Rydra

Ewan’s Journey with Hyper

“Early in my startup journey, I faced two challenges that fed into one another. When I started Rydra, I was a 19-year-old law and software engineering student with an ambitious idea and little else. I had no real understanding of how startups operated, how to scale a business, or how to navigate the endless decisions founders face. Every decision felt overwhelming because I was making them alone. Even before officially joining, my first consultation gave me a level of clarity I’d never had, enough confidence to raise $30,000 with nothing more than a concept.

Once I joined, I realised Hyper’s greatest value wasn’t refining Rydra, it was transforming me into the founder capable of building it. One lesson stuck: if you spend all your time working in the business, you stop working on it. I naturally gravitate toward coding, product and legal problems, but Hyper helped me see my real job was building an organisation that didn’t depend on me doing everything myself. For the first time, I didn’t feel isolated. I had experienced advisors helping me navigate hard decisions and pushing me toward opportunities I’d have otherwise avoided.

I developed what I call the four stages of entrepreneurship: Uninformed Optimism, Informed Pessimism, Crash and Burn, or Informed Optimism, where founders accept success comes through iteration, not a perfect idea. Hyper also taught me compartmentalisation: not every setback deserves the same weight, and successful founders solve problems individually instead of letting one overshadow the next.

Thanks to Hyper’s guidance, Rydra has grown into a team of seven, a $2.5M valuation with $5M in sight, tens of thousands raised, and six figures in annual recurring revenue. We’re live, generating revenue, and building toward becoming Australia’s leading demand intelligence platform.”