Paul Spain:
Aaron Ward, great to have you on the podcast. How are you doing today?

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, awesome, Paul, it’s great to be here. Great to be in the country.

Paul Spain:
Real privilege to have you on the show. And thanks for taking time while you’re visiting New Zealand. I always like to start at the beginning. So tell us a little bit about where you grew up and, you know, what those childhood years looked like for you.

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, well, you say visiting New Zealand, of course I’m from here and, you know, that is a point of pride for me. But, you know, living now in the US I do count as a visitor when I come and I have to tick that box at New Zealand customs.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Aaron Ward:
Which is tricky. But, yeah. So I, from New Zealand, born in Whanganui. I whakapapa back to Ngati Maru in Thames, but spent most of my time in New Zealand, at least in Auckland. Grew up on the North Shore and, yeah, much of my early career kicking around Auckland.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And what did those childhood years sort of look like? Were there, you know, inspirations around that stood out? Were there things that you ended up sort of, sort of doing as a youngster that would have, you know, given a little bit of insight into where you would end up in terms of as a founder and entrepreneur?

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, it’s sort of tempting to try and look back and say, okay, well, how do the dots connect? I guess for me growing up, we’re in a very sort of working class family. My father was a panel beater, fixed up broken cars. My mother worked in a variety of sort of admin roles, and we had to have two parents working to sort of make ends meet. And I think. I think back to early childhood, yeah, it was. Everything was pretty sparse, but not that it’s felt that way to me. I mean, you’re just a kid doing your thing.

Aaron Ward:
I lived in Auckland. There was a beach down the road. It was pretty magical. Maybe. One thing that stood out to me is my dad, as a panel beater, ran his own panel beading shop. And in his own way, he was actually quite entrepreneurial. You know, he always had ambitions for more for his family and wanted to break certain moulds and, you know, and I think that that stood out to me. I remember one day, oh, goodness, I would have been 10 or 11, and I spent the day.

Aaron Ward:
I was sick off school, I think, and I spent the day working with him, and I remember him sort of pulling me aside and saying, hey, boy. I think, you know, it’s important that, you know, that you can be whatever you want to be. And for some reason, that just stuck with me. You know, I think you probably also realized that I had like zero practical hands on skills. I was never very much help inside his panel bedding shelf. And, you know, you know, my destiny had to, you know, probably had to do with something I could.

Aaron Ward:
Use my brain a little bit more for. So I guess he was hopeful that I would find out what that was.

Paul Spain:
So that’s interesting. So he was an entrepreneur and a business owner in his own right. Cause, you know, it takes some guts for anyone to start and run a business. And there would have been a lot on his plate, more than just the panel beating itself.

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, yeah. It brings all sorts of pressures and strains, I think, you know, you say guts is a essential ingredient. I would agree with that. I would also say there’s a, there’s a sort of a minimum level of insanity as well to go out there and create something new when you don’t know what it’s going to take. You know, he was the first in his family to go out and sort of build a business. And he didn’t have anything like any sort of training or education or coaching along the way. You know, he was genuinely one of those people that sort of worked it out as he went and, you know, hit wall after wall and had the, the, you know, the perseverance and resilience to be able to sort of keep going despite, you know, getting knocked back and, and told all the way along, you know, that it wasn’t for him and that, you know, this wasn’t the type of thing that he should be doing. So I think, you know, maybe, maybe looking back, some of that stuff might have rubbed off for me.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So you’d have conversations or you’d hear about some of the challenges of business at home.

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, I don’t know that I would say I had many long, deep conversations with my dad, but I was, you know, I saw what he did.

Paul Spain:
Yep, yep.

Aaron Ward:
But I also saw how it affected him as well and how it affected other parts of his life and, you know, family life, home life. And so, you know, there’s two sides to those coins.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Ward:
And, yeah, those things stood out to me as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And did that leave you with some lessons, you know, that impacted and helped you decide how you wanted to be a business owner yourself in the future?

Aaron Ward:
Well, I don’t know that I started off with the idea that I wanted to be an entrepreneur or a business owner. I think I just felt like I needed to go and get a job, you know. And so, you know, the truth of it for me was that that’s how. That’s how I started, you know. And it’s funny now, having gone through, you know, various cycles of.

