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ATEEDNovember 10, 2016

On the Grid: One Fat Sheep are custom-building reality

Contributing writer
ofs-featured

There’s a revolution underway. Deep within the Auckland Viaduct lurks the beginnings of our own tiny Silicon Valley. At GridAKL, more than 50 startups, in industries as diverse as medicine, robotics and augmented reality, are running the entrepreneurial gauntlet looking to build a high-growth business – or at least a get a second funding round.

In On the Grid, a sponsored series with Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED), we tell their stories. In this, the fifth instalment, digital design firm One Fat Sheep.

Almost surreptitiously, cellphones are in the midst transitioning from a screen in which we view snapshots of the world to a lens through which we can see an enhanced version of its entirety. Nobody understands this better than One Fat Sheep.

A digital marketing agency with roots in traditional web development, OFS have turned pizza boxes into gaming arenas and trans-Pacific flights into mere formalities with their innovative take on an augmented and virtual reality experiences.

After visiting Singapore in VR and shooting down a horde of the undead on a pizza box, I spoke to New Zealand Managing Director Sebastian ‘Bazz’ Deans in the GridAKL Tech Cafe.

*

The Spinoff: So, One Fat Sheep, 2009 was the initial kickoff right?

Sebastian Deans: Yeah that was sort of early days.

Those were early days for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) as well – either could easily have turned out to be a gimmick.

Certainly, but I guess for us our ethos has always been to push the boundaries and that might be a bit cliché sometimes but for us it was about technical boundaries.

To explain it further, we spent a lot of time in that space; AR came on our radar first and VR didn’t come onto our radar until later. Augmented reality for us has far more scope and that helped us to understand that it had longevity. AR for instance can help make complex systems appear simple, and it’s that simplicity that helped us understand it was going to be around for a long time.

VR came for us around 2014. By then it had had a bit of time for validation and we started to find user cases for it. We looked at areas such as training, which we’ve come to understand has got long term possibility, and gaming – obviously you can see gaming from a mile away, that’s the whole point of it – and then even around tourism. For us tourism is a massive focus. We’re not necessarily thinking long-term about VR, we’re thinking is this an opportunity for the next three or four years?

It almost feels like VR has been in the collective consciousness long enough in gaming that it’s old news basically. But that tourism example – I’ve never seen anything like that before. Where did you get the inspiration to go into that space instead of going down the gaming route?

That came from two different routes I guess. We started building websites in the tourism space so there’s that natural progression. We started to understand the sector, we started to understand our clients better and we started to understand that 360 video was coming too. We saw 360 video quite early on which is great. We were fortunate in some ways. Then we started to understand how taking that 360 experience and expanding on it is so important for us.

Shooting 360 video is great, but it doesn’t have longevity for us because soon it will become ubiquitous. Every man and his dog will create 360, everyone will be in [on it in] the next two or three years. So what we have to do is add value.  For us it was about going ‘What can we build into that experience that allows a bit more room to move from a client’s perspective?’ and then they can manage it themselves as well.

baz
Sebastian ‘Bazz’ Deans. Photo: Rebecca Zephyr Thomas

When you’re moving into a space with emergent technology, and you’re looking at where to go next, where do you draw your inspiration from? There’s nothing to base it off aside from maybe science fiction.

Good point. I guess it’s often internal first. We’re chucking around technologies and coming up with ways that we could apply them, and of course we apply agile methodology after that. We test with our family and friends at first, some of them under a non-disclosure agreement, hilariously enough, which can be a little awkward. It’s a little bit funny, ‘Sorry my love, can you just sign this NDA?’


But it’s with those core clients who we really have close relationships with that you start to understand the value a bit more. We put it to them with a few options for a few different concepts, often for free. The notion for us is about testing, trialing, delivering, testing, trialing, delivering. I guess the way we start to understand iteration of technology is that if it’s not out there, build something very minimal. MVP as we call it – minimal viable product – proof of concept, or just a dabble, don’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars developing it, then give them a sample and test it.

How does that work on a practical level? Are you literally sitting around brainstorming, thinking ‘Hey, this would be fun’?

