My experience of StartUp Support Programs - the Good and Bad and the Ugly With special guest Caroline Lepron, founder of Skoutli

Small Biz Matters

Small Biz Matters – #172 Providing the small business community with educational content and advocacy since 2014 with Alexi Boyd, broadcaster, advocate and small business owner. Date: 25 August 2020

With a welcome influx of innovative startups into our small business community it is helpful for experienced small business owners and newbies to understand the Startup Support Landscape.

Your idea can be grown, collaborated with, mustered, incubated, and accelerated so with no many opportunities to choose from (and pay for) the scene can appear cluttered. Beware to the inexperienced charlatans claiming to understand what it means to be starting out, or have any inkling of what the path to growth looks like.

We need to have information to help our friends the startups and (insert descriptive text here)-Preneurs to navigate the brave new world.

So we’ve invited Caroline Lepron, the founder of several successful startups including Skoutli to share with us the good, the bad and the ugly experience that is the Start Up Support world.

Topics we’ll be covering:

• Tell us about the concept of Skoutli and how you got started
  • It’s about the sharing economy sharing space
  • Avoiding waste and going against the idea of single use items
  • In our first company we found kitchen spaces to share at certain times of the day when they weren’t being used (such as evenings inside a lunchtime cafe)
• In what ways have small businesses been tapping into this concept of Skoutli?
• How do you think the gig economy is changing the economy as a whole?
  • Allowing more people to share what they have
• Tell us about your experience in the Fishburners environment?
• What’s your best advice for startups when choosing your support program. What should tech startups be looking for in terms of support?
  • What makes a good program? KNOW what phase your business is in, especially if you’re paying for the program
  • What to avoid
  • What overseas options are there - Austrade support - and what should you be prepared to do?

To find out more go to their website: www.skoutli.com

About our Guest:

Caroline is French and Australian. She discovered Australia 12 years ago for a 6months internship and never left! She is 35yo, Serial Entrepreneur, Mum of a 3yo girl. She loves traveling, food, extreme sports, she is a Kite Surfing Instructor, and she focused on creating a positive impact on earth! She is an expert in Marketplaces, her last one Cookitoo was about commercial kitchens. She soft launched Skoutli almost a year ago and just launched Skoutli properly! She loves helping entrepreneur and she particularly wants to help women entrepreneurs as she thinks that there are not enough of them.

Skoutli (www.skoutli.com) helps content creators (photographers /producers /influencers) to find locations for their next photoshoot. These sets are people home / environment /backyard/ vehicles that can be used for advertisements, social media posts, and movies. The way Skoutli is different from its competitors is that it offers location rentals by the room by the hour. The price is also different according to how many people come on the set to be fair for small and big teams. It’s possible to rent a yellow bathroom for 2hours, a modern kitchen for a full day or a swimming pool for 3hours!

Adventurous and passionate person. Highly motivated and positive thinking individual. Lived and studied in France, Mexico and Australia and was part of the Australian Landing Pad in SF for 3 months.