Having spent the last few months living in Fitzroy I have certainly scoped it out and thought I should share some of the highlights. The hyperlocal web market in Australia is still very young – but every Fitzroy local should definitely be subscribed to Fitzroyalty (I suggest doing it with FeedMyInbox to get a managable daily email update) to keep in touch with the best local reporting.

Another good avenue to explore what is happening is a tailored Twitter search on the area – again using FeedMyInbox is a good way to subscribe to daily updates.

Where are the hotspots? Here we go:

Min Lokal

Two communal dining tables and a menu that reflects their sister cafe, New York Tomato. The specials are usually awesome, and the sandwiches make a good lunch. The coffee here is the best in Fitzroy, by a huge margin. It’s on George St so you lose the masses of tourists from Smith St and Brunswick St – since I was living 2 minutes away this place quickly became My Local.

Browse Min Lokal on Yabble – Share your review of Min Lokal on Yabble

Newtown S.C.

Another very intimate space that is great to catch up with people, the Newtown social club lives up to its name with a very regular set of customers. I have only been here for breakfasts but they were all amazing – from the muesli and fresh fruit to the special baked eggs. The coffee is outstanding and the aromas are amazing.

Browse Newtown S.C. on Yabble - Share your review of Newtown S.C. on Yabble

Little Creatures

The Dining Hall is a sight to behold. The open kitchen up the back delivers a good array of snacks or more thorough meals depending on the hour, and the bar that lines the left side of the hall has as much beer as you need to quench your thirst. If you’re new to Little Creatures ask for the “pony round” where you get a pony of each of the 6 drinks they brew – it’s a good way to get started and then you can order something larger of the winner. Great place for a warm afternoon session, and it gets really busy at night.

Browse Little Creatures Dining Hall on Yabble - Share your review of Little Creatures Dining Hall on Yabble

Lamb on Brunswick Street

There’s quite a selection of souvlaki shops on Brunswick St but this one comes out on top. $2.50 pizza slices are great, and they’re by far the most welcoming slices that you’ll see in the windows. The souvlaki’s are great too – traditional but awesome. This is where you go for your lamb after a few beers down the street!

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Houndstooth

Long communal tables as standard in Fitzroy. Houndstooth has a great simple menu on the wall – you pay for one, two or three meals and then select from the chalkboard. The Kangaroo fillet was excellent with a rather unique beetroot side. The tiramisu dessert is also a spectacular way to end the meal. It’s a warm atmosphere with a good selection of beer, a good place to meet with friends during the week.

Browse Houndstooth on Yabble - Share your review of Houndstooth on Yabble

Retro Cafe

The bright yellow restaurant and bar down the end of the Brunswick St strip, Retro is good for a fast but decent meal. They often have a $13 beer and pizza deal which is obviously a winner.

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Dr Folicles

No appointments, beer on arrival, loud vinyl and a $27.50 cut. Do yourself a favour and see the good Doctor when the hair gets out of control!

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Gus at Haul

If you continue down the road into North Fitzroy be sure to stop in and say hi to @GusTheBoxer. He guards the haul shop, where you can find some awesome MacBook Pro laptop sleeves – I picked up a Coca Cola cover for my new 13″ and it’s awesome. The products are all made of recycled billboards, number plates, and other cool materials. Gus will help you find something awesome.

Browse haul on Yabble - Share your review of haul on Yabble

Please share your thoughts on each place and if I have missed anything in the area let me know!

Related posts:

1. Social Media Breakfast Melbourne
2. The Hive with Brendan McKeegan
3. Copy / Paste Thinking

Start of Presentation: 100% Risk, 0% Reward 

• Demonstrate market demand: 80% Risk 
• Demonstrate well-targeted solution: 60% Risk 
• Demonstrate coherent business model: 40% Risk 
• Demonstrate A-Team who can execute: 30% Risk 
• Demonstrate sizable, addressable market: 30% Reward 
• Demonstrate plan to reach 1st target segment: 40% Reward 
• Demonstrate sustainable competitive advantage: 60% Reward 

End of Presentation: 30% Risk, 60% Reward = Valid reason to conduct followup meeting.

Entrepreneurship is about reducing risk and the key word in this process is demonstrate. You can demonstrate with numbers on a page but what matters is where those numbers came from. If you have gone into the world and actually tried the things you talk about you will be able to answer any question you get asked because you can relate it back to what you have actually done.  