Sometimes, absolutely. We’ll definitely take inspiration from around the world. Obviously there are people out there in the US and so on doing amazing things, so sometimes we’ll take inspiration from them and figure out how to do it possibly better, or just replicate it because it’s a great model, but yeah, sometimes we literally just sit around in a circle or on Skype. We’ll sit down, talk about current technology and talk about the challenges we’re facing. Of course, we’re also continuously out talking to clients. From there we start to understand what the challenges are, and then we see the technology and think ‘Well, why wouldn’t you use that technology for training, for instance?’ That is massive. Or, AR from some point of view of overlaying a game mechanic on top of a real-world product, exactly like Hell Pizza. We recognise those tie-ins.

So you think that AR is where the real market is going to be? Is that down to the proliferation of mobile phones over headsets?

I feel it’s the space to move into because of that notion of scope, the broadness of scope of AR. You’ve got so many more opportunities, so you can go from one end of the spectrum, engagement, so Hell Pizza for example was phenomenal as far as engaging customers, brand awareness, even sales at that point. Then you go to the far other end of the spectrum, which is the function or utility-based AR. That’s where I’m talking about complex mechanical systems, overlaying information on them to make that user’s life easier day-to-day. [For example] it could be a manufacturing plant, [where] there’s an amazing opportunity in that you’re not disconnecting them from the real world. AR is obviously about overlaying information, so you’re not taking people out of the world and therefore they’ll use it often and therefore it’s more ubiquitous. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better, I just think there are more opportunities.

How do you impress upon your clients the potential of these products?

We often do demos. For us it’s all about being out there and demoing it with them. Talking them through it. Showing them similar examples – often we’re doing new things so it’s not always easy to show them exactly how it works, but that’s why we build agile. So, we don’t pitch a $250,000 build straight off the bat often, because we’ll say to our clients ‘dabble, test, and then understand if it’s effective’.

I honestly believe completely in that, a process that doesn’t allocate huge budgets, it doesn’t take a huge amount of time, and they can then understand the efficacy of it. Then you can iterate it from a number of angles. You might have got it slightly wrong for their purposes. That AR solution that you thought was solving the challenge they have, it might actually solve a completely different challenge for them. That’s why we’re focusing on that approach.

So essentially making sure that we sit down and workshop and actually understand, help our clients to understand, the full spectrum of AR, VR and 360, and then start building with them in sprints. Going back to that agile methodology again, always making sure the client is a part of that development process, and then testing internally with us. It’s not taking away and silo-ing the build, it’s actually making sure they’re a part of it the whole way through.

Do they ever come at your with angles and solutions you may not have arrived at on your own?

Definitely, 100 per cent. The key question that we ask, the first question, is what is the key challenge they’re facing? They might throw five at you. You create a concept or two around those five challenges, and then through the process there will always be a sixth or seventh challenge you never thought about. We had a client, we were actually there from a marketing perspective, looking at a branding exercise, and we ended up building a manufacturing project. It happens all the time, and that’s the great thing about where we are. Because we’re educating continuously, and we’ll sometimes educate the client after the workshop, then two weeks down the track we’ll have a new solution.

Solving technical problems isn’t something I’d considered when thinking about AR. There’s a Vimeo short that has a dystopian AR theme, it’s terrifying, alerts everywhere, special offers, this and that, it’s overwhelming. That seemed to me to be the future of AR extrapolated out. But in terms of technical advantages, what share of your projects are solving technical issues rather than just enhancing marketing?

A lot more than we ever expected initially. Probably somewhere around a third or a quarter at the moment. And it’s growing. Of course we’re starting to build the appropriate templates as well. Part of the process for us is deciding whether something should be a custom build or if a template build is more appropriate. We understand that if certain vertical furniture has more of a case for having something the client can own, manage the content and crank out the application and iterate it all the time, we move it over to our sister company Platter. For us it’s about understanding what to do with it from that point onwards.

I’m finding it hard to stay on subject or even really listen to you properly, because my head is filled with so many ‘what if’s’ with this tech. How do you stop yourself from putting energy in the wrong places?

