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Built in Wellington: startups get one-stop shop

Wellington startups have a new one-stop shop, builtinwellington.com, designed to nurture the local entrepreneurial community.

The site is the brainchild of startup mentor and programme director Laura Reitel, now working in community engagement for Wellington’s Creative HQ.

She modelled it on similar sites offshore, including builtinchicago.org and builtinla.com, as a portal for news, events and resources. “Since I’m relatively new to Wellington, I realised that it can be somewhat challenging to find out what’s happening around town and get to know the local entrepreneurial minds,” Reitel says.

“I figured that Wellington could benefit from an online community that connects the dots with all the great resources already out there.”

It currently sources news from RSS feeds of New Zealand news sites and stories contributed by local entrepreneurs. “Ideally I see this site functioning as a bulletin board and a broadcasting channel supporting Wellington region entrepreneurs by sharing their news, blog posts, thoughts with the wider community and offering an up-to-date list of events that will hopefully incentivise more people to join the meetups,” says Reitel.

Event information is drawn from sources including meetup groups, the Startup Digest curated by I Want My Name director Paul Spence; and The Fetch, curated by Katherine Field from the Biz Dojo.

“I hope that the entrepreneurs, marketing and social media managers and developers in companies around town will send me some of their write-ups to share with the world. It is meant to be a community site by and for the community.”

Reitel says her role at Creative HQ involves “anything I can do to help local entrepreneurs: brainstorm and strategise around their businesses, connect them to the right people and resources, help them find talented people to hire and so forth.”

She’ll also be a mentor for the second round of the Lightning Lab accelerator, having already worked with companies in the inaugural intake.

Last year Reitel launched Startup Jobs NZ, which she says she might revamp.

Amanda Sachtleben is an Auckland writer and social media type, who's also Idealog's former tech editor and business journalist.

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