Why Brand Is the Only Moat Left in SaaS

that the news only shows us the worst things that have happened in the world that day. So I ended up kind of falling out of love with the news and thinking that it would actually be much more honest and useful to go work in advertising because at least they were honest through literal American $1 notes. We got 2,000 of them out of the bank and made it rain and set up confetti cannons and did like a surprise to her and gave them that money and said, "Hey, thank you for being great customers." brand may be the last mode that you have with software products now that we have AI and that kind of the technical side of things is almost being commoditized.

If you can describe the entire function of a product in three sentences and it's a repeatable process they're cooked, you know, they're going all the margins gone. They're going to be cents on the dollar.

We are going to enter such a golden age of productivity.

I love the concept of butter passing and where there's mystery there's margin. just go and do it and see what happens.

Ideas are worth like jack [ __ ] Absolute jack [ __ ] Like if you can't execute, there's nothing.

Just take that initiative to actually take whatever crazy ideas that they might have and just try to see what comes of it.

Don't be afraid of ambition. Chase it. Love it. Wrap your arms around it and and say it out loud.

New Zealanders don't know any better. They will just get up and give it a shot. That's why we were first to get to the top of Mount Everest. Go to dream that ultimate dream like what is it that you ultimately want to do? and it's all achievable.

All right, so today we're sitting down with um Simon Pound who is a true cornerstone in the New Zealand innovation ecosystem. If you operate in the startup space in New Zealand, you've probably heard his voice before. We've worked on a number of companies together that we'll talk about as well. He's a true brand architect and marketing expert and obviously marketing is going through a really really interesting time at the moment with everything going on in AI. So we'll talk about that as well. But Simon, this is a podcast, but you really started out in a different medium which was very similar which is radio, right? Uh during your university years. Yeah. Yeah.

um started out in student media at BFM and then from there was able to get into the forerunner of Q&A, a show called Agenda, which was a um politics TV show as a politics and media reporter and then went into TV production uh and made heaps of things with TBNZ and TVZ7 um before jumping out and moving to advertising. So um have gone from kind of traditional media to advertising and then into the startup world. What drew you to media in the first place? Why did you want to get involved in it? I loved media. Like it was so interesting kind of adrenaline and being up close and um being near things happening, but it's also kind of like the longer you spend in it, the more you see that it's not actually perhaps that healthy a thing. I mean, we're we're really well served with so many um amazing long form writers and there's amazing media if you seek it out.

But the kind of 24-hour news cycle, the 6:00 news show, the constant publishing of new things, it actually kind of removes people's attention and ability to make things that are lasting be really considered, care about the important things. And I actually think that media um you know it's kind of like we live in the most amazing time ever for normal people. There's never been a better time to be born in terms of health, travel, opportunity, education, lack of violence, unlikeliness to die of violence, child mortality. Like on any possible measure, life's better than it's ever been. But the news only shows us the worst things that have happened in the world that day.

So, I ended up kind of falling out of love with the news and thinking that it would actually be much more honest and useful to go work in advertising because at least they were honest that they just kind of existed to get people's attention to sell them things.

Yeah. And then you worked in advertising and obviously now you're a brand master. Like for somebody who doesn't really understand this world too much, like what's the difference between advertising and branding?

Yeah. Well, I think advertising I went and worked at quite traditional agencies doing brand campaigns for big companies like um Spark when it was called Telecom which kind of dates me a little bit and things like ASB Bank and Lexus and uh Toyota kind of things and working on those big campaigns that advertising uses very well established brand principles because a lot of those industries they actually aren't differentiated at all. So, mobile telefan or banks or power companies, they're all just offering very similar services. And the only thing that really is the difference between them is one's the blue one and one's the red one, one's the yellow one, and they sponsor a different kind of sports team and they have a different kind of we're here to help Kiwi get into homes ad and a different kind of we support small businesses ad, but it's the same kind of stuff.

But what they can do through all of those sponsorships and partnerships and advertising messages and consistent use of distinctive brand assets is that they do build their own brands in the world. And so I came out of that world of very traditional advertising for big big brands. And then coming to the startup world I actually noticed when I went into a company called Vend that it was a point of sale. So to help retailers sell things in their stores. And that reminded me a lot of like a telco. It's something where or like an internet provider or something. It's something where a retailer walks in, turns it on, and it has to work. But it's not actually that differentiated as a product from other point of sales.

And so the ability and opportunity for tech companies to use brand to be more customer ccentric, be more obviously for their community, reflect back their users, do things that their users care about to build emotional uh connection was super there. But most companies in the point of sales space didn't do any of the kind of basics of brand building. And so then we're really interested in using brand as a lever. and Vaughn Ferguson and Nick Holdsworth uh founder and first employee there were massive believers in it. So they got me in and liked this idea of trying to do kind of what you do for a telco or a um internet provider for a point of sale and we took a lot of a lot of inspiration from what Zero was doing. They were really forerunners in building brand and technology companies in New Zealand.

And so we're able to bring these kind of brand principles which brand is really something that's enduring. It's like about your customers and it's something that you share and make happen in partnership with your customers team and market. While advertising can have brand principles, but advertising is really just constant messaging things that go off communications that try to get attention or sell specific things. So brand's really enduring and advertising is much more conversionbased or targeted.

