The Aussie creative surge
As people, one of the core abilities that we possess which will never be replicated or replaced is creativity. It’s one of the differentiating characteristics the sets us apart as humans.
Australia is leading the charge in the creative economy, proving a long track-record of ingenuity in this sector across design tools, creative marketplaces, creator tools, and more.
When talking future trends, there is continued focus on the way people work and make money online, shifts in the ways we communicate and engage with each other, and changes to the ways we socialise. This opens up opportunities for new creator tools, social platforms, gaming, and so on.
Over the years, we’ve seen the emergence of tools and marketplaces that facilitate the creative process built from Australia for a global audience and we expect this trend to continue.
One of the reasons for the success of a place like Silicon Valley is the density of talent that has done it before and successful stories from the past, I think of it as pedigree. Australia has this same pedigree in the creative sector after building many leading platforms across the sector, let’s dive into it below.
Marketplaces:
Australia’s support for the category started with traditional platforms or marketplaces for creators, designers, and freelancers to make money off of their designs and skills. 99Designs was an early runner and was recently acquired by NASDAQ-listed Vistaprint, another one of Australia’s most understated success stories, Envato also came to be. Envato (as at FY19) cleared US$113m in revenue and 7 million users — a wonderful Melbourne self-funded success selling digital assets such as WordPress themes, code, video, audio, graphics all the way through to consultants and mini-websites with Milkshake.
Design tools:
No list of Australian startup successes would be complete without Canva, the lightning bolt design tool that has surpassed all expectations, they closed out their last funding round at US$6bn valuation and recently announced they have over have over 40 million MAUs. The Canva team which is closing in on 1,000 staff are leading the charge of Australian creative companies with their product-led design tool for everyday brands, SMEs and recently moves into enterprise and print.
Yet it doesn’t stop there with corporate brand automation company Outfit helping large enterprises to manage their marketing and branded assets, or management of creative projects through Melbourne’s Milanote, creating the ‘evernote for creatives’.
Australian founders have also created market-leading collaboration and PDF tooling with Nitro listing on the ASX on 2020 and other emerging software providers such as Drawboard.
Video:
The fastest-growing category on the internet is video and has been exacerbated by the explosive growth of TikTok and Instagram Reels of late, video creation and content is fast-becoming table stakes in any SMEs creative arsenal.
In competition to the incumbent players like Adobe with the high feature (and friction) tools such as Adobe Premier Pro, we’ve seen the unbundling of this product stack with emerging video editing products such Clipchamp, an in-browser editor which recently surpassed 10 million user accounts and allows any creator to make high-quality video in minutes. Another video platform based in Tasmania is Biteable, a shortform video editor and Qualie enabling short-form video surveys.
Low code and links:
The Link-in-bio category has emerged as one of the most hotly contested places of ‘real estate’ on the internet. Followers go looking for the most relevant and recent content of their favourite brands and influencers via their social media profiles “link-in-bio”, this space has been created by players such as Melbourne success story Linktree. Linktree is becoming the traffic director of the internet with millions of users and customers such as top-tier celebrities Justin Bieber and Alicia Keys, and brands such as Red Bull, etc using their no-code simple sites. Linktree recently announced their Series A led by Insight Venture Partners — one to watch for sure.
The next evolution of this category could be from Australian founders VOP, with their shoppable video content and social commerce product.
Storytelling:
Australia has also shown creative flair in the development of proposals with engaging proposal software such as Qwilr or Sizle. Or with short-form video to engage your customers such as Bonjoro.
Creating in the creative:
Creating is our space, we’ve seen Aussies outperform in the creative category and we can’t wait to support more of the creative economy. The next generation is the creators’ world, we’ve seen it in gaming and on platforms such as Youtube, TikTok, TwitchTV, BiliBili, and others. The next proliferation is more people doing what they love and getting paid for their creativity, it’s what differentiates man vs machine and where we express ourselves from the future wave of technology first.
If on the lookout for engaged investors that want to support the next product-led creative business emerging from our side of the world — ping me direct stew@transitionlevel.com or at TEN13.
