kim-pushstart

- The lack of payment gateway options in Australia sucks - CORRECT

- There is no startup community in Australia - INCORRECT

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There is a massive amount of community activity for those who care to look for it.

Here are just a few examples

- PushStart - http://www.pushstart.com.au

- StartMate - http://www.startmate.com.au (NB: Alan, the OP, is cofounder of http://www.bugherd.com which went through StartMate's first Sydney program and is doing incredibly well)

- Fishburners - http://www.fishburners.org/

- AngelCube - http://www.angelcube.com

- Startup Weekends (here's the next Melbourne one) - http://melbourne.startupweekend.org/

- Silicon Beach Google Group - http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia/

- Sydney Tech Startup Meetup (Open Coffee) - http://www.meetup.com/open-coffee-sydney/

...or just sign up to The Fetch (http://thefetch.org/) or Sydney Startup Digest (http://startupdigest.com/2011/05/24/sydney-startup-events-2/)

From a funding point of view you have more and more angel / super-angel sized investment $$$ coming online all the time. There's also an ever increasing amount of large scale investment into top Aussie startups from leading Valley firms.

This has led to a good number of successful startups and more that continue to be started everyday.

I could keep going on but I won't... :)

The point is, let's not get confused. The post is about a specific issue with being a non-US based startup not about the Aussie startup community as a whole.

Hey everyone - Kim from PushStart here.

We're really glad we're able to add PushStart to the Aussie tech startup ecosystem.

To answer some of your questions

- Mentor Connect, the mentor matching service, will be national. It's heavily Sydney focused at the moment because that's where I, and the other co-founders, are from. That having been said, we have already started adding mentors from QLD, VIC and ACT and as @GVRV rightly says, more will no doubt sign up from all over the country when we open up applications in the next few weeks.

- The startup accelerator will be based in Sydney later on in the year.

- @mwill - A couple of years ago WA was the driving force in the local startup scene but most of the good people from those days have moved to the east coast or dropped out of the scene. You should jump on the Silicon Beach Google Group, the online hub of the Australian tech startup scene ATM, and ask your question there.

Any more questions, feel free to ask below or to send me an email at OOOkim@pushstart.com.auOOO (remove the O's)