Yeah. And this idea of bringing branding to something, excuse me if I said it, rather boring, like a point of sale system, right? That was still kind of rather new and I think you did a bunch of very interesting things there, right? Like you kind of didn't just Yeah. kind of like optimized for as you said like B2B advertising, but you like did a few like activities and actions all around the world that made this brand really kind of like sexy and interesting. Yeah. Maybe maybe do you have a few example examples of these kind of actions that you did?

Yeah. Well, the you know, like I said that Vaughn and Nick were very natural brand builders and so prior to my getting there, they had done things like oh advertise a partnership with PayPal that meant that you could take payments anywhere. We had a a customer of Ben's in Australia that was a skydive school. So they went to the skydive school and actually videoed for conducting the payment on a mobile device as he fell through the air and that was really cool. So they really had a true instinct and and you know natural aptitude for doing things that got attention and people found really engaging and that was really great for those early adopter customers. And then as we got more targeted to kind of retailers so you know think about like a woman's wear fashion store or a homeware uh or like you know giftware store or something. That was the real sweet spot for vet.

We then tried to like build a brand that really reflected back what independent retailers cared about and what was important to them. And that was really cool because it's really important when you build a brand that you actually do care about the same thing as your customers do. And so we really believed that independent retail was important to support because if you think about the soul of a city when you go to a new place, you want to go check out the districts that have the coolest stores, the coolest cafes, the things that are kind of like unique and special to that city. Like a mall is the same anywhere, downtown shopping districts the same anywhere, but it's those kind of independent things that are the heart of it. And so what we really worked to do was champion independent retail. And so we do that by doing things that they cared about in a way that would support them.

So for example, we did like a retail takeover of shortage in London. And what we did is we used street postering to tell the retailers that we were there and they could enter to win a competition. And that competition, they would win Apple iPads, so they could do a digital makeover of their store and be able to do a more modern experience. And also, they could win the advertising space. So, we had a big package so they could then advertise what they did. And they'd be able to get support and free vend from us and partners. And so, what it was was like a real kind of like the kind of thing a retailer would care about, communicated in a way that a retailer would communicate. And the way we got the word out is we did a collab beer with a local brewery. Um, and then we dropped that into every store in about eight blocks with an invitation to come to an event.

And then we did a series of events and then we did the giveaway and it ended up creating and we used a couple of our customers who had like stores and places like Brick Lane to showcase what we could do to help them be better at retail. And so all of our efforts were like in the vernacular that they used were about how we could help them succeed and showed lighthouse customers that they admired as the kind of experts using vend. And so we were always that kind of like servant brand lifting up our users. And so doing stuff like that, you can't shortcut it. you either do turn up and be in the spaces that they care about and put events on that are relevant to them and showcase people that they admire and give them resources uh or you don't. And so we did a lot of actually like turning up and doing the work for our our customers.

And then in kind of more fun ways as well whenever we had an opportunity to we try and actually just put money in the hands of our customers and increase their profile. So, we had a, for example, a um retail calculator that showed how much using Vend would help the average retailer be more profitable because we had a point of view in the product that they should care about their cost of goods and profit margins. And that was really useful for these retailers. And so, we worked out it was about 2,000 bucks per retailer. So, we found a a a store that we loved and we hid in the store and conspired with the owner's partner in the business and then surprised uh Rose at a store called um Crushers in Oakland as she walked in, like threw literal American $1 notes.

we got 2,000 of them out of the bank and made it rain and set off confetti cannons and did like a surprise to her and gave them that money and said, "Hey, thank you for being great Ben customers and this is kind of the difference we make for you." And so it made for something that was colorful and nice for the socials and for the video, but also it like showed retailers that that's what we actually do. We we turn up for them. And so that's kind of like when we talk about branded previously when I talk about brand what it really means is being really customer ccentric. You have to have a customer in mind and then you have to demonstrate how you make things better for them and you have to reflect back who that customer is and why you're prove how you're helping them. And so yeah, you can't really have a brand without having a customer at heart.

Interesting. That's that's a fun story. How do you come up with these ideas? What's your kind of creative process when you think about what kind of cool activities you could do?

Well, I just thought that would be fun and we had a really great team at Vend where I was the um brand and comm's lead and wrote the website. So our website was our number one. You know it was 80% right up through um

20 million of annual revenue of the revenue came in through the homepage. And so um we had a great demand genen team you know absolute weapons who've gone on to be incredible people um around the industry and I worked very closely with them and the rest of the marketing organization to ensure that their performance marketing and the brand was super closely aligned and so I could see what kind of content worked and was interesting and what could be in line with our um goals as a brand. And then we just did so many AB tests and just so much, you know, it was like going to a five-year SAS and internet traffic business school as we grew from 1 to 20 mil of revenue internationalized around the world.

Partnered with Shopify and Square and PayPal and all these people at the front of their game, did big campaigns with Apple and got to learn and work with people who were the absolute leaders in the world. And so our ideas would be can we make something that these big partners would think is cool and would pay for and then if we could get that over the line we'd go and do some exciting stuff.

So it's just constantly iterating kind of yeah AB testing coming up with new ideas see what sticks basically and being super close to the customers. So the whole time I was there I was actually a managing director of a retail store. My wife's a um fashion designer and so I was super close to the pain points and what retailers cared about and so was able to spend a lot of time doing customer case studies and talking to the people who we served and understand what they cared about as well like yeah being super close to the customer in any kind of productled business or brandled business is obviously like unbelievably important. Yeah, and vent vent is one of those big success stories coming out of New Zealand and there's maybe like a whole vent mafia similar to zero or similar to what we see now at Rocket Lab.

