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Gaspy
Larry Green is helping consumers save hundreds of dollars a year with his app Gaspy. Image: Tina Tiller

BusinessMarch 15, 2022

Meet the team behind Gaspy, the petrol price-saving app that’s gone ‘batshit’

Gaspy
Larry Green is helping consumers save hundreds of dollars a year with his app Gaspy. Image: Tina Tiller

It started for kicks at a poker game. Now Gaspy beats Facebook on the app charts and nearly a million New Zealanders rely on it to find cheaper gas.

Four years ago, Larry Green and his three co-workers at a software development company got bored during their regular Tuesday night poker sessions. “One of the guys commented that fuel prices were crap,” says Green. Back then, they were around $1.50 a litre. “He wanted a way to keep an eye on it.”

For fun, the foursome began using their Tuesday nights to design a programme that would allow them to find Bay of Plenty’s cheapest petrol prices. “We came up with this concept of being a ‘gas spy’,” says Green. Soon, they were registering prices every time they filled up, and competing to see who logged in the most. They soon had most of Tauranga’s petrol station’s covered.

Thus, Gaspy (it’s pronounced “Gasp-ee”) was born. Originally built just for Green and his three engineers at Tauranga tech company Whem, they began inviting friends to take part. Having worked with major corporate clients who always asked them to sign NDA forms, it was nice to have something they could openly talk about. “That’s why we made it free.”

Gaspy quickly took off, reaching 1000 users in six months based all around the country. It was a milestone they decided to celebrate. “We had a mini nerd party,” says Green, with “a warm bottle of chardonnay and a packet of crisps with the air conditioning on and lots of screens everywhere”.

These days, the celebrations deserve to be much bigger. Gaspy’s gone major, becoming an essential service for every driver in the country looking to find cheaper gas. Lately, that’s become more important than ever, with prices soaring above $3 thanks to rising barrel prices and oil shortage concerns as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues. Some suggest $4 a litre could soon be on the cards.

All of this has made Gaspy’s usage soar. This past Friday, as rumours spread about another looming rise, 32,000 new users signed up, far outstripping the previous daily record of 4000, and taking the company’s user tally to 885,000. Gaspy also topped the local app charts over the weekend, beating out Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok.

Gaspy
Gaspy topped the local app charts over the weekend. Screenshot: Facebook

Green and his team never envisioned this kind of success. “We’re just four super-nerds who made a funny game about fuel prices that’s gone batshit,” he says. “We’re beating out Mark Zuckerberg and YouTube. A Kiwi app never beats Facebook … here we are in Bellevue, Tauranga. Any day you can get one over the giants, it’s a legendary victory in our IT community.”

It’s not just ballooning gas prices fueling their success. Gaspy is easy to access, and simple to use. Users log in, enter their location, and the closest stations offering the cheapest petrol instantly pop up. The app relies on drivers to log their fuel costs, and others to confirm the results. But there are incentives, with coins and badges awarded, and leadership boards for each region.

On Monday, the day I spoke to Green, the cheapest gas closest to me was in Albany Village at $2.93. “Boom!” said an excited Green when I told him the news. “Under $3 that’s a steal today.”

Gaspy’s gone from something that used to be a fun way for friends to try and save a little money on petrol to an essential service for those struggling on the breadline. Green’s well aware of this, boasting the app saves the average user $800 a year.  “When it’s $3 [a litre], it’s like, ‘holy crap’,” he says. Driving home the other night, he noticed prices veering between $2.90 and $3.20. “That’s a 30 cents difference. If you’re filling up your tank, that’s massive.”

Green believes “game-ifying” their app was crucial to its success. “People get a kick out of being able to share information,” he says. “It’s a bit like the weather it’s useful. Tap one or two buttons and it makes life easier for everyone else. You know a lot of people are going to get great value out of it.”

He and his team don’t make money out of the app, with a scattering of Google ads helping to keep it running. That seems like a mistake, but Green disagrees. What about cashing out? “We’re in no rush [to sell it],” he says. “We know what we’ve got.”

Green’s open to offers though, and says there’s definitely room for future owners to grow and streamline Gaspy. There’s also room to improve it. Soon, they’ll add services for electric vehicle owners, and perhaps address some of the complaints they get about the app’s “clunky” interface and fonts.

But he’s staying mum on whether Gaspy will ever launch a similar app for grocery prices the most requested feature among users. He knows it would work, because it’s already working for petrol prices. “There’s a real group of people out there who love working for the common good,” he says. “They would happily stand in the supermarket walking up and down the aisles all day.”

If they do it, Green and his team will take care of it on a Tuesday night. Yes, their “poker nights” are still going, yet there are no cards being dealt or bets being placed any more. They use that time to work on Gaspy, just “four nerds” sitting around a table, says Green. “It’s like the office pet we have a great affinity for it.”

Download the Gaspy app for iPhone and Android here.

Keep going!
(Image: Tina Tiller. Original images provided by Spark).
(Image: Tina Tiller. Original images provided by Spark).

BusinessMarch 12, 2022

Beyond Binary Code wants corporates to make meaningful change on gender

(Image: Tina Tiller. Original images provided by Spark).
(Image: Tina Tiller. Original images provided by Spark).

