ACS has three innovation labs in Australia – Harbour City Labs in Sydney, River City Labs in Brisbane, and Bay City Labs in Melbourne.
‘A Look in the Labs’ is an Information Age series profiling the high-growth startups based in our labs – what they do, their ambitions, and the advantages they’ve gained being based at the ACS Innovation Labs.

This week, we talk to Travis Reading, co-founder and CEO of Vidstep.

Business Vidstep

Established 2019

Co-founder and CEO Travis Reading

Based at River City Labs, Brisbane

Online at Website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram


What does your business do and how does it help people or other businesses?

Vidstep provides 'knowledge in an instant' by converting a simple video into a step by step instructional experience for teams, clients and audiences.

Be it enterprise level or everyday people with everyday skills and budgets, anyone can now produce world-class instructional content in an instant.

How did the idea for your business come about?

In our real-world experience with many business clients around the world, we recognised a trend to beautiful and agile operational software like job management and CRM that helped them to manage the 'who does it', 'what it is' and 'by when'.

However, the 'how to do it' remained very antiquated and disconnected in clunky and expensive training, education and process software.

Vidstep was developed to shift away from heavy training content and provide lightweight and agile instructional content placed within their existing job management software environments.

Was being an entrepreneur always one of your life’s goals and what have you learned about being an entrepreneur?

I was born an entrepreneur so I never had to set that goal, and started in business at a young age.

But, I have certainly had to experience my share of great wins and painful lessons to be ready to take on Vidstep and all that it will demand of me over the next few years.

What has been the biggest challenge and the biggest milestone for your business so far?

As with many things new, our biggest challenge has been helping people to understand the huge distinction between existing training content, versus the click-to-play instantaneous instructional content that Vidstep enables for in the moment/in the field support.

Our biggest milestone has been our reach in such a short amount of time, building a user base in just five months that now spans 136 countries. The problem we address is certainly a global one.

Where would you like your business to be in two years?

Our business is continuing to go from strength to strength.

In two years, Vidstep will be delivering value for over 2 million small business and public users, whilst also servicing close to 400,000 team members within enterprise business levels.

What is the best business or life advice you’ve ever been given?

Marshall Thurber told me many times over that to succeed you must: one, be of service to the highest advantage of others; two, be interested and listen to what people really want (never assume); and three, make sure you have leverage to be able to provide value to as many people as you can

What made you decide to move into the ACS Innovation Labs and how has it assisted your business?

I decided to move into the ACS Labs to be around like-minded people that didn't think my ideas and dreams were crazy, and also to network and collaborate with the fabric of the technology space in Australia to bring Vidstep to a reality.

For more information on the ACS Innovation Labs, visit the websites of Harbour City Labs in Sydney, River City Labs in Brisbane, and Bay City Labs in Melbourne.
If you're interested in joining successful Australian businesses in the ACS Innovation Labs, email scale@acs.org.au for details.