A big part of this is obviously branding and the role that you kind of brought into event with branding. How did that inspire what you're doing today? And also if you think about software products is brand maybe the last mode that you have with software products now that we have AI and that kind of the technical side of things is almost being commoditized. Yeah. Well, um I would say that because you know as a brand person, you know, talk your own book up. But yeah, that same idea that like things like telos, things like banks, things like utilities are commoditized and brand is the moat or the margin. That I believe is going to become more and more true in software and digital products as it becomes, you know, much easier to replicate features and products.

things like truly being for your customers and truly being a customer-led brand, having a community serving them, that stuff does become your moat. And I think, you know, products need to have more and more of a point of view about how they make their users more successful in their work and what they do. So companies that we've been involved with like tracksuit and ideally they're a perfect example of a company where brand tracking that that tracksuit does like there are many products that can do brand tracking now. They were very, you know, they were very fresh and they led that space. But now there are other companies that can do that.

But their moat is the amount of time, effort, community building that they have done with their customers to help brand builders have the tools to be able to make the case to the rest of their organization, the finance department, other people of the value of doing more brand building. When performance marketing is very easy to measure and brand building is harder to measure and it's not completely understood how the leading indicators feed into the performance marketing, it's very hard to make the case to do more brand marketing. But with the tools that track equips people with and then the thought leadership, community building and support that gives to brand builders, its focus is to help brand builders do better brand building and help companies grow better as a result.

And so having that focus on helping your users do what they want to in their jobs is a very important overlay on top of just providing your product or service. And if your product or service is is really optimized and pointed towards helping your users succeed as opposed to just be a repeatable task or process, I think there's always going to be a role for companies like that. But companies, my favorite example at the moment, it's like doc send or survey monkey. Mhm.

So, doc send, you know, you the PDF on the service and then they put it behind a password gate of someone's email. Then they tell you who's seen your PDF and they were charging kind of 30 New Zealand bucks a month for that. And I vibe coded a version that I could use in half an hour and it's, you know, perfectly reasonable for my purposes. And so those kind of like if you can describe the entire function of a product in three sentences and it's a repeatable process, they're cooked. you know, they're going all the margins gone. They're going to be cents on the dollar. But if you're something like Figma, which is a perfect example of the kind of company that has a community, it's doing things like, you know, it's config, it's conferences, a key moment for the community of designers to know where the industry is heading.

The product is an incredible productivity builder and has enabled collaboration and made designers a bigger part of more processes across all kinds of stuff in a company. and businesses have built their entire workflows around it. And they are working night and day to help their users become better at their jobs. Now, that isn't going to get vioded away. That's something that's always going to be really important. And so, brand community and caring about helping your users be better is the boat for the future, I think.

Yeah. No, I agree. I guess for some people who maybe like maybe like growth hackers and software people, some of these words can be a little bit fluffy, right? like what does it mean to kind of build a brand? What does it mean to build a community? Maybe on the example of tracksuit, there's some incredible things that you guys have done that um really built the brand, but also the community. Maybe Yeah, if you have some examples there um to kind of showcase what that really means in reality.

Yeah. Well, I mean tracksuit's really a case of we previously and um the team from TR who came together to help found that we had a lot to do with it in the first kind of six to 12 months but the last kind of four to five years where all their success has been generated has been pretty much completely them with um James Herman who's the founder previously has been involved in thought leadership and working at the future demand ideas and attending events and being a supporter to the company. Yeah. Everything that they've built is very much the work of the company and the team there. It's the kind of great thing of the model of helping to start companies is you then step progressively out until it truly is the company on their own venture. But yeah, we've been able to observe up close the great things that they have done.

And yeah, they they have helped those people who want to build brands actually do more brand building, not just give them a dashboard that tells them what their awareness metric or consideration is versus their competitors. They've helped them make a case for how they can do more brand and why doing more brand will help them grow further into the future. And so they've done that through thousands of events, amazing resources that people have used, research that they've published with partners like Tik Tok and Google, um work that they've done to showcase how the leading companies on their platform have used their brand data to grow.

And they've got as a result of all of these activities compounding some of the best brands in the world using their product and are becoming almost like a Neielson number where your tracksuit data about your brand is now something that boards want to see before they are wanting to invest in more top offunnel brand building type activity like why should you be spending money on these things if you can't measure will they have an impact on your leading indicators as they happen. So yeah, they've done a fantastic job and takes suit just such a great example as well of how a company out of New Zealand like they have grown to, you know, a very significant size out of only about a thousand customers and there are hundreds of thousands of more customers in the states, the UK, Australia, EU who are consumer brands who could be using them.

So I feel like, you know, the trapsuit story could very much just be getting going.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's definitely one of those great companies coming out of New Zealand at the moment and yeah, the the branding is just really really on point and yeah, we we can show a few pictures perhaps on what that means. Let's talk about previously unavailable. So the model there is really interesting. I mean you have a fund but you also do more than that. You invest through sweat equity essentially. Yeah. Maybe let's talk about what the model of previously unavailable is.