Aaron Ward:
Starting and building businesses of different flavours, I can see a number of the experiences that my father had and probably more on the tricky side of the coin, you know, repeated in my own experiences. So I don’t know that I necessarily. And I learned the lessons that he did early on. I had to go out there and make a number of those mistakes myself.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, sometimes we do for it to really stick and become evident. Right. You can maybe listen to a podcast or see somebody else that goes through something and, yeah, it doesn’t necessarily stick until the reality kind of hits for you.

Aaron Ward:
No, I mean, I can say confidently, like, I never made the same. Same mistake twice. I made them three or four or five times.

Paul Spain:
Right.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yep. So true. So when did you end up leaving school and what was, you know, what did that journey then look like post school?

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, So I stayed through till seventh form in the old numbers. I don’t know what that’s called nowadays.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, 13, I think.

Aaron Ward:
Right. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, my secondary school, like when I was 15, we did. We did school certificate back in. Back in my day. And I remember getting phone calls at that time from a number of my aunties saying, we heard you finished fifth form. Well done. And they weren’t congratulating me for my marks in my exams, they were congratulating me because I was the first in the family to make it through to the end of that year.

Aaron Ward:
Of course, there are two more years left in New Zealand high school, but just as a sort of a marker of the, you know, the expectations around me and the patterns in our family is, you know, that was regarded as some measure of success. And I wasn’t a great student, but I. But I did do well in math. And I remember my old man looking at my report card and, you know, found the one good mark that I had around math. And he said, well, okay, this means that you need to be an accountant. Which I think is pretty weak logic nowadays. Math equals accountancy. But in his panel beating business, he had an accountant and his accountant had a nice car.

Aaron Ward:
And he equated that to a worthwhile career where people are working with money, therefore they must be able to make some money. And that would be a good direction for me. And so.

Aaron Ward:
That was the feedback that I took at that stage in life to. To go off and pursue a career in finance. I went and studied accounting and finance and had a number of roles in that area to sort of kick off my career before I realized that there was.

Aaron Ward:
Not the best direction for somebody like me.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it was probably common logic, as I remember at one stage, and I can’t remember what led to it, but I had this thought I was gonna be an accountant, partly, probably cause I was good at maths. But that. That soon disappeared.

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, well, look, I mean.

Aaron Ward:
Hopefully the world has moved on, but, you know, at that time, you know, the careers that people that my father looked up to were accountant, lawyer, doctor, you know, those were. Those were the choices. And it’s interesting, the drunkards walk that we go on in our career. You know, you ask people, how did you end up in the role that you’re in? You know, and invariably people say things like, well, I just sort of stumbled into it. And it seems crazy to me, right? Like, how do you, you know, is that how life is supposed to work? That, you know, we’re just supposed to sort of hit wall after wall like a little Roomba vacuum cleaner.

Aaron Ward:
Trying to find some sort of path forward and we stumble into the right thing for us?

Aaron Ward:
But also, I think, speaks to just the importance of feedback from others. You know, I pursued this career in finance because my old man said I was good at math.

Aaron Ward:
He was the one person that provided some feedback to me, and I acted on that feedback and off I went in that direction. And so I guess it just speaks to this idea that, you know, you can’t be what you can’t see. You know, my dad had seen an accountant, therefore that was the, you know, that was the, you know, the best option that he was aware of. He was the one person that provided me some feedback. That’s the. That’s where I went. Yeah. And like, I think we’ve got to do a far better job for kids now, right, in terms of helping them see and seize the full range of possibilities that are open to them.

Aaron Ward:
You know, what would our world be if people, you know, if kids actually could latch onto the thing that they were not just good at, but they were excited about and be able to pursue careers that help them, you know, utilize their. Both their strengths and their passions and, you know, what would that do for us?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it makes a big difference, doesn’t it? So those first jobs you did in the world of finance, when you look back, were there some lessons that you were able to take away into the rest of your career? Were there some tough times or challenges or lessons that sort of stood out.

Aaron Ward:
Well, I think luckily for me and I, I deserve zero credit for this, but there was a thread through the early roles that I held. So the companies that I were in were all reasonably early stage. They’re in their first sort of 1, 2, 3 years of their existence. So they were growing, they had ambition and boldness around what they’re looking to achieve. And in particular in the first couple of companies that I worked in, they had really sort of charismatic leaders. I think nature of a startup is you have to be able to paint a vision that’s really motivating beyond what exists today, which often is not.