That’s the most salient question I’ve had all year. It’s a massive challenge, and I’ve really focused in the last two months on making sure that we’re validating verticals and thinking about them really carefully. Say tourism for instance, or education, or any of those verticals. Helping to understand those, and validating them as well, you can get caught up so easy thinking something is an amazing idea, but you have to make sure that you continually benchmark, understand if something is the right decision, and validating that with your user base – your clients in this case. That’s really important for us, for me especially. Because as you say, you get so excited by all this technology, and I can chase leads left, right and centre but it won’t help me or the business, so basically that’s my key. It’s focus.

The glory of the technology that we work in though is that you can chase things for a while. In some cases you’ll just go on your heart. Occasionally that will happen. But it’s about making sure we always tie it back to those core goals, and also check it with our team. I can get excited by something then I go to my CTO or Head of Projects and say ‘Is that even possible?’ and they’ll say ‘Don’t even think about it for the next two years.’ So there’s always someone there to bring you back down if need be.

How does the proliferation of certain hardware effect what you’re doing, and how far in advance can you plan?

It’s a big challenge but we’re finding ways to be ubiquitous across as many bits of hardware as possible. So Magic Leap for example, we’ve spent a lot of time on understanding what it even is at this point. It’s a retinal display for augmented reality but we don’t actually know everything about it. It’s the most amazing product we’ve ever seen, it’s phenomenal, I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s around $2 billion investment of capital raised, and yet we haven’t seen anything yet. Which is… good on them, I completely applaud them, but now for us it’s about understanding as much as we can, and then understanding how we can work with it when it does launch.

How optimistic can you afford to be? Is it better to overshoot or undershoot?

It’s a very good question. I think in some ways it’s better to be a little bit pragmatic, and think about slightly undershooting. But if you’ve got a specific user case that has very limited time, then go for it, overshoot, because if it’s only a proof of concept or a need in that next six months to a year, and it doesn’t have a longer life cycle for it, then go for it. Head for the stars on it.

Photo: Rebecca Zephyr Thomas
Photo: Rebecca Zephyr Thomas

What are the key advantages to working with such uncertainty? You can’t extrapolate ten years out because who know what the device capability is even going to be.

We definitely don’t know. We can predict through reading and research and knowledge of our industry, maintaining our network, but we certainly can’t predict that far in the future. I guess the advantage of it is that we’re always kept fresh. Our technology is fresh, our ideas are fresh, the concepts we pitch our clients are fresh too. That’s probably the biggest advantage for us in general. We don’t get stagnant, and we’re continuously looking for something new, within the same realm though because you don’t want to be chasing different technologies all the time. We are still talking about AR, VR and 360 here, and that allows you a bit of scope to be thinking ‘What can we do in the next year?’ with that, but not going too much further, because you might be chasing technology or hardware that might not be around in two years time.

Do you have a dreamboard of things you’d like to accomplish should the tech become available?

100 per cent. Some of it’s in my head, some of it’s with the team in Melbourne, but we’ve all got a centralised idea, as well as our own ideas around where we want to take things. It’s about fitting back into that space of validation of your vertical. We spend probably a third of our time when we’re presenting to clients around thinking blue sky. So, we’ve got concepts that we pitch all the time that might not even necessarily be exactly possible, but in our minds we’re always focusing on what’s next as well. Those concepts can be around Magic Leap, as I said, they haven’t actually launched but we’re thinking of phenomenal applications for it if it does launch the way we think that it will.

Time will tell, I guess.

It seems we’re on the precipice of major change. When these AR technologies become ubiquitous it feels like it will change everything.

Certainly. We talk about it as a revolution. You can talk about evolution with website development and technology in general, but for us this is certainly a revolution, particularly when you consider AI, which will start integrating with AR and take it to a whole different level. That’s when it starts to be ingrained in everyone’s lives. But we mentioned before the overwhelming nature of what AR could be, and so it’s also about understanding how to filter that information.

It’d be terrible if it was anything like early websites with pop-ups and flashing bits and all that sort of thing.

It’d probably drive you mad. It literally might. And epileptics probably wouldn’t do very well either. Those are all real concerns.

Do you bring traditional design principles over into the digital space? Because obviously you’re no longer limited by conventional physics and things like that.