Yeah. So previously I've been here for a bit over 9 years since coming out of End and from the very beginning um was really excited by what James Herman and Chris Pel and Ed Deber who were there when I came over were experimenting and working on which is this idea of creative people do work by the hour and then it creates a lot of value for companies and they never really capture that value yet they are you know especially in advertising an industry that James and I came out of. You can see the it's very measured in terms of the effectiveness awards and the impact that campaigns have on sales, but you only ever get that kind of hourly wage. And so there was a real idea about how do we redefine the value of creativity and be a company that shares in the upside.

And there was some cool companies like Fahrenheit 212 and a few other kind of like Red Antler, you know, some even like um Lucky Sandwich. Uh it's Lucky Sandwich. Yeah. um who were experimenting with taking equity with startup clients and having some great results. And so we worked to offer startup founders really professional brand and design services kind of much earlier than they'd normally engage them in return for equity with the idea that by doing this earlier they could increase their trajectory, attract more customers, be more professional, get better partners, get better team, and get better investment terms. And if they could work with us on like a safe note, the idea would be pay us at kind of 20% off your next valuation, but we should have hopefully increased your next valuation a wee bit. So, um, this should be a good deal. So, that was the kind of idea we went out with.

And we found a bunch of customers, clients, friends, um, who like kind of got it and enjoyed it. But we also found that it was a very very new offer for the industry and a lot of people in tech in New Zealand had come out of straight technical environments, product or engineering or research. Very few had been part of businesses where brand and marketing were taken seriously, invested in or a part of their success. And that's just a factor of like the age and maturity of the ecosystem. There's been like Zero is a good example of a company that's done that. Vins's become one. Timely who we worked with to help them rebrand to be more of a brand lead company is another great example. But 9 10 years ago they were thin on the ground. And so quite rightly I think technical people were a bit kind of like wary of you know these people coming in and waving their hands about the power of brand.

And so that led us to found tracksuit to help to put some measurement around the power of brand. James has done a lot of research and some thought leadership like his book future demand has been a fantastic asset to help people understand why startup brands have brand as a lever they could pull and what the benefits are in a very kind of clear and fact-based way. And then we've just done an enormous amount of advocacy and trying to turn up with our VC partners. We've done webinars and conferences and speaker things and workshops for MOVAC and Blackbird and Ice House and just just so many um people in the ecosystem. Talked at Electrify, South by Southwest and just trying to be advocates for how brand for the right kind of companies can be something that can be a real accelerant to their success.

So our view is you can't outbrand problems if you have a great team, a great product and and and have doing the things that your customers love, a clear idea for your customers and you're making things your customers love. Then a really strong and clear brand idea and proposition and visual identity and set of behaviors and activities that are consistent to build your messages will help you go faster. If you don't have a great team, product or product love, then a great brand and all of the rest of it isn't going to isn't going to be the difference. But if you do have that set of things, then it will help you go faster. What's your favorite case study out of those nine years, your favorite rebranding that you did? And maybe walk us through the process as well. How does it usually work when a founder comes to you and says, "I understand the value of branding. I need to do something here.

Simon, please help me."

Well, I think a cool one to talk to could be appetize. Is there um people in your portfolio as well that you guys have um been part of the journey? So they're a really great example of how brand can be a platform for your next stage of growth. So they came to us through Ice House Ventures, our partner in brand fund, the small VC fund that we have and Ice House were looking to lead around with them. They were called Menu Aid, which was a great name for their initial concept, which was just a menu app. But that team there, an app that helped people do grocery shopping and chose their meals that they would cook for the week and then got the right recipe and they were charging members of that community something like four bucks a week or something to use the service. And that's what it was. It was a menu. But what that worked out and and its goal was to kind of like kill admin.

So get rid of the admin. And then what they had done is worked out that from the huge amount of data they were getting about what people's shopping habits were, what food they wanted to cook, what recipe ingredients they substituted out, they had this trove of amazing data that food brands would love to know. So they created some really strong relationships with B2B customers, people like Fonta and, you know, a lot of the biggest brands on your supermarket shelves, and said, "Hey, would you be interested in getting access to this data?" And so they built out this new category of behavior-based B2B FMCG kind of food brand insights.

So they needed a brand that would cover um a change in the business model to be a brand in the world of food for food companies as well as they wanted to change their app from being the revenue driver to be free and then they wanted to be very welcoming and bring many many more people onto the platform. And so Menuade was good for the first stage, but it didn't fulfill that purpose. And so we went, great, what a cool business. What an amazing founding team. Look at the progress they've made. They haven't even touched their food brand for the last like year because they've been working so hard building out the B2B side. What a perfect project.

So then we could come in and help capture the energy, generosity, hospitality, maybe yummness of the recipes they made every week and the way that they shared the food with everyone and make the whole brand feel like that cuz it had felt very thin and get to the point and no admin. It didn't do the fun stuff when you think about a food brand. It wasn't like Gordon Ramsay or Nigella Lawson or Jamie Oliver or like a magazine. You know, you think about food magazines and you think about recipe books and you think about restaurants and you think about dinner parties and it's all generosity and y but that wasn't captured yet. And so we came up with a very simple strategy. Move from being kind of admin to being advertising. And from that the name kind of popped out. Advertise sounds kind of like a tech company. Sounds kind of yum. Sounds kind of active. Cool.