Aaron Ward:
And that quality in a leader is not as common. But it was a feature of the places that I worked with and I just found myself just getting drunk on the inspiration that came that just sort of these leaders exuded. And I found myself just.

Aaron Ward:
Really wanting to.

Aaron Ward:
Follow and add and contribute. I think also a nature of those types of businesses that you can actually have an impact on something small or an early stage in its development and put your fingerprints on a business. I found that just intoxicating.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. So what was, what was the first job you took and how did you get it?

Aaron Ward:
I was almost 19 and I was studying at the time and was not enjoying studying at all. I think I need to go find a job. So I literally opened up the paper back in those days and you had classifieds and I applied to a role in there for some sort of entry level accounting.

Aaron Ward:
And ended up taking this job in a business that had recently been listed on the stock exchange in and around debt collection. Credit reporting was called Credit Corp. Yeah. So goodness, this feels like dark ages. And yeah, in there found some really good mentors that were able to help me sort of build my craft and.

Aaron Ward:
Develop that language around, particularly around business performance and trying to, you know, connect activity through to outcomes in a business. And that experience, you know, whilst finance is not necessarily my, you know, my strongest suit today I think has really been useful to me. You know, when you go going forward and now working in sort of SaaS style businesses where metrics are so important, I think that’s been, you know, that was really a really good start for me.

Paul Spain:
And then, you know, what, what came after those, those first couple of roles?

Aaron Ward:
Well, I found myself getting a bit fidgety in New Zealand and.

Aaron Ward:
You know, wanted to spread my organs a little bit and my, my then girlfriend, now wife and I took off to London and we worked. I worked for a mobile carrier over There called, called Orange, which is one of the most innovative wireless brands in the world at that time. And there I really learned about the power of challenger brands and just having a really bold, audacious vision. This is an extremely audacious, visionary business led by again, another very, extremely charismatic CEO. I fell in love with that and it was the audacity of that business that really infected me. And I think it’s really.

Aaron Ward:
Some of the founder DNA started getting built around that experience.

Paul Spain:
Yep, yep. And how did working in London differ from being in New Zealand? You know, you got a faster paced city. You’ve got, you know, a lot more people in London than in all of New Zealand. Yeah, you’ve got a scale there that’s, that’s very, very different. Like, you know, what size. Do you recall what size Orange was at the time that you joined?

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, I do, I think. Well, one feature of working in New Zealand is, you know, typically building for a market of 4 or 5 million people.

Aaron Ward:
Orange was based in the UK but had a vision to be in 50 countries by 2005. So they weren’t constrained by their own geography. They said, we’re here building a global brand. And again, that level of ambition and audacity really opened my eyes to the idea that you can build businesses of significance that can really have an impact on a huge number of people.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that, that must been. Yeah, pretty, pretty inspiring. So that, that window of time there in London, were you with Orange sort of the largely the whole time you were there or what? What did that look like? Did you know what brought you back to New Zealand?

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, no, it was, I was. So it was interesting was it was a, you know, looking back now, it’s a relatively short period of time. It was two years. In that time.

Aaron Ward:
The business itself.

Aaron Ward:
Got bought and sold twice. They were buying 3G licenses all around the world. I was fortunate enough to spend time working in that business in South Africa and India and the US and the Netherlands, Norway. And.

Aaron Ward:
As a kid from sort of small town New Zealand, being able to sort of, you know, bounce around the world dreaming up, you know, new market entry strategies for this, you know, for this really exciting brand. I thought that was, you know, that was super exciting. But I mentioned my girlfriend Stephanie.

Aaron Ward:
Started feeling the pull of to go back to New Zealand to, you know, she was, she was excited to build a family and build a home and you know, it’s a, it’s a common story. That’s what got us to come back. And I came back sort of full of vigour. And enthusiasm for, okay, I’m going to find my orange. I’ve now seen the style of business that I think is exciting and I came back full of energy. Looking for a business like that.

Paul Spain:
Seems to be a reasonably common scenario. Kiwis that go off around the world, they’re part of these incredible businesses. But at times, then there’s sort of the return home and it can be a bit of a, oh, it’s not as exciting in New Zealand. Was that how it looked to you when you got back or were you able to see businesses that stood out and excited you?

