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Quick Notes
SouthStart 2026 in Adelaide — I spoke, and attended multiple AI and business related sessions across 2 days.
The big theme: authentic storytelling is more powerful than any marketing budget
Solo founders have doubled in a decade — AI is why, and it's changing how VCs think
Brand voice, community building, and human-first storytelling dominated the conversation
AI came up in nearly every session — always as a tool that amplifies humans, not replaces them
Your Docs Deserve Better Than You
Hate writing docs? Same.
Mintlify built something clever: swap "github.com" with "mintlify.com" in any public repo URL and get a fully structured, branded documentation site.
Under the hood, AI agents study your codebase before writing a single word. They scrape your README, pull brand colors, analyze your API surface, and build a structural plan first. The result? Docs that actually make sense, not the rambling, contradictory mess most AI generators spit out.
Parallel subagents then write each section simultaneously, slashing generation time nearly in half. A final validation sweep catches broken links and loose ends before you ever see it.
What used to take weeks of painful blank-page staring is now a few minutes of editing something that already exists.
Try it on any open-source project you love. You might be surprised how close to ready it already is.
Rundown Time!
BUILDING YOUR BRAND VOICE IS CRITICAL
Everything starts sounding the same. The brands that stand out are the ones with a genuine, specific, unmistakable voice.
That's your competitive advantage in an AI world.
A few things I wrote down:
The "cool friend" trap. If you mindlessly lean into casual + funny + enthusiastic on every platform, you end up sounding like everyone else's cool friend banking app, cool friend cleaning service, cool friend insurance. Be specific about who your voice IS — and who it isn't.
Pick a character. One exercise I loved: describe your brand voice like a Hinge bio. One sentence. Is it a Judi Dench on holiday? A practical, just-get-it-done type? A passionate expert with a sense of wonder? The more specific, the better.
AI copy is vague — and you can feel it. When you read ChatGPT output and it feels almost right but not quite, that's not your imagination. LLMs tend toward vagueness and repetition. Use them to fill blanks, not set your voice.
Build a style guide. Not as a boring document — as a living reference. What words do you always use? What words are banned from your copy? Even small decisions (semicolons, emojis, exclamation marks) say something about who you are.
FINDING OURSELVES THROUGH STORY
This one was my favourite session of the whole conference.
Three speakers: Joel McCarrow (poet and author), Marta Dusseldorf (actress and filmmaker with 30 years in Australian TV), and Samantha Pillay — a surgeon, OAM recipient, AI filmmaker, and founder of AIFilm4Good.
The theme: authentic story is the most powerful business tool you have.
One of the key quotes that stuck with me is:
"AI is the paintbrush. You are still the artist."
She uses AI to tell stories about medical topics that affect millions of people, reaching audiences her schedule would never have allowed before. The technology isn't replacing her humanity — it's scaling it.
The session's big idea: "Find the real thing at the heart of your thing."
Your brand is a megaphone. But it needs something real to amplify. The businesses breaking through aren't the most polished — they're the most authentic. In an age of beige AI marketing, real wins.
STORYTELLING IS IN. MARKETING IS OUT.
This panel was a bit of a slap in the face. In the best possible way.
Three speakers laying out exactly where Australia's startup ecosystem is falling short — and what we need to do about it.
A few stats that floored the room:
Australia deployed $5.1 billion in startup capital last year. Sounds great. But 66% of it went to international markets. Only 34% stayed local.
Australia's superannuation pool is $4.33 trillion. Only 0.5% goes to local startup and tech companies. Most comparable countries mandate 3–5%.
40% of global unicorn creators are repeat founders. In Australia? Only 15%. Our founders are getting rich — overseas — and not coming back.
We need to invest in Australians.
The Key Messages
SouthStart punched above its weight this year.
What struck me most wasn't any single session — it was how consistently the same idea came up across all of them: human stories, authentic voices, and real community are the moat that AI can't replicate.
Every session touched on AI. But none of them were scared of it. They were asking the better question: how do you stay unmistakably human in an AI world?
The answer, from everyone on stage: get more specific, not less. More personal, not more polished. More real, not more refined.
I'll be thinking about this for a while.
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