The key is to think about the idea only until you have a simple vision, and then get out into the world to try doing them – that’s where you will get real feedback that you can learn from and iterate with. Work the important feedback into a presentation and then show it to as many people as possible before the official competition pitch. The questions you get asked in these practice sessions will be invaluable if you can answer them before the next practice run. With every iteration you will get noticeably better. 

When we brought The Hive to the John Heine Challenge in Brisbane we won the award for Best Overall Presentation because we had already run a number of successful events. With Yabble at the RMIT Business Plan Competition we came 2nd overall as well as winning the City of Melbourne award for Creative Industries, because we had a working mobile prototype that already had a few hundred reviews. This was all accomplished with the process listed above!

These words by Michael Hewitt-Gleeson are important to remember ”The perfect pitch being worked on at your desk can send you out of business. The imperfect pitch being presented to a customer can keep you in business.” The Strategy Is Fine, just get out there and apply it!

Note: I found this process online somewhere, I didn’t come up with it – but it’s damn good!

Related posts:

1. Peter Williams talks business at The Hive
2. Entrepreneurial Ethics: what would Alice do?
3. Silicon Beach Melbourne

Before considering the future though, where has it come from?

My history of publishing online

In 1999 I had been online for a little while, and started playing with html. Geocities was one of the first places you could set up a free website, but Tripod was better. Forums were popular, and you spent hours crafting the pixels of your signature image. Macs were for schools and media dudes, but if you were serious about computing you ran Windows. Slashdot was where you got your tech news, and things got slashdotted. CyberTown was amazing because you could walk around a 3d virtual space together with people from all over the world.

In 2002 I didn’t have a blog, who wrote diaries anyway? I posted a few photos and things at DeviantArt.

I wrote my first ‘weblog’ in January 2003, and stopped writing in October 2003. Movable Type was the weblog software of choice at the time because WordPress didn’t exist. Posting took a while because it had to regenerate all the static html files. I found Flickr interesting but didn’t feel like sharing any photos. This was when you went to flickr.com and had to hit the bright pink “Start Flickr” button to load it up.

In April 2004 I got my hands onto a Gmail invite a few days after the private beta started and I wrote a few articles about that – if you weren’t there at the time, it was a HUGE event on the web. Who would have expected a search engine to release a serious email service with a whole gigabyte of storage, on April Fools Day! The demand for invitations to the invite-only service was huge and resulted in a few practical jokes and a nice little windfall when I sold the few that I had. This was all on WordPress 1.2.

It was around 2004 that I had a brief foray into LiveJournal, because that’s where my friends were talking. RSS was amazing.

In 2005 I got into Flickr more seriously because I was heading to Europe for a month with the family and wanted to share the photos I would be taking. I made a template for a blog but didn’t have time to turn it into a WordPress theme so I ended up editing it manually. I posted a quick roundup every day as we traveled around. I sold my first website. Myspace was ugly. Facebook was new.

In 2006 I heard about this thing called twttr and decided to sign up. It seemed like it had some potential but it was brand new so there was nobody talking there.

In 2007 I created the HatchThat blog to publish interviews with entrepreneurs. I loved the concept and it started off well but with a limited scope I got over the weekly schedule. Twitter was much more fun.

In 2008 there isn’t much conversation on blogs because it is all happening on social networks. I have posted almost 3000 updates to my twitter profile, which 1,350 people listen to – there are people talking there. I still use Facebook to talk to friends and see what is happening, because my friends are there. FriendFeed has potential because it aggregates everything you publish from all over the web, but the signal to noise ratio is horrible. Facebook lets you post a variety of formats and has a Live feed which automatically updates. Twitter has decapitated all of its good features of which the most concerning is search.

What’s next?

John Johnston says he doesn’t want or need a blog, and that he is happy using Twitter exclusively. I think he makes a fair point – up until today I was just a twitterer. But it only gives you 140 characters and as you can see I can easily bang out much more than that.

I figure it must be time for a blog again. We can have profiles spread over the web but we have little control over what happens to them. Twitter just turned off archives past 10 pages. Facebook is an obvious walled garden. My home base is at www.rosshill.com.au and I should have that domain name and email address for eternity. I don’t need to post all of the content I produce here because not many people care about a photo I took out the window, walking back from the beach or watching jets at the airshow, but a few people are interested in ideas and that is what posts are good for. I will still have passports on other sites such as Flickr and Vimeo and Yabble, but for now home base is home base. But are there people talking here? Well, there are a couple of comments already – but there are links from all over the web pointing here, so it will be interesting to see what happens!

What’s after that?

Once the filters improve, Lifestreaming will be much more interesting. Maybe next year.

No related posts.