Aaron Ward:
No, it was exactly that. I came back. I think I spent five or six months literally looking for a role or a company that was going to be, it was going to be interesting. I was, I was extremely disappointed.

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, I think I ended up going and doing landscaping for a couple of months just, just to, you know, keep myself active and, you know, and ironically.

Aaron Ward:
It was humbling but also very, very grounding for me as well. Just to sort of get my feet back on the ground and think around. Okay, well if roles like this, you know, like I’ve just had don’t exist in New Zealand, well, you know, do I have to make one?

Paul Spain:
So what were the roles that you did end up kind of, you know, jumping into for the next few years? What sort of things did you do?

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, I took a short term contract role with Spark, the Intellicom for a couple of months, you know, sort of a little bit begrudgingly ended up staying there for two and a half years, you know, bouncing around a whole bunch of different things.

Paul Spain:
Okay, so they found some things to keep you engaged.

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s. And then I left there and created my first startup which was a consumer Internet business that we, that we bootstrapped. A friend and I then went back into corporate land with Mighty River Power and did a lot of work on creating new energy businesses and brands for them. That was, that was probably startup number two for me. We created a business within, within that, called Globug, which was the world’s first prepay smart meter enabled electricity brand.

Paul Spain:
Oh, interesting. Yeah, now you skipped over something there. You mentioned an initial startup. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Aaron Ward:
Goodness, it feels so long ago now. So friend and I created a business, Goodness, 20 plus years ago called Tickle and Tickle was an online photo products business. So at that time our digital cameras were just starting to come out. We’re all still on dial up, right? Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Okay.

Aaron Ward:
Okay. And so we had this idea, well, like, if, you know, people are out there taking photos, but, but they’re not printing them out and, and you can now do stuff with digital photos. Why don’t we create some sort of website where you can like, put those photos onto, like, into like books or calendars and, you know, make gifts about gifts with them. Of course, you know, fast forward today and there’s a, you know, there’s dozens of these types of services around and super popular. There was nothing like that in New Zealand at the time. So we were the first.

Aaron Ward:
In New Zealand and then we released a bunch of products through their brand that were the first in, like, southern hemisphere as well. So, you know, it was a fun, you know, foray into like doing some innovative stuff around tech and starting to use the, you know, the Internet, the.

Paul Spain:
Lessons from that window, because it sounds like you were doing something that was cutting edge, but not all of these things kind of, you know, work out as you, as you imagine. So what did you walk away with from that experience?

Aaron Ward:
Totally. Yeah. There are a whole bunch, I think coming out of the Orange experience over in the uk, I had a huge amount of conviction that this concept had little legs, it could scale to be something really, really large. And we treated it, we came at it with that level of sort of conviction, which I think in the rear-view mirror was a total mistake. It makes a lot more sense to be experimental up front to validate those hypotheses before you start going writing big checks.

Paul Spain:
Gotcha.

Aaron Ward:
I think the first thing that we did in that business was get out and start doing retail partnerships with nationwide chains like, like, like BP and video stores back in the day so that we could put their, our technology into those places. And so, yeah, it was very expensive model and very expensive lessons to learn as well, especially when we were bootstrapping it, we were using our own money. I was mortgaging the house. We ended up having to sell the house.

Paul Spain:
You know, how did that go down family wise with having to sell your house?

Aaron Ward:
With my wife. Yeah, she stopped bringing it up weekly now.

Aaron Ward:
20 plus years down the track. Yeah, yeah. The last conversation we had about that on that topic would have been maybe a month ago. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Okay, this is a.

Aaron Ward:
Oh, my God. I skipped past that part of the story for a reason.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s why I was curious. So the partnerships you were setting up, you had to fund those. So if you sort of signed a nationwide ideal that was that you could put technology into these places, but, but you largely had to, had to make that, make that happen. And of course there are limitations if you don’t, don’t have a, you know, a whole lot of venture capital funding or very deep pockets. And, and did you get any external funding during that or was that very much kind of, you know, bootstrapped? It was your own money and any revenue you could bring in?