A certain amount from the UI point of view, particularly with VR. If you touch on 360 especially you’re looking at a completely different canvas. Some of your principles are exactly the same, overlays and calls-for-action, they’re all the same for us, but when you’re shooting for 360 it’s a whole different world. You have to hide. You literally have to hide every time you shoot unless you’re using a very specific, custom-built rig, and so that has challenges.

From a design perspective, the actual user journey in some ways is actually a very similar process. We take interactive design, understand what we’ve done in that world, and integrate it with AR and VR. It has crossover.

You spoke about the rise of AR, do you think this is going to be ubiquitous in areas such as education? Imagine history for example – you could have an accurate recreation of the entirety of the Western Front, zooming in to witness battles happen at key points in real time. Are these the sort of applications you consider?

Absolutely. I consider that completely true. As long as it’s managed properly from the start, I feel like every classroom would definitely have it, and it would probably be a Magic Leap device, because it takes out all of the distractions of even modern-day AR as we have it. AR is phenomenal, but of course once you take away the smartphone you’ve got tractability as well, you’ve got the power to use your hands. You could be using AR to move shapes, trees, mountains, whatever’s in front of you, changing the directions of armies or the orbit of planets.

The ability for your brain to actually absorb that information, we believe at the moment, from what scientists tell us, is far more powerful than the rote-learning way that we learned when we grew up. That allows huge possibilities in terms of education, but also other realms like engineering and construction. You could look at a site and see the structural integrity of the foundation through augmented sensors that would tell if it’s moved .1cm, you could see it in a virtual overlay, and then when the building is finished from the outside, or wherever you want to be, you can look around you and overlayed are diagnostics of that room. It has applications for the real world.

It’s important that it’s managed, and you’re not overwhelming people mentally. Even as far as considering saturation, people will start to lose understanding of what’s effective in an AR world. That’s a worry in our point of view, and it’s highlighted best by that Japanese videographer [on Vimeo].

But there are huge opportunities as I said before. It can solve problems like, for instance, mechanical repairs. If I could look at my engine and get a diagnostic from it, something that would tell me which sensor to pull out or whatever it may be, I’ve saved myself $1500. That’d be the dream for me. Same with turning this environment that we’re sitting in into a gaming experience or environment. A tree might turn into a monster – amazing.

You could put someone who is paralysed on top of the Great Pyramid if you wanted.

Exactly.

More Reading

    To me that’s one of the most exciting aspects of VR. There are real, legitimate therapeutic uses for this technology.

    I couldn’t agree more. Therapy is a beautiful aspect of VR. As I said before, people absorb it better when they’re put into a context and actually believe it, [at least] to a certain extent, so the notion that we’ve all heard before of people overcoming their fear of heights through VR, different phobias with regards to spiders or whatever it might be, having that ability to slowly iterate, add that phobia into their lives and take away the challenge they have, it’s amazing. Absolutely amazing.

    GridAKL is Auckland’s innovation precinct, located in Wynyard Quarter – powered by ATEED and run by BizDojo. New spaces are leasing soon – click here to find out more.

    Keep going!
    PosBoss founder Jonny McKenzie
    PosBoss founder Jonny McKenzie

    ATEEDNovember 4, 2016

    On The Grid: Posboss want to make paying for coffee enjoyable

    Contributing writer
    PosBoss founder Jonny McKenzie
    PosBoss founder Jonny McKenzie

    There’s a revolution underway. Deep within the Auckland Viaduct lurks the beginnings of our own tiny Silicon Valley. At GridAKL, more than 50 startups, in industries as diverse as medicine, robotics and augmented reality, are running the entrepreneurial gauntlet looking to build a high-growth business – or at least a get a second funding round.

    In On the Grid, a sponsored series with Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED), we tell their stories. In this, the fourth instalment, hospo wizards Posboss.

    There’s a certain cognitive dissonance in your every day cafe transaction. After telecommuting through space to a freelance gig in our most distant antipode, you close your laptop and approach the counter only to find a caffeine-fried barista simultaneously stabbing at some archaic typewriter, wrangling a tiny printer and frothing gluten free soy skim almond milk to a silky microfoam.