And then we used that as the base of doing a brand that was all about generosity, hospitality, and yum essentially. And then a professional version of that for the food companies because they also care about the same things as the users. So that was like a dream project cuz we were able to just show to the external world what was true internally, work really closely with that team to capture what was important to them. And then that relaunch that Toby and Elise ran brilliantly led to a 20% bump in customer users of their free app overnight from the media coverage and the interest. And then since that time we have ah, you know, quadrupled revenue, east of 3x, moved to Australia, built a big team, got other great VC involved, and now have um the opportunity to really lead this platform into new markets and be a really significant business.

And the cool thing is that that brand that we made them kind of three years ago now is still, you know, that they're executing it so well and it still is like helping to capture and carry that energy and optimism and just how just how great a team that they are. So that's quite like a dream project and it's a dream project cuz we invested in it from brand fund. We invested in it from previously off our balance sheet and we have you know had like a great relationship because they have known that we are making our suggestions as investors and partners because we really think they'll work not because we want to you know make some nice imagery. It's like we really believe that this will be a horse multiplier for your business. So we have a great relationship on the work that we've done and we've become good mates as a result.

Yeah. And it's Yeah. Yeah, Toby was on the podcast a few months ago and they obviously just raised the series A which we were part of as well. So, it's a great success story overall and yeah, we love the brand. It it looks really cool and um yeah, the way you describe it really makes sense. Um I think that's kind of how you feel it when when you look at it and look at the website and everything. How like how does it work when somebody like Toby and Elise, they come into your office? Do you tell them what they need to hear or do you make them tell you what they like what what does what does this process look like really when when you start working with farmers?

I mean every project will have different needs. So theirs was really clear they wanted to move off the name and that feeling um and capture the next stage of the business. So the most important thing like the thing we do which is different than a normal brand studio is we try to create like a a single team who see all the information together make all the decisions together and iterate towards a goal which is much more like product design than or product management than traditional creative where you do a quick briefing and then you would go away as the agency and come up with all the you do all the research all the benchmarking all of the ideation alone. Then you come back with three different ideas and hope that they pick the one you like, but in actual fact you merge them and make a donkey. And that's like a terrible way to get to the best outcome.

So what we do is we make one team, we get very clear on what our strategic goals are. We do research together, have a workshop together where we run down the themes, set what our goals are for success, benchmark really thoroughly to see what brands in the category do and don't do and what other brands out of the category do to communicate the concepts. So if I talk to the appetizers example, we went, well, what are other food um apps, you know, meal kits do? Okay, well, they're not that interesting, but we need to have some of those conventions because people need to know where they're what they're using. But then what do food brands do? We actually went and looked at what great um recipe books and what great magazines and what great media did and then went, well, how can we feel like this? And then we looked at the themes of like generosity and we were like, well, how do they do that?

It's like, well, big zoomed in images are like, wow, you're going to get heaps and so let's do that. And then really colorful displays means that it feels like it's going to be a treat. And so we actually like go through and pick out kind of concepts that we think will help um yeah convey convey those ideas or or design techniques and then we kind of put it all in the hopper and then try and build out a a really cohesive brand world and then we iterate that together to the end. Then we give people a toolkit in Figma where they can activate the brand themselves. We don't stay on retainer.

We believe that brand should be the voice of a company and that should be in a company and so we help them get designers and help those designers get up to speed and that's the kind of like dream approach but in some cases you do have to go hey a our view is that doing this kind of approach is going to be much more beneficial than not. But then what we try to do is show examples, show other brands that have done it, get people if they aren't sure to talk to other founders who've been through the process cuz the principles and the ideas that we take people toward are very tried and true in every other area of business. Like be customercentric, narrow down your customers to have some hero customers, make things that your customers want to see, ground your brand and what your customers care about, not what you care about. Make distinctive assets. All of those principles have an idea.

So you can execute an idea and it will be easier to know what marketing to do, what content to make. All of these principles are very tried and true. They're just very um new sometimes.

So what we do a lot of is just trying to help have empathy for the fact that people haven't thought of these before, but everyone we deal with are like the smartest people in the world. They just haven't been in the zone before. So yeah, like going through kind of a a good process means that we get to a really good place. And you're also investing money into some of these companies. Do you think a founder needs to have some sense of branding always or do you think that's something you can hire for or outsource in a way?

Think like think a founder needs to be customercentric. So if you're customer ccentric, you can be a good brand builder. Like it's that simple. In terms of like taste and design chops, I don't think people need to be absolutely expert in that. It's kind of similar to like you know you know that you want a really great like compliant DevOps platform that you know has got fantastic like you know best practice cyber security or whatever but you don't need to know all the details if you're not the person that knows that. So you need to get good people and then trust them and then check to see if it's working from data of what your customers care about.

And so the best people who aren't naturally confident themselves on taste and design what they say like for example Carl Margrain who we worked with at a glow he was a payments expert who had a company called Payleer and when we said well he he'd identified that beauty tech was his biggest opportunity and when we did a rebrand and naming for him he said I totally understand that we need to be more of a beauty brand and we need to look like a beauty brand to connect with this market.

I'm not a beauty guy like I know the industry but I'm going to make sure the three women on my team who've worked in the industry their whole life um their whole career they are the people who are going to lead us through this project as to whether it's landing and like that is good leadership gets the strategy understands what we're trying to do and then gets data points that can like tell them whether we're on the right track that are customer ccentric and then we tested it and pushed it out and they've been great brand builders so I think like yeah he's a perfect example of If you're customer centric, you can be a good brand builder.