Aaron Ward:
No, no, no, we didn’t. So at the time we were, we, we pitched the local, what was then the Ice Angels network here in Auckland, which at the time was so new that they hadn’t actually made their first investment in anything at the time. So we would turn up to these events and there, you know, a bunch of guys sitting around drinking wine and, you know, paying very little attention to our pitch, more looking at each other to see who was the person that was going to go first. And, and, and none of them wanted to be the first to put their hand up for, you know, presumably anything. So, yeah, now we bootstrapped ours from the start.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Aaron Ward:
And again came at it with a whole bunch of vision. We created these custom built touchscreen kiosks that would rival whatever New Zealand uses in airports today. We had a whole bunch of stuff that we did.

Aaron Ward:
Which was super bold, super visionary, way ahead of its time and sort of ridiculously over the top for the style of business that it was.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Oh, that must be. Yeah. Packed with lessons. Well, thanks for sharing some of that with us. Obviously. Yeah, there’s a bit of pain that these things leave, but also the, you know, the learning is super valuable.

Aaron Ward:
Right, Totally, yeah.

Paul Spain:
Anything more on that time at Mighty River Power sort of stands out Well.

Aaron Ward:
I think the business that we built within Mighty Era Power, the Globug business, at least from my contribution to that, really benefited from the lessons out of Tackle and then Orange before that. But that still didn’t stop me from making a bunch of mistakes in there.

Aaron Ward:
I think I brought a level of sort of founder energy to that business.

Aaron Ward:
Which I think contributed to, you know, much of its early success, but also ended up disenfranchising me from a lot of the people in that business. And so I think something that I learned out of that experience was the, you know, the importance of sort of taking people with you. It’s not enough to be able to come in and.

Aaron Ward:
You know, see a bold new future and, you know, ignore all of the voices and personalities in the room in pursuit of that future.

Paul Spain:
Yes.

Aaron Ward:
And so I think that’s important. I think one of the things perhaps that was really impactful and important to me out of that was Globug was essentially serving families in New Zealand that lived week to week for whom a monthly power bill, which can spike up and down, was totally unmanageable. And as a consequence, like, when you send somebody a two or a $300 power bill, that’s often the thing that doesn’t get paid. And then that creates a lot of sort of very negative consequences for families down the track when things like power starts getting disconnected and that, et cetera. So with Globug, we saw an opportunity to replicate the model that I’d seen in the mobile phone industry five years before, where people could go out there and put 20 bucks on their power, as they did with their phone, and have enough credit to get them through the next couple of days, because that’s when the money was available. And just that concept, which, you know, you look back, it seems pretty simple. It’s pretty practical. I think some of the best ideas are like that, you know, in the rearview mirror, just sort of seems obvious that you should be able to, you know, treat your.

Aaron Ward:
Your electricity supply in the same way that you would. Your mobile phone, like them, really made a massive difference to thousands and thousands of families. And so in that experience, I saw the impact that technology had on the human condition. I remember I was actually. I was at the gym, local gym here, down the changing rooms one day, and this dude was one of the trainers, rocked up to me and said, oh, bro, what do you do? And I said, well, I work for a power company. And he said, okay. He said, yeah, which one? I said, oh, it’s associated with that Mercury energy. He said, oh, is it Glow Bug? I said, yeah, that’s the one.

Aaron Ward:
And he thrust out his hand, you know, to shake my hand, and he said, bro, we’ve got globug at our house. That is the best thing. We love it. And in that moment, I had this shot of dopamine into the heart when I heard from a customer who not only bought and used this product that I’d had a hand in helping designing, but he was so excited about it, it really meant something to him and made a difference to his family. And.

Aaron Ward:
That feeling totally stuck with me. And it was like a drug. I was like, I want more of that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, that’s obviously pretty connected to your story. Now, before, because you started Ask Nicely, what was it? 2014. What did you do? In between Mighty River Power and Ask.

Aaron Ward:
Nicely, I did a short stunt. Since working in a software firm that itself was reasonably entrepreneurial and had designs to build a number of different Products. I think by the time that I was in that role, I had recovered from my earliest startup experience, you know, the bootstraped one. I’d had a measure of success underneath a sort of an entrepreneurial experience with Globug. And now I was fully back on the Kool Aid, ready to do my, ready to do another one again. And so, yeah, us Nicely was, you know, sort of had to happen.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So how did the dots come together? What was the.