    It seems strange that we can beam information directly from a satellite into your average cafe and yet every purchase remains a Gringott’s level interaction. Is there not some way the process can be streamlined? Can the power of the internet not be harnessed like a beast and ridden into a new era of pain-free hospitality transactions? Posboss CEO Jonny McKenzie believes it can.

    *

    The Spinoff: I had this idea in a 5th form enterprise competition – assuming you didn’t copy me, where did your inspiration come from?

    Jonny McKenzie: I had a few businesses in Wellington, three bars and a cinema, and at the time I had pretty archaic tools. The main challenge was not knowing how the businesses were going while I was at the cinema running that. I was looking for a better point-of-sale system, and Vend was one option I considered. I was looking at using Vend for the bars, but after a bit of research I realised that it wasn’t going to work for us. So I flew up to meet Vend, and asked if I could build an add-on for them to make their product a more suitable for hospo. After about six months of trying to make it work together, we found that actually, Vend is built around and worked really well for retail businesses – it was essentially crafted for the retail mentality. What we needed was something made with a hospo way of thinking behind the scenes. 

    Realising that the differences between ways of thinking were so marked started our journey of being able to use mobile technology to make a tailored, useful tool for hospo. Thankfully we were very lucky to have the support of Vend who helped us as we started on our PoS building journey.

    It’s interesting that you bring up Vend, because that was something I wanted to ask. What’s your point of difference? Are you even competitors?

     I normally draw a little picture, but fundamentally if you imagine there are two circles and they cross over, the area in which we cross over is what I’d call retail-hospo: the places where it’s a ‘counter mentality’ where you pre-pick what you want to buy, head to the counter and pay for it. There’s some crossover there, espresso bars can sometimes work that way, but it doesn’t work when you get an extra layer: where you’ve got a kitchen running, or you’ve got a barista who isn’t standing right next to the till, and you’ve got dockets printing and you’ve got people asking for modifications to their dish, ‘more bacon with my bacon and eggs, remove the sauce,’ that sort of thing. In the retail world that doesn’t exist. You never buy a pair of shoes and ask if they can change the laces to blue, whereas in our world that happens with nearly every order.

     Retail PoS systems are great and work well for that single transaction sort of situation, and in essence our core difference is that we are designed for the more fluid, frenetic world that comes with hospo operations. We know it well, and we love it, and now we create the perfect tool to make that world work easier.

    How did the actual build of the platform go? Did you have sufficient experience in coding?

    Not a chance. I did an IT degree, but I put that aside and did hospo. The only bonus was that I had a little bit of understanding of what I was getting into, without really knowing what I was getting into. At the time I teamed up with a company called TouchTech, they still exist, who were an app development company. They brought on the capability to program and a designer came on board and helped us with that, and we formed this little company with our different skill sets. I was just the driving force who kind of took it and went forward.

    What advantages did you have coming into this knowing exactly what was required? Because in a sense you were custom-building it for your own purposes.

    Actually one of the hardest things was to stop just building it for myself. I guess the bonus was being able to clarify when a customer said something, how that would be interpreted by a developer. You know, facilitating communication between a hospitality person and a developer, being able to translate that so we actually got something that was useful. 

    But what about being a business owner as well? Having experience in managing people, and payroll, and all that sort of thing?

    I probably take a lot of that for granted now. Every day I have to remember that there are a lot of skill sets that after eight years of running businesses you kind of forget you possess. Things like making sure you’ve got a good team, for example.

    I guess one of the key things for us at PosBoss was never to be a tech company, but to be a hospitality company. We call our sections the ‘Front of House’ and the ‘Kitchen’ team. The devs are our kitchen, and anyone doing support is front of house, dealing with the customers. Everything we do we try and treat it as if we’re a hospitality system. I guess basically what I did was rather than trying to learn how to run a tech company, I just made a tech company run like a hospitality company. And it kinda works.

    Has that been tried before?

    Well that way I could relate to it, and I could easily talk to it. It meant that I was using my own buzzwords rather than trying to read every latest book about what the keywords I should be using are.

    I tried reading The Lean Startup before I began these interviews, and it was all pivot-this and segment-that, there’s a whole language you have to learn.