The new project from Spark and OutLine Aotearoa aims to make online spaces more inclusive of non-binary people, while challenging businesses on how they collect and use gender data. 

For cis-people, navigating online spaces as gendered beings isn’t something that needs much thought. Gendered ads aren’t usually jarring, and questions about gender identity aren’t given a second look. But for our non-binary whānau, navigating the internet can be an experience of constant “low level discrimination”. Signing up for websites usually involves entering your name, email, age and gender, and many of those forms don’t include options outside of “female” and “male”. If you’re lucky, there might be a “gender diverse” option, but that label doesn’t come anywhere close to capturing the diversity of gender identities that exist outside of the female/male binary. Navigating the internet as a non-binary person can therefore be extremely alienating. Spark and OutLine Aotearoa’s new project, Beyond Binary Code, is hoping to change that. 

Aych McArdle (they/them) is co-chair of OutLine, a rainbow mental health organisation that provides support services to the LGBTQIA+/Takatāpui community across Aotearoa; they run a free support line every day from 6-9pm, as well as a chat support service and a counselling service. OutLine has recently partnered with Spark in consultation with the non-binary community for Beyond Binary Code, an online tool that challenges businesses to have a deeper think about when and how they collect gender data. Businesses can find resources on how to better support the non-binary and gender diverse community, and access questionnaires that help them determine if gender data is even required for their business in the first place. If it’s truly necessary to collect gender data, then businesses can copy-paste a customisable HTML code into their website to collect gender data in a more inclusive way. 

“It’s about dignity… and safety,” notes McArdle, who hopes the code will support a “minimum standard” for businesses and reduce the discrimination and dysphoria that non-binary people face on a day-to-day basis. 

Claire Black (she/her), general manager at OutLine, says that “as a mental wellbeing-focused organisation, we see a really clear line between not having those negative experiences… having those [gender] affirming experiences, to the flow-on effects for people’s well-being”. 

Claire Black, general manager at OutLine. (Image: Supplied).

To ensure the project wasn’t “just rainbow washing,” says Black, Spark and OutLine commissioned a survey focused on the experiences of the non-binary community regarding gender data collection and representation. The survey informed the development of the code itself, and the surrounding resources available on the website. 

“The code is not the entirety of the tool,” says Black, who adds that the project “is not going to address every single form of discrimination that non-binary and trans people face directly.” Instead, perhaps the most vital part of Beyond Binary Code are the resources for businesses, which OutLine hopes will spark conversations that bring up hard questions. 

“Why is [gender] a piece of data that we feel is uncomplicated and people are entitled to have?” asks Black. “Why do we have to think about things in terms of gendered products? [There are] all these potential flow-on effects. If we’re not asking for gender, then perhaps we have to reconceptualise other aspects of business.”

McArdle adds that their “hope [is] that this space, this code, might be a contribution to unlocking those doors so that us as non-binary people, as Takatāpui people, as people of indigenous gender identities and intersex people might be able to take up our place in the world and stand in our value. And [that] the world will be able to see and acknowledge that.”

The project comes in the wake of StatsNZ’s 2021 updated recommendation on statistical standards for collecting gender data. Following public consultation, StatsNZ found that the way we collect gender data in New Zealand is often inconsistent, inaccurate and doesn’t reflect the true diversity of gender-identity in Aotearoa. In other words, collection of gender data as it stands may return misleading data sets, as non-binary people are forced to inaccurately report their gender. This essentially invalidates that data; StatsNZ’s updated best practice recommendations were therefore designed to address these issues.

However, McArdle notes that there was an “education gap” between the government findings and businesses. They say that’s where the true potential of Beyond Binary lies, because the project is “really about educating and upskilling those workforces to enable positive change”. McArdle believes this project could “be absolutely global”, adding that the code has the potential to be altered to include local indigenous gender identities. 

So far, McArdle says OutLine has seen a positive response from the non-binary community, who are praising the project as an example of meaningful corporate engagement. 

“This is how you do partnership, this is how you do Pride,” says McArdle. “Contributing to the kaupapa, to the movement. Driving conversations forward, not just putting a rainbow sticker on something after the fact.”

McArdle adds that the project is an example of how businesses can enact “deep listening” and be “open to what you can contribute to a particular movement”. They said that this is “doing it the right way, in partnership with the voices that might make you feel uncomfortable” and they’d like to see more of it. 

Some may question whether corporations are best suited to drive this sort of social change, but Black says that “in the current society, corporates exist and people work for them. 

“It’s much better to see people really pushing to use that resourcing and power for good – so long as it’s not fundamentally compromised – than it is to just not have them doing that work.” 

Additionally, Black notes that non-profits are often poorly resourced, “so being able to leverage those connections for our kaupapa is really valuable… that’s why this relationship is one that we talk about a lot, not because we’re pro-corporates as a whole, but because this [feels] like a really good model of how [corporate responsibility] can work.”

“Redistribute the resources!” laughs McArdle, who wants to urge businesses to “partner with communities”. For McArdle, the code represents one step closer to an inclusive future, one where “binaries aren’t limiting – where there’s space, where there’s opportunity, where there’s the full colour spectrum. 

“That kind of world is a world that I want to be in. That, to me, signals a world of dreaming.”

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