Founded by Rebecca Wilson in 2013, Starts at 60 has grown to become Australia’s largest digital media brand for baby boomers.
Today its audience stands at over 1.46 million users - the largest cohort of over 60s online in Australia - and the Starts at 60 team, based in Brisbane, has grown to over 30 people.
In 2019, Starts at 60 won at the Australian finals of the Startup World Cup, held in Brisbane. The team then travelled to San Francisco for the grand finals to battle it out with the winners from 40 other nations, vying for the grand prize of US$1 million in capital.
“It was a really big buzz to represent Australia at the Startup World Cup grand final,” says Rebecca.
“It’s a powerful opportunity and we were at the right stage to be able to capitalise on it and really position ourselves for our next play, which is expansion and platform play.”
Rebecca says Starts at 60 is moving towards becoming a digital platform, starting with travel.
“We’ve built a marketplace for travel, and now we’re building a range of first-party products as well as working with the biggest suppliers in Australia to list products that consumers can purchase online and offline,” she says.
“Eighty per cent of leisure travel purchasing is from the baby boomer.”
Rebecca credits the recent expansion of the Travel at 60 platform to a round of funding, which saw Hollard Insurance, Advance Queensland, QUT Bluebox and Seven West Media come on board; Seven West Media was also the sole investor in its first round of funding, three years ago.
“It’s a really opportune way to give the baby boomer better travel options - and over time, that’ll bridge together with our marketplace platform.”
Next, she says the focus will turn to finance and health.
“The focus is really on building scale in travel, and then building out solutions in finance and health.
“These are the three biggest problems of the baby boomer market and it’s our goal to solve them with self-empowerment and pathway to purchase solutions - solutions that’ll make their lives and their retirement better.”
From there, Rebecca says the vision is to scale to other global markets.