    Exactly, and you learn them anyway when you start having lots of coffees and everyone keeps using them at you. You’re just sitting there going ‘You mean, like a change in the menu?’ and they say ‘Yea, that’s a pivot,’ and I go ‘Well ok, I guess so’. 

    The other key thing was to make sure that the team didn’t feel that there was a huge distance between the devs and our customers, so they became one. What helps there is building a product where they get to interact with it everyday. So they go to cafes and burger joints where they have to see their till, the till they’re building, being used, and they see the facial expressions which they can relate to. That helps a lot.

    As opposed to many of the startups here at the Grid, you actually generate revenue. How does that effect the way that you conduct yourself?

    We’ve gone through that raising process, but naturally I think my natural instinct is to not take much money, which means that we’re always feeling like we’re bootstrapping to a degree. It’s good to know that we’ve actually got some money coming in because the best thing about it is that you know that your product is wanted, and we’ve got super happy customers. That’s been good. 

    But I guess what it means is that it gives us a bit of confidence in the direction we’re heading, which has made it easier for us to make bigger decisions on how to go. The biggest thing is that we’ve got the confidence where we can tell customers that the way we’re building this thing is potentially a better way to operate their business than how they keep trying to tell us to. The danger there is obviously you don’t want to tell them that they’re wrong, you just want to open their way of thinking around how technology can help them to have a smarter operation.

    You’ve got an advantage in that you’ve been in that industry so you know how to talk to these people, right?

    It helps a lot when they start talking about their years of experience, because while I fully respect that, I’ve got some experience of my own. And that does help especially with how we do sales and support. We always try and talk as if we’re running their cafe with them. It is awesome having revenue being generated, I think it’s about that next phase of challenges that coming along which is how do you get from this amount of revenue, to this amount of revenue. And then how do you control that growth, and not get too excited and spend money in the wrong places.

    And as a subscription and service model, it’s not like we’re making a ton of money with every sale. We’re $55 a month per person. Well, developers and the rest of the team cost a little bit more than $55 a month, so it takes a bit of scale.

    I noticed on your site a lot of the marketing emphasis is around reducing space and clutter, a lot of focus on the aesthetics of the product. Why is that so important?

    Because software is difficult to explain to a market who are very tangible, who touches and sees the things they work with, to sell them software it’s often hard for them to understand what it would look like. One of the big questions we get is ‘how does it look?’, or ‘what does it work on?’ So we realised that during that initial step, when you’re trying to get them to understand the product, giving them those photos or images about how it reduces that space and it will give you some more clarity and clear the environment becomes a stepping stone to them going ‘Well how does it work?’

    posboss
    Jonny McKenzie

    Was that an effort to target towards more stylish, boutique businesses like an upscale food truck?

    Well we built it to work on iPads, which are already seen as being simple and clean and clear. And after researching so many different stands, the Heckler stands are the ones you’ll see on our websites – it just comes as part of the package and mentality. It was then about trying to track our growth in the market, which at the beginning was with new businesses. Our product was designed for new owner-operators. The new guys were espresso bars, they’re opening up faster than anyone, probably the highest growth right now, and so the aesthetics was a real key element there as well. Knowing that they like minimalism, nothing on the counter, that really helped. It sort of went from not really being a key part through to us realising that’s such a key feature. People like the look and the feel, and therefore we should promote it.

    It’s interesting that your business is in selling software, and the presentation of the package still remains important.

    Tills have always looked really ugly. We also know with payment, where it’s going, you’ll be turning the screen around pretty soon for a digital signature, and other things that we’re looking to build in the future will have you interacting digitally with the till. I guess it’s become part of the journey, making sure we always look at design as key to it, understanding that our customers care about what they look like, and therefore we should care about how we look inside their premise.

    What about, on a slightly different side, Xero integration. How did that come about? Did you originally intend to have such comprehensive analytics?

