not guaranteed for a fully digital startup. It still needs resources to tap into, whether these are in the shape of technology infrastructure and capability, or business experience and mentorship. For startups looking to follow in the footsteps of Australia’s unicorns, there are five ingredients I see as crucial to success. 

Following the footsteps of Australia’s biggest unicorns

1. Build fast at low cost

   Working with an established cloud provider means infrastructure and support are there from day one. Being able to hit the ground running in a cost-effective manner, with access to experts and partners, is key to success in the formative stages.

   Startups appreciate proven, ready-to-go technology stacks that they can use to build quickly and create innovative products and services.

   Some cloud providers take this one step further, providing founders with access to credits to help them when they need it the most.  

2. Build with scaling in mind

   Leveraging cloud technology is essential as digital natives compete for an edge. Getting there quickly is important for startups seeking to innovate and disrupt, whether they are processing financial documents autonomously or running a contact centre that is highly automated.

   One example of a digital native making use of cloud technology at scale is Airwallex. The Australian unicorn has focused on modernising platform architectures to create applications that help businesses overcome financial challenges. In 2021, it moved onto Google Cloud to expand into new markets and support compliance with regulations on payment card handling security standards.

   After its move, latency across the network became at least 50% lower than other cloud providers. At the same time, it could scale up from 1500 transactions per second to 50,000 transactions per second without compromising performance, availability, or consistency.

3. Bake AI and ML into your plans early

   Ranging from healthcare to finance to automation, there is no industry that AI and ML is not transforming, AI and ML is so deeply embedded in digital businesses today that startups know they need them early on. Instead of seeing these tools as luxuries for the next round of funding, they should include AI and ML early in their plans. 

   By bridging data and AI from the earliest stages of a business’s development, startups can take advantage of user-friendly, accessible ML tools to get the most out of their organisation’s data — gaining the best insights from day dot. By leveraging a trusted cloud provider that has been embedding some level of AI or ML into every product for many years, startups can easily tap into AI and ML tools, services, and data sets, enabling them to easily leverage these capabilities in their own product development.

4. Security has to be built in

   When it comes to managing security and safety, being able to build without having to consider, for even a second, that your platform security may be compromised is a key benefit of working with a trusted cloud provider. 

   Startups should take advantage of cloud providers that offer secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in protection, and global network to protect their information, identities, applications, and devices. It is imperative for startups leverage platforms that build security through progressive layers to ensure they are armed with  true defence, in depth and at scale, from the onset.

5. Have access to the support you need

   For many startups, the steep learning curve can be made gentler by learning from others who have been in their shoes. Gaining access to fellow founders and mentors in the ecosystem is important to a startup’s success. “It’s lonely at the top”, so finding a founder going through the same challenges can be a godsend. 

   From receiving timely support to solving technical challenges to having access to an ecosystem of fellow startup founders and other experienced builders of digital businesses, it is important to seek the right cloud partner that offers opportunities to learn early on. Leverage startup programs that help to guide founders on their journey and build connections within the startup community.

No need to build from scratch

The good news is that all these tools — AI, ML, security, and more — are an integral part of the cloud setup today, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel to build up the digital building blocks.

What startup founders have to decide on is finding a trusted cloud partner that can work with them closely throughout their growth stages.

As Australia’s unicorns have shown, an ecosystem is available today for digital natives to build and deploy quickly and with safety and support. From this, they can create a whole new breed of enterprises, faster and more efficient than ever. Powered by the cloud, they will go beyond being a disruptor to set new standards for a digital economy.