Aussie start-ups to pitch on Chinese TV

TWO young Aussies will have the opportunity to turn their start-ups into the next billion-dollar tech ‘unicorns’ on a new Chinese reality TV show.

Jessica Wilson

WHEN you’re facing millions of potential Chinese buyers, your elevator pitch really needs to sing.

Two Aussie entrepreneurs will seize that challenge next year when they spruik their start-up companies on a new Chinese reality TV show, The Next Unicorn.

Dubbed a cross between The Shark Tank and The X-Factor, the show is after the next Airbnb or Atlassian, a start-up “unicorn” that could grow into a $1 billion-plus business.

For two Australian contestants chosen to compete among 15 global entrepreneurs on the show — Jessica Wilson from Stashd and Nick Hough from GradeProof — the opportunity is tremendous.

“The Asian market is the size of the US and European markets combined plus 50 per cent, so if you can tap into a niche within the market, it’s incredible,” Ms Wilson told AAP.

She and Mr Hough are workmates at the Fishburners start-up hub in Sydney, where Ms Wilson developed her fashion app Stashd.

While Ms Wilson says she’d had long-term plans to enter the Asian market, with around a quarter of users of her fashion discovery tool based in the region, she wasn’t anticipating the door to be flung open so suddenly.

“You’ve got to be very tactical about how you crack into the market and this opportunity has now sped up our timelines really quickly, it’s incredible,” the 24-year-old said.

It’s an even steeper rise for Mr Hough, a national 110m hurdles champion who created his education app last summer in between Rio Olympics training sessions and studying law and IT at the University of Sydney.

The 22-year-old entrepreneur coded the software from scratch and hopes the exposure to Chinese markets will draw a flood of users to GradeProof, a writing app that acts like an English tutor, fixing up grammar and expression and offering sentence alternatives.

“We want to be the next spellcheck, something in every word processor and everywhere where you’re browsing the web. It doesn’t just help you correct your writing but it helps you rephrase it as you’re typing,” Mr Hough said.

At the moment the pilot mobile app, which was launched only a few months ago, has about 2500 users, most of them students, but Mr Hough says the potential for the software to be used by professional writers is huge.

Mr Hough and Ms Wilson will head to Shanghai in January to start filming for the show.

They will compete against 15 other contestants for a $A2.5 million investment prize.