I see. So, some intuition, but you don't need to be like on the tools kind of, you know, knowing how to like pick the right color and making

the biggest thing, the biggest thing is to go when you start a product and you're a founder, it is about you. It's about I've seen this problem, have a technical or process kind of approach to it that I think I can solve. I think customers are going to be into it. And quite often it's a lot more about like what you're doing in the early days. But once you get enough customers, that center of gravity should change and you go from being a product company to a brand. And that just means it's not about you, it's about your customers. And so the people who can make that transition then go, okay, well instead of like, do I like orange? You know, for example, purple, is purple going to be a useful color? Let's test with our customers. Yeah, no one else is using purple in the space. Our customers love it. We should use purple.

Like that's how you should make a decision on color rather than if if you're questioning it yourself rather than going I don't like purples so we shouldn't use purple because it's like well unless you're your customer which in some places you know people are and you deeply understand what your customers kind of aesthetically care about then it's not it's not as important as the strategic goal.

How much um kind of yeah in in brackets but how much do you think branding is science versus art? I well like the strategy our strategies are like wildly simple like you know um appetize be like a yum food brand you know like that was basically the strategy you know and if they're not that simple like era Derek Handley's company that does an app and interesting um partnerships with property developers in order to get people into first homes radically cheaper and radically easier than traditional ways to get into a first The strategy there was first homes faster. And you know that insight came from young people thought they were or first-time home buyers thought they were years away from saving a $200,000 deposit if they had the average Kiwi saver and the average savings which were about. But if you went for a first home new build off the plans, then you could get in for a 10% deposits.

You only needed to get to 100K. And then if you worked with ERA and they gave some of the development and broker fee back to you, you only needed about 20 or 30K. And so like putting that concept in as first times faster as opposed to cheaper or whatever meant that that brand was completely oriented around that. And so the visual brand kind of feels fast. It references symbols of racing. Kind of feels like kind of F1 times kind of hot cars kind of thing. Hot Wheels. uh they wear kind of like racing kit, the logo is kind of like leaning into the world and everything they do carries this sense of like speed and energy. And so like a brand strategy of like first time's faster, make sure the brand feels like it's fast and it's engaging because your customer are people in their 20s and 30s. Um make sure it'll fly on TikTok. Like that's the strategy.

And so you got to be that simple to be able to actually convey a brand on the screen. So that's the science is to go be confident enough to have one clear idea and then commit to it. But then the art is to convey that idea through your visual brand, through the way you act and turn up in the world. So what events you go to, what your trade show looks like, what partnerships you do, what case studies you choose to tell, what thought leadership you do, what kind of ads you put in the world, all of that stuff. That's the art to go well how do we convey that idea in a way that will be effective distinctive so you know clearly from you ownable like you know something that you know people will remember you at the end of it and then you know engaging so will your customers like it and in there is is is a lot of

gotcha interesting yeah that's um yeah because I guess yeah you can kind of like do a very scientific approach to branding and just kind of like test the [ __ ] out of everything right but some of it is probably just kind of like intuition feeling. Yeah, just art. I want to talk about new and improved ventures as well. So, you're not just doing branding, but you're also building companies in marketing tech specifically. And you've launched one company, Ether. You're in the process, you just told me earlier, in the process of launching a new one. Yeah. Tell me about what you what you're doing at Newmproved.

Yeah. So, New and Improved is the venture studio where the people who started tracksuit and ideally have come together to make more great marketing technology companies. So Tracksuit was and and ideally were both companies that previously unavailable partnered with TRA to launch and Conan Bray and Anthony Eid the two key people out of TRA partners in that business have actually come out of that business and are full-time in new and improved which is amazing and then us as previously we have I've got a third Chris Michael's got half James and Phoebe have um parts of their week on kind of key responsibilities And then we've got three nearly four full-timers who work in the business as well. Laura Laather who's the chief of staff, Hannah Andrews who's the um COO, Ashish, our amazing lead developer.

We've got like yeah a really cool team who have with with Con and Bray as the lead in that business who have worked together to create these two companies and are trying to put what we've learned across both of those processes into making a repeatable model for making great SAS and software businesses out of New Zealand for the global mart community. Ether is the first one that we've launched which has been an amazing experience getting that into the world and that's been in a much more kind of pure AI space which um is a really is a really fastm moving and dynamic environment and then our next startup that we're launching shortly is in the um PR communications getting your story out to the world space and that's very much like a tracksuit or an ideally where we're looking to replace an agency and be a tool directly in the and of marketing leaders.

Yeah, it's super exciting time to be launching companies, super exciting to be able to have such great talent wanting to work and be part of these companies. And then we're very fortunate that because of the success that tracks suit and ideally uh are having in the world, which is again 100% because of what they're doing,

more and more people are interested in this model and so we're attracting great investors, partners, and customers.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's super interesting space to innovate in especially at the moment with everything going on in AI. I don't know how much you can already talk about your new venture but yeah curious to hear more broadly how you think AI will change marketing in general different aspects of marketing.