    I think it was always intended. One of the reasons I wanted this system when I was hunting for one was knowing what was going on. There was always going to be an element of reporting. I’d actually just recently moved my businesses over to Xero, and it was the first time I could see my account without waiting for my accountant to drop them off. It was a real moment of realisation. And then I guess to hear the sort of concept of integration, and being able to do this with a flow of data… at the time, by 2pm on Tuesday my managers had to have gone down to the bookkeeper to drop everything off, and now they don’t have to go anywhere. The integration just made sense in that way. And I guess it was also, going back to how we look, Xero’s got a way of looking, we were sort of tying into that, and our customers start to feel that this is the way they see themselves. It was a great partnership, not to mention they’re an awesome company to work with, super supportive and helped to guide us in the right direction. Now that we’re seeing accountants becoming more like business advisors, it’s been fascinating.

    Have you had client feedback around reporting and analytics?

    The one report that made the biggest difference was the sales-by-hour report. It made people realise that, for example, in an average month at their cafe they were doing about $3 sales between 3 and 4. Even opening hours themselves, if they’re opening at 7 but they don’t do any business until 8, why are they bothering? If you shave an hour and a half off operating times, multiply that across staff hours over a whole year, PosBoss has paid for it’s subscription. That’s one of the key elements – if we can pay for ourselves then we’re doing our job, and that’s where they reports come in. If we can do anything to support our customers to make smarter decisions, then we see instant gratification come back.

    A lot of client relationships can feel a little predatory – you know, squeeze the client for all they’re worth – but it seems with your model that shared goals and a successful symbiosis delivers far greater returns.

    Yes, and it’s our sales strategy too. From all of my experience, the way I knew about a new product was through word-of-mouth. It was very rare that a sales rep would walk through my door and successfully sell me something.

    Did your experience in costing things out and managing a cash flow help you to avoid any pitfalls that trapped other startups?

    I think knowing that you’ve got to hit payroll, and you’ve got continuous costs coming out, you’re always fundamentally thinking about what’s coming out of your bank account and thinking ahead. Then the other side of it is that some people are so used to being paid, the fund just gets topped up every week, if you’re used to never having a fund topped up then you start to realise where you need to cut. It’s definitely been an interesting journey with money.

    Traditional experience definitely helps. I wish I had more of the dev side, it’d be helpful to understand what the guys are going through, just help that sort of element, but at the same time I guess they wish they had a little more hospo experience in order to understand client problems more quickly. So trying to make the perfect team is the challenge. To find complementary skills.

    What about more intangible things, like grit or will?

    It’s funny you say that, we’ve actually got a small outage going on at the moment, and I just told the team ‘It’ll be alright, you’ll get it fixed,’ and came down here. But you can definitely see the team freaks out a little more than I would, because back in the day in the cinema a movie inevitably wouldn’t start, and you’d have 180 people shouting at you, or you have a fire alarm go off and you have to evacuate a 3000 person party – you’re better off taking a deep breath and figuring out the best way to handle it, rather than panicking. One of the big things is to make sure the team takes a breath before they react. The quick reaction is often the wrong one. I always believe in gut feelings, but they can get you into a lot of trouble.

    That’s why we call our support staff front of house, because we understand the problems our clients go through, and we have the empathy to understand what it’s like to lose a till system or eftpos integration or the printer stops working in the kitchen, or whatever it may be. In the three years since our first paying customer came on board, we’ve lost four customers. Two of them closed their doors because the businesses went under, and when businesses have sold, owners have taken over the system. So it’s been awesome as far as sticky customers go, and I think that comes back to our sales concept – get customers to support us, rather than funneling money at it.

    Because one of our challenges is that traditionally till systems are not well loved. I mean, they’re point of sale systems, they’re not meant to be loved, but they’re very unloved. They used to be very clunky, very expensive, and all it reminds people of is negative experiences. So one of the biggest hurdles is getting people to even consider changing, because their previous experience is so bad. But we’re slowly getting stronger now, and we can actually start pushing the message that it’s ok.

    It’s incredible how long people will tolerate a bad setup rather than trying change.

    It is incredible. Even at my flat, we’ve just changed the gate so it opens the opposite way, and now we can our rubbish out. That took four years. Life can be so much easier with simple changes, and hopefully we can get the message across that it’s not that daunting and the investment you make now will save you a lot of personal time – and that’s something people working in hospo never seem to have a lot of.

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