How do you grow an idea into successful company? Research and development company Thiri chose to be part of a business incubator to turn an idea into reality. Rosina Di Marzo speaks with Thiri's managing director, Beverly Forner, about what the company has learned from the experience.
This time last year research and development company Thiri was evolving from a series of conversations between contacts into a fully fledged plan for a business. The group could see the benefits of providing a faster, safer, simpler way of sending and receiving payments over the Internet. And they wanted to turn this idea into a business.
These visionaries, currently directors of Thiri, invested a significant amount of their own money into setting up the company. Beverly Forner, managing director at Thiri, says they had all worked inâ€"and startedâ€"high-tech companies. The directors saw Thiri as an opportunity to go through that process again, but within a slightly different business environment and with different types of solutions.
For example, Chairman of the Board Brand Hoff was the founder and former managing director of Tower Software, an internationally recognised company that developed document management workflow software.
But something which Former says has been significant to Thiri during these early stages of getting the company up and running, has been the support of the CREEDA business incubator and more recently the Epicorp organisation.
Evolving and growing
The growth of Thiri over the past year has been what Forner calls an evolutionary process. The company set out with some very bright young people from CSIRO and ANU and the team has been steadily built around these core software engineers.
To complement these original technical skills, the company has gradually added a testing manager, several usage engineers, and some modellers. Thiri is now adding a business operational manager, because they are hoping to have the first customers using its system in a trial starting in November.
The aim, according to Forner, is gradually to diversify the team around the research and development function. It's another one of the ways she has found working with an incubator like Epicorp incredibly useful. -In my team of people I have technical people," Forner says. -But gradually we're having to bring on more and more business and commercial people, and [Epicorp's] pre-existing expertise in that area is critical."
-The thing that's really helping us is being part of this business incubator," Former says.
She says Epicorp has been a very useful service in giving Thiri access to all sorts of advice to do with commercialisation, such as dealing with the regulatory system. This is important to a company such as Thiri, because working in the payments there are a lot of regulations it needs to understand.
-They're very helpful in making connections and networks for us, and helping us with our intellectual property. I would say, from my point of view, all that area of commercialising that development is really greatly assisted by being involved with an incubator."
Forner believes Epicorp has been indispensable in providing Thiri with advice and support. The list is lengthy, but includes helping Thiri to develop business and investor strategies; to identify critical service providers; and also to recruit key personnel. Forner says the incubator has also been a terrific trampoline to bounce ideas off. -Just to even identify what it is that we need help on, [such as] do we really need a production manager or a business analyst first? It might not be much of a decision, but it can be a significant amount of money if you make the wrong decision, or you go the wrong way first."
However, she makes it very clear that the relationship is not one of dependence. Instead, she sees it as a factor in getting Thiri to market sooner and in better shape.
Finding your niche
Like many young companies starting up, Thiri came up with an idea to solve a business problem facing companies, and looked to commercialise on that initial concept.
Currently Thiri is working on a project called SNAP. It is a solution which uses Bullant technology, a very fast processing system. Originally SNAP was conceived specifically to try and solve the micropayments problemâ€"something which arises when the cost of making a payment over the Internet is more than the value of the payment itself.
-There are many, many examples where the recent business model of a number of companies wanting to make sales over the Internet suffered from the problem of not having a system that was cheap and effective in enabling them to collect payments from sales over the Internet," asserts Former. -So that was the problem as we saw itâ€"the micropayments problemâ€"and the objective of Thiri is to come up with innovative solutions for various fast transaction systems on the Internet."
As Thiri started to look at how to solve the micropayments problem, it discovered something else. Former believes that the whole online payment systemâ€"in addition to being expensive and inefficientâ€"is not very functional from a business point of view. This forced the company to address the whole e-commerce questionâ€"how do buyers and sellers do business effectively?
And from this question the SNAP project diversified into an application which allows for enormous amounts of current transactions. It can also provide businesses with a means of effectively presenting their bills electronically, and for their customers to view those bills at any time. As Forner explains, -what we are going to provide is an easy entry to the market for a whole lot of small to medium enterprises who currently may have automated their invoicing process, but they currently don't give their clients or customers the option of viewing their bills online and paying online."
This is an extension of the current transaction system Thiri has already developed, and will offer many advantages, including cost savings, security, foreign currency exchange, instant settlement of funds, and access to secure safe lines of credit.
As part of its planning, Thiri has done a lot of work in identifying the types of products already in the market place, and has also entered into discussions with people and companies looking to purchase solutions. SNAP will initially be aimed at three main types of businesses. In addition to targeting large billers, Thiri is also going after the small and medium enterprise sectorâ€"which it sees as the longer term and more critical target market. Its third target group is any other business which sells and fulfils over the Internet.