Yeah well one of our observations is that um marketing as a function is and in kind of you know big enterprises and big organizations is underappreciated and undervalued. uh you know in many instances the marketing lead kind of sits underneath the CRO and that CRO is more of sales lead. Marketing is one of the biggest spend lines in a business and one of the biggest levers for success. If you do it well you attract more customers, you have a better business. If you don't do it well you have fewer customers, you have a poorer business. And marketing actually touches the whole customer life cycle. So building awareness, getting them converted, onboarding, retention, advocacy, loyalty, you know, there's this whole cycle of things where marketing principles and kind of caring for the customer are vital.

Yet marketers like they don't even have like all of the tools and skills that they do inhouse. So if you think about most bits of a business like marketing is unusual because often a marketing leader will have a communications agency, a PR agency, an advertising agency, a media agency, a performance marketing agency, an SEO agency, an events agency, an activations, you know, like they've got like just so many people, not to mention research, market research, brand tracking. They're a part of the industry where they don't often have all of their team within their team.

And so what we think is going to keep happening and what we've seen happen with tracksuit and ideally and ether and now our new venture is instead of like you know take Ideally as an example instead of a marketing director going I want to know if my if this new pack is going to be of my soft drink it's going to be relevant to the age group that I want to target. And so what they do is they brief in the past brief their insights manager who would brief an external agency who would go to a data provider and then they would come back make a report give it to the insights manager and give it to you. And that would be 2 weeks and $20,000. And what I did was build that straight onto the survey data and put that tool directly in the hands of insights managers but also marketing managers. like you can partner with your insights manager or directly as that marketing person.

Ask those questions and get stuff back literally in order of magnitude cheaper and faster. So overnight for like maybe a couple of thousand compared to 20,000. And so that is revolutionary for speed, efficacy and putting the power in the hands of marketers. And so what we've done there at Ideally or what ideally you have done there being able to do that with PR which is another spend which is bananas and then there's also so many other slices of the marketing budget which currently have an extra margin and in the past an extra margin often an extra step to get to the actual data or value. And in the past that was vital because domain expertise was such that you wanted to have specialists be your partner. But now because of AI, LLMs, the ability to build products for the point of view, your product can be the keeper of the domain expertise and many more people can access that.

And so that's a really exciting really exciting time.

Do you think all of these agencies that you just mentioned will they disappear?

I don't know. I think people who are Do you know the concept of like a butter passing job? I kind of love that expression. the idea that if you're just a middle if you're just a middle person, you know, pass the butter, please. If that's basically what you're doing, if you're just going taking someone's, hey, I want to know this, taking it to the survey provider, getting the data back, putting it in a presentation, and then charging them 10 grand, you're caught. But if you're their strategic partner to help them understand the voice of customer, and you bring extra awareness. But I think you're going to have to radically prove your value and stop making margin out of butter passing.

And you know there's this other expression I love where there's mystery there's margin because of the AI LLM ability to give you domain expertise in most industries and right now it's like pretty good but run it forward like a year it's going to be amazing and there's going to be so many more specialist kind of you know insights manager in your pocket or whatever LLM use cases that if you're banking on mystery or butter passing you are going to be a bit cocked. But like everyone who's actually good at their jobs and understands like customer value, if you use these tools to deliver way more value to your customers in the same budget, you'll be fine. And if you use the trust you bring as someone who has experience and knowledge, who knows the difference between a confident looking wrong answer and a confident looking right answer out of an LLM, then you become more valuable.

But I do think there's going to be contraction and those junior roles that are just administrative or number crunching um are going to are going to really fall away. But then like is that a bad thing? Like should people be spending the first 10 years of their career doing dumb calculations and making spreadsheets and staying till midnight reworking stuff that can be done in minutes and um any kind of great AI partner like maybe everyone's going to be just like way more productive in the future. And yeah, I I think we're coming to an, you know, if we don't destroy the world, you know, using all these new toys to kind of like blow each other up, we are going to enter such a golden age of productivity.

Yeah. No, I I love the optimism and yeah, I certainly don't Yeah, I spend a lot of nights aligning boxes in my consulting days. So, I definitely think that's not an activity anybody should do, but I love the concept of butter passing and where there's mystery, there's margin. Um and I think yeah that that's probably a really good framework to think about what's going to stay relevant and what's going to disappear. If you think about company building there's this concept of like building billion dollar company with one person and you know everything else is outsourced to some agents. Do you think marketing is one and there's all these kind of different aspects of marketing right like PR advertising and so on. Do you think that's something that you can at some point a founder can just say do my marketing, bring me sales, bring me clients.

How much does how much does the founder still need to be involved in like a 10-year future where these things are going to get going to get really really good?

Think like, you know, back to that customer centricity. If you're the founder, your job is to make sure that you understand what your customers needs are and then deliver something that like radically delivers that value to them and keeps getting better for them and is easy to use and they love. Like that's your job as a founder. Like, and if you've done that well, then using third party platforms that will get your message and proof points in front of the right customers will be much easier. Like already things like we've invested in Cudible who are doing an amazing job for e-commerce retailers making ads that convert way bigger for them and as they continue to kind of prove out the ROI. You know people don't want ads, they want sales, they're just going to keep becoming more more powerful for brands who care about their brand.

