What does it take to build an innovation program in a city with no startup ecosystem to lean on?
That was the challenge Mindesigns took on with James Cook University. Since 2022, Dr Samantha Horseman, JCU’s HDR Innovation & Industry Lead, had been running a startup simulator at the JCU Ideas Lab. Founders who joined the program got real results from it, but the program itself had no marketing, so very few people in the region knew it existed.
Mindesigns directors Omer Bernstein and Santiago Parra believed the program deserved a bigger stage. Before any funding existed, they volunteered their marketing expertise through JCU’s Founders in Residence program. When the Queensland Government’s Regional Enablers Grant was awarded in late 2024, Mindesigns rebuilt the program from the brand up and relaunched it in January 2025 as Impact10X, working with JCU’s Graduate Research School to take founders from first idea to an investment-ready venture.
One year later, every stage of the program had beaten its targets, and the Queensland Government published Impact10X as an official Innovation Story on its Advance Queensland platform. Here are the results of that work, and how the Mindesigns team achieved them.
Starting from zero
When Mindesigns started, Impact10X had no brand, no website, no email list and no audience. The first job they planted was to build the basics. The team created the brand identity, the website, online registration and the application process, then connected them to every marketing channel so the whole system worked as one.
The market itself was the harder problem. In Sydney or Brisbane, a program like this can promote itself to a startup community that already exists, but Cairns had no such community yet. The people the program most needed were tradespeople, tourism operators, health professionals and JCU graduates with good ideas. Most of them would never describe themselves as entrepreneurs.
As Omer puts it, the marketing had to create demand from scratch and educate a community into a category it did not know it belonged to, in a region where the fastest route to failure is a campaign that sounds like it was written somewhere else.
A marketing funnel matched to the founder journey
The core decision Mindesigns made was to stop treating Impact10X as one product with one message. Instead, the team designed a three-stage marketing funnel that mirrors the real journey of becoming a founder. Each stage has its own audience, message, channel mix and conversion goal, and each stage feeds the next.
Stage 1. Expert Sessions. Free monthly events on practical topics for local business owners. These sessions gave people an easy first step into the program. Even someone who would never apply to a startup program will attend a free session that helps their business today. Mindesigns promoted Expert Sessions through paid social media, email and shared channels with JCU and the Queensland Government.
Stage 2. The AI Simulator. A three-day program where participants test whether their idea can work in the real world. Mindesigns promoted the AI Simulator to the audience built in Stage 1, using paid ads, email campaigns and announcements at the Expert Sessions.
Stage 3. The Venture Builder. Mentorship for founders getting ready to grow and raise investment. For this stage, Mindesigns changed the creative approach and told the stories of real founders, including Albert Jindra of Celsi and Claire Hadfield of KidMaps, through video campaigns on social media, email and radio.
News coverage then stretched the budget further. Each founder story was made to be used twice, once as campaign content and once as a story local journalists could run. ABC Far North covered the program on breakfast radio, Cairns Local News featured the Just Bananas story, CityLife magazine ran a long form piece on Celsi, and Cairns Regional Council promotes Impact10X events through its business newsletter.
Marketing results published by the Queensland Government
Every KPI agreed with the Queensland Government and JCU was exceeded once the funnel went live. These are the figures the government published on its innovation platform in December 2025.
Expert Sessions. The 2025 goal was 400 participants. The marketing delivered 950, and 2026 is tracking roughly 10% ahead of that. More than 1,400 people have now attended an Expert Session.
AI Simulator. The goal was 30 applications. The result was 82, and 2026 has already brought 105.
Venture Builder. The goal was 5 applications. The result was 20, four times target, with approximately 35 in 2026 and applications still arriving.
Participant satisfaction. The goal was 3.8 out of 5. The result was 4.6. Dr Horseman’s own assessment, published by the Queensland Government, was that the volume of applicants clearly showed the marketing and communication had reached the right audience.
The channel performance behind those numbers
Those results came from steady growth across every channel, which Mindesigns tracked and reported every month.
A regional audience was built from scratch on LinkedIn, where followers grew 400% in twelve months and organic impressions rose 466% to 45,360. Organic engagement averaged 16.9% for the year against a channel norm in the low single digits, peaking at 46% when founder-led content from the Townsville cohort was posted. Search visibility also followed, with impressions up 516% and the program’s average Google position improving from 20 to 11.
Over time, the funnel replaced the media spend. Website sessions grew 136% year on year, from 4,612 to 10,903, while paid social fell from 30% of all traffic to just 9%. Organic search more than doubled, email traffic grew from 12 sessions to 459, and the email database grew from zero to nearly 1,000 unique contacts, generating more than 1,400 event registrations across 22 events, giving the program its own audience it can reach organically at any time. Conversions rose 159%, from 321 to 832. The marketing reached more than twice the audience while buying less of it, which is why cost per conversion fell from $16 to $3.
The ventures behind the results
The clearest measure of the campaigns is what happened to the businesses they brought into the program.
Celsi, founded by Albert Jindra, provides smart temperature monitoring for food service. Between November 2025 and April 2026, active customers grew from 177 to 240, and major contracts won rose from one to four, including Guzman y Gomez Singapore, Salt House and Sooshi Mango. Celsi hired its first employee in the same period. A Cairns venture now supplies an ASX listed national brand into an overseas market.
Just Bananas, founded by Tony Trafford, operates mobile banana trailers. Ipswich revenue grew from $900,000 to $1.15 million annually while a new Logan operation reached $900,000 in its own right. Jobs grew from three casual positions to six across two cities, and trailers in operation rose from 8 to 25, all without raising capital.
Between them, these two ventures account for seven new jobs, an export contract and more than $2 million in combined annual trading revenue.
What Cairns keeps
Far North Queensland now has a permanent, reachable community of innovators that did not exist two years ago, along with a program that has run 33 cohorts and an email audience of nearly 1,000 contacts it can reach at any time. JCU has documented the model in its own feature on Impact10X.
The work is also putting the region on the map for global businesses. Wärtsilä, a global leader in marine and energy technology with vessel traffic systems in ports across more than 50 countries, found Mindesigns because of its innovation work in Far North Queensland. What began as a design engagement has grown into leading the go-to-market strategy for Wärtsilä’s next-generation vessel traffic system, run entirely from Cairns.
The Queensland Government has confirmed that Mindesigns will continue to lead the next phase of the program, driving its creative strategy, coordination and delivery, with funding in place through to 2027. The government also actively promotes Impact10X events through its own channels.
Be part of the next chapter
The Expert Session series is where most Impact10X journeys begin. Each session brings practical, tested know-how from people doing the work, and every session is free for the local business community.
If you have an idea, a business ready to grow, or simple curiosity about what an innovation program in Cairns could do for you, head to the upcoming events page and save your seat. Join in person at the JCU Ideas Lab or online from anywhere.