Paul Spain:
The thought patterns that you and your co founder had to kick off Ask Nicely and to make that a thing that you’d dive into boots and all?

Aaron Ward:
Well, I think step number one is sort of a fait accompli that I needed to go and be part of the founding of another business.

Aaron Ward:
I knew there was no sort of happiness or fulfilment in sort of big corporate roles.

Aaron Ward:
Step number two was in and of myself I am insufficient. I, you know, I go back to my father’s observations, had no real practical skills in and of myself. I needed to partner with somebody else that could help build that, particularly from a technology perspective. So I needed to find my co founder and then, and the next step after that is what are we going to work on? So the idea was less important than we need to go and build a business. I need to do it with somebody that can help complete me. That person for Ask Nicely was John Ballinger. And this is where the dots do start to connect. Because I met John when I was building Tickle and he was like this gun for hire web mobile developer.

Aaron Ward:
That I had contracted to help me with rebuilding the Tickle engine. And through that experience I discovered in him somebody that I had a sort of an uncommon chemistry with. We, you know, we’re both reasonably prickly in different ways. You know, we’re both acquired tastes, but we really clicked together. And in that moment this is, you know, reversing up a few years. I knew that he was the guy that I wanted to go and build something with. And so.

Aaron Ward:
I had a list by the end of 19 unstarted startup ideas, which is.

Aaron Ward:
It’S a good sized list. Oh, it’s a terrible list. Right, right. Cause the only thing that matters is one startup idea that is started, not the unstarted ones.

Paul Spain:
So how did you, how did you make a decision when you had 19 ideas, thought starters, you know, however far you’d got with them and how did you whittle that down to one?

Aaron Ward:
So John and I would have an annual conversation of sorts. I would ring John up and say, hey, I’ve got an idea I want to bounce off you. And I’d drive around to his house and I would pitch him one of these ideas off this list. And his typical response was, aaron, that’s a stupid idea. No one’s going to want that. Go away. And I would scurry away with my tail between my legs and like, a year would pass and then I would, you know, I would be excited by some new shiny idea and go around and pitch it. This process went on for 10 years.

Aaron Ward:
So we’re talking started in 2004. By 2014, I’m rocking up to his house to talk to him about the idea that became Ask Nicely.

Paul Spain:
Right. So you probably, in hindsight, you had a lot to thank him for before you even started Ask Nicely because he helped you not waste your time on some daft idea.

Aaron Ward:
100%. 100%. I look back at those earlier ideas that I bounced off him. I was like, oh, thank God I didn’t go after that. But at the time, each one of them, like, this is the one.

Aaron Ward:
And I remember going around to his house and he told me quite some time afterwards, he said, man, I was getting sick of you coming around to my house telling me these stupid stories. And he said, that night that you came over, I was going to tell you.

Aaron Ward:
Just stop. I don’t have time for it. I don’t need any more of these, of these, of these, of these pictures from you. That’s enough.

Paul Spain:
Oh, that’s nuts.

Aaron Ward:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
But he listened.

Aaron Ward:
Well. Yeah. So we. So John lives in his little house in Ponsonby. We walked up to Ponsonby Road, we went to a.

Aaron Ward:
What was then a little tapas bar, and we sat down and I had this conversation with him. And I still remember the entire conversation, which I won’t bore you with, give.

Paul Spain:
Us a short version of what was the pitch for us Nicely.

Aaron Ward:
Well. So I looked at him, I said, hey, John, what if we could do. I said, there’s these things called customer experience surveys, customer satisfaction surveys. And John’s like, oh, yeah, I’ve seen those things. He said, they’re terrible. They suck. I said, yeah, I know they do suck.

Aaron Ward:
I said, what if we could do to those long, awful surveys what Twitter did to blogging? Remember, this is 2014. Twitter’s quite cool back then. And he paused for a second and he said, I like it. I’ll build it.

Paul Spain:
Wow, that was quick.

Aaron Ward:
Well, yeah, I remember this is like I’m jumping out of my skin at this point. This has been 10 years of me bouncing like these business ideas off him. And I said, awesome. When he said tonight, he said, stop talking. You talk too much. I’m going home to start coding.

Aaron Ward:
So this is a Tuesday night. It’s raining outside