Meta, if you're an e-commerce retailer or someone selling services through Meta, they already go, "Hey, just tell us what you want to sell and we'll put it in front of the right audience." So then the actual unique value proposition, your actual message and the actual value that you deliver becomes more and more important because anyone can kind of get to the right audience. So you've got to actually just be the best. So I think I think like you know the world's always ending and there's always opportunity and I think you know at the moment every business has to hire specialists in demand gen and SEO and whatever else it is they need to do to get to their customers and it's just going to be a different way of winning those battles against your competitors but it still comes back to like what's the essence.

Yeah, I love that. No, that's great. And yeah, it's really really energizing to speak to you because you have such an optimism about where the word's going. Yeah, we we don't always hear that. So, it's that's statistically great. heaps. There's going to be a lot of this and a lot of people are cooked and a lot of things are cooked, but I think overall I mean I keep going back to um I I'm half Irish and my Irish relatives were very very poor 100 years ago and were like pulling plows with their you know shoulders and you know like now life is unbelievably more productive because you know me as a surf I'm not standing there pulling a plow for eight hours a day and you know women are no longer at home doing repeated washing tasks all day long.

And you know, I really feel like you run these arcs out and you go, what happens when all of the clever people stop doing butter passing domain specialist jobs like consultants, lawyers, accountants? What if all these smart people were doing useful things? What happens if bankers were doing useful things? What happens if like administrators were doing useful things? And I think like it's definitely not going to be smooth sailing for everyone, but overall I think there should be a lot more productivity.

I agree. Great. No, that's that's a really optimistic version of the future which I love and which I 100% subscribe to. Can we do three quick questions to kind of round this up? So first one would be if you had to describe New Zealand as a brand, how would you describe it and how would you make it better? See, I've seen the research and New Zealand as a brand by the outside world is seen as empty, benign, and green, maybe with a bit of sheep and hobbits. And so, like those things, they're not bad, but they're not good for all the things that are important for New Zealand's future, like being a center of tech excellence, being able to have high value waiters exports, attract amazing talent to live here when our companies go overseas for them to be able to hire the best people.

So there's a lot of work to be done to build relationships and mind share in places like America especially where there's great work happening but the more we can do the better because what we want the world to think about us Yeah. and what the world actually thinks about us are probably quite far apart.

Makes sense. What's a brand you admire the most?

Admire the most. Man, I love I love so many brands for what I really admire is when you know it's very hard to go has this company done a great job without knowing what was the brief, what was the client like, how much was the budget, how much time did they have, you know, like it's very hard to know when people make things whether they did the exact best possible thing they could have in the circumstances or if they completely, you know, missed an opportunity. So, like I kind of like um I love it when I see anyone doing stuff that's really um that that I feel is like inspiring and and pushing things forward.

Um, I might take that slightly separately and go there's a company in New Zealand called Motion Sickness who are in the advertising and kind of content creation, brand building space and they have consistently worked with clients that I know are hard like government departments and you know like business associations who have no money and they have turned around the most interesting, most out there work that like looks way more expensive than it was to produce and works its socks off and it's like brave and you go how did you get this out when you know the clients are so conservative and the budgets are so low and you know everything will be hard and so yeah they they're someone I really admire as a kind kind of like a brand builder because they consistently do things that I just go wow that's so cool that you made that you know people might have seen that they did the um the the thing for the fire service about not cooking when you're like high and so they got wasted people to cook and that was amazing.

And they did this the census work where they got you to rip your suburb and people if they enrolled to vote would get like cool things ripping their suburb. And they did the beware of porn ad where they had the porn stars turn up to the door and the mom answers and the son's like uh-oh. And like that kind of stuff is like and they did the herpes campaign. That stuff's like brave and hard and and really cool.

Yeah. Awesome. No, I need to look those up. That's they sound really fun. Um, what do you think your day today will look like in 5 to 10 years when all the AI agents do all the annoying work?

Yeah, I feel lucky that like I'm 44 now and have had a good time in the industry and so I was already going to be getting more and more into governance and fund stuff and like supporting founders and probably less on the tools over time. So, I think my time, if anything, these tools will mean I'll be building more stuff than I was. Like, I'm already, you know, like every person who's seeing these amazing new tools. I'm just making so much more stuff and it just feels amazing. So, um, that's really cool. I'm loving that. Yeah, I feel I feel lucky that I've already come up through the industry and and have a bit of an understanding of things because I do wonder about what a lot of jobs will look like.

Not out of fear or concern, but like I don't have that clear view because I think people are going to have to use this army of PhD plus level intelligence in their pocket to solve problems that are actually valuable. And there's not a road map for that. And so I think the most valuable and important people in society are going to look a lot more like founders and a lot less like lawyers, accountants, you know, even doctors, you know, like so many of these roles where our highest IQ people have gone. I think I think that's going to change a lot. Like the most valuable way people can spend their time will hopefully be inventing new things, not um yeah, not just kind of like getting the same job that the kind of upper classes have had.

Yeah. Yeah. I hope so too. And uh yeah, I think we're in the right industry to experience that change. Great. Simon, this has been really really fun. And uh yeah, so good to hear about your insights around branding. We talked about Appetiz. That's obviously one great company we have in common, but there's a few more like Symphfony, like Spoke, and yeah, we're really really grateful to have you as a partner. And yeah, thank you for for joining us today.

Hey, thanks for the kindness. And uh yeah, such great companies, and it's just such a privilege to be able to work with people like that. So, thanks for the time and the kindness.

Awesome.

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