Opportunity

[Peter Montgomery]

You're constantly adapting, you're constantly evolving. I think it's just a continuum, because you're always looking ahead, I mean you're taking a guess on your opportunity that that will be something that will be valuable to customers now or in a few years' time, and it will have sustainability. So, um, but in doing that because you're connected with a customer and you're customer-centric, you're learning along with them. So, you're constantly adapting your product and iterating the whole time in terms of innovation to keep ahead, and that's essential as well. You just can't stand still.

[Mahmood Hikmet]

We're not interested in just providing technology for its own sake. We want to look at truly how best to serve people the environment or ultimately the client, who hires us to solve a problem for them. And if we're not the ones who can solve the problem then that's not really something that we should be pushing our technology into.

[Sam Gribben]

We are constantly reworking how our product works, and how we um engage with our customers. So, the things that we've had to change, like for example, um we have redone our onboarding flow maybe 15 times and, it's the mentality there is not... it's wrong, we've got to get it right, as how do you.. there's always another few percent that you can eek out of it to get, you know, people over those obstacles. You can always find some place where the flow is a bit bumpy and people drop off and give up.

[Sam Burton]

So Chris Bennett founded bobuck 30 years ago, um, in his garage. He was really frustrated with um socks and shoes just falling off his daughter's feet. So, the shoes in particular, he grabbed and cut the laces out and tied a bit of elastic around, put it on her foot and realised that it didn't come off. And sort of stumbled across a really good product idea. And from there what he did is use, I think he even cut up his wife's handbag, sewed it together and started making these little leather booties. I think one of the biggest challenges was actually creating a market for this product because it was so new there wasn't really an understanding of foot health, which is one of our founding principles. The whole purpose of the leather booties was that it takes the natural movement philosophy where, as the child's foot is growing, uh the foot is moving naturally and it isn't constrained by really strong stiff shoes like you'd see in a little mini-Nike or Addidas shoes. So educating the market about that I think was probably the biggest challenge that they faced, and you know to a certain extent we still face that today.

[Mahmood Hikmet]

So, HMI Technologies started as an electronic sign and scoreboard manufacturer, which meant that we were doing things from score boards in school gymnasiums to little badges that we sold at conventions that people could program at home for themselves. But we found that by niching down and focusing on a problem where we could be an expert there was a real value in that.

[Philip Fierlinger]

The opportunity, it was daunting because we were going up against these massive incumbents, and people thought we were insane. They said you'd never make it because you're going up against these massive companies. And we felt like they were these dinosaurs that just couldn't move, and we were right they couldn't and so they tried but we were able to outmaneuver them very very easily, and they didn't also understand the value that we are able to deliver. They didn't understand the landscape, they didn't understand the opportunity of helping people collaborate and do things in real time. Those were completely foreign concepts to them, so that gave us this great strategic and competitive advantage.

[Sam Gribben]

The other thing I see happen a lot particularly here in New Zealand is people worry that someone will, kind of, take their idea, and... almost too much, kind of, belief in the product as being the thing that defines your startup. And I think the reality is very few or no one is going to be in the right place at the right time to take your idea and steal it. There's that small risk but it is vastly outweighed by the benefit you get from talking to lots and lots of people about your idea. And just hearing, you know, like it helps you to refine your pitch what are they understanding, what are they not understanding. Their questions will help you identify the weaknesses you've got in your plan, and it will help you kind of get an idea of the people that you need around you to make this thing happen.

[Sam Burton]

I think a few years ago we were taking a very much... a shotgun approach to how we put our collection together. By focusing in on individual market, right down to the level of neighborhoods in particular cities, such as Hamburg. We've flown over to Hamburg a couple of times and spent some time in the UK as well doing some very pointed one-on-one customer research projects. Um so going into the mom's homes and asking them questions about how they actually buy shoes, how they use them, um... And what type of product they need you know from season to season, and yeah we found that it was really different to New Zealand. The seasons are much more extreme over there, so they need the big fluffy winter boots, as a result we developed an entirely new range of waterproof winter boots just for Hamburg which went really really well. And that's then expanded across different markets and trickled out. We've also been working a lot closer with our end customers which then feeds that machine as well. So we've got this really amazing process running right now in the business where we're not being so much dictated by our distributors, as we used to a few years ago. When I first started, I remember the distributors coming and saying "yep that shoe's great, but we want it in blue" um "just give it to us". And because we didn't have those really strong stories and that really strong understanding of what the end-customer wants, we pretty much just had to give it to them. So, after going through that whole process of really understanding those end-customers, um feeding that back into the business, we can approach it with a lot more confidence and we're starting to see that in the sales and the data coming through now.

For after sales support, generally if there's a problem with the shoes, we'll just return it. We want to maintain um a really high level of service because we care about our customers so much that we want to make them feel wanted. It's actually much more efficient within the business to be able to handle it like that. If we spend a lot of time deliberating on whether something should be returned or not it just ends up costing us time and money, so by doing that it actually frees up our customer service to be answering other questions, you know, and actually helping them in better ways.

[Sam Gribben]

What you need to really look at is what a customer is saying about your product, you know. I think that quite often... well they don't know about that, they don't know about the things that you've got in mind for where it could go. And what they do know about is what works and what doesn't work. And you need to really get into the minds of the customers as early as you can and kind of, yes, keep your vision of where it's going to go but don't get too sidetracked with like "okay, customers I'll be right with you, I've just I've just got to build this thing it's going to be epic I'll be back in 5 years and it'll be... it'll blow your minds". And just like really get in and find out what is the core of the problem that you're solving, what's the core value, what is the thing that they really really like.

[Peter Montgomery]

I've been in nine startups, um and what I've tended to do is look at processes, and processes will be something that people are doing in their business place. I'm looking at ways of automating, then speeding it up or finding efficiencies or gains in productivity. And if I see something that really interests me is particularly around the um health and safety or well-being uh for people that improves their lives. I'm curious about that, and if I can find something that makes a difference for the company, we can unlock, generate a lot of value for ourselves. And that's how I look for new opportunities in business.

[Phillip Fierlinger]

So, when we started Xero, it was a very different time and a very different era in terms of the business landscape, the tech landscape. Running software online was really foreign, and so we... that was both an opportunity, but it was also a huge risk and a huge obstacle for us because people were freaked out about it, there was lots of security concerns and people were really like "uh I'm not going to put all my business's accounts online, um that's too risky", and we were like "you do know that you have all your money, your literal actual cash money online through your bank". So, um we had to have all those kinds of conversations with people.

[Sam Gribben]

2019... We were doing a lot of user research and... um talking to people who were kind of on the 'disengaged' after a few months and it wasn't quite working for them. And a ton of user research and a ton of really quick feature developments to um iterate the product to address the things that were coming out from that user research. And it just really wasn't making a difference. So, um late in 2019, we kind of stepped back from it and we said, "Well we know what the unhappy customers are saying, what are our best customers say about melodics?" And we didn't really know. The answer was well we don't really talk to them because we only talk to the people who are dissatisfied. So that was a little bit of a tell.