Safety at sea strikes right chord

When Ian Wills registered to take part in the Tauranga StartUp Weekend he had no idea what his product would be but won the entrepreneurial challenge with a simple mobile app for boaties.

The event has been likened to television show Dragon's Den, where contestants present ideas to be launched as business models.

While registering without a game plan is generally not the done thing, Mr Wills was not worried.

''I'd had plenty of ideas in the past that I'd just not executed. I thought it would be real good to go along and see what happens in a really quick space and what the barriers are from getting an idea into a reality,'' Mr Wills said.

Mr Wills, who is passionate about the water, came up with the idea of a mobile app enabling boaties of smaller craft heading out to sea a simple method of checking in with Coastguard when they leave, telling it where they will be and when they will return.

The name StandBy came about as a play on words associated with radio communication.

After each of the 22 ideas were pitched to a crowd on Friday night, voting began for the most popular including Mr Will's StandBy.

''People just started congregating around the idea and how to execute it.''

Mr Wills was joined by Phil Harris, Justin Scott, Clare Kemeys, Rachel Donald, Rochelle Alder, Mike Jansen and Kelvin Trask.

The team spent the rest of the night working on their minimum viable product - the least you need to go to market with it-and ''sort of smashed it over the next two days''.

''It's a lot of long hours and effort for everyone involved. It's really dynamic, fast and hard but I'd recommend it to anyone,'' Mr Wills said.

Mr Wills works as lead designer at Comvita, Paengaroa.

''Through my career, I work on branding. I enjoy the design thing and taking business forward.''

A meeting has been set up between the StandBy team and Coastguard to discuss the future of the app.

The four judges were Brett Roberts, Candace Kinser, Cheryl Reynolds and Lance Wiggs.

Chief organiser Sheldon Nesdale said the StandBy concept was ''awesome'' because it was about people.

''It was a community-based product that we could relate to. A lot of us have friends and family who go boating and might forget to check in with Coastguard. It's fantastic,'' Mr Nesdale said.

The StandBy team won $4000 worth of accounting services and business advice from KPMG, eight coaching sessions worth $2000 from Catalyst Management Services, a StartUp Law Pack worth $2000 from Loundes Jordon, three-month hot desk in San Francisco worth US$1500 ($1814) from Kiwi Landing Pad and lifetime membership for mobile app mockups worth $1548/year from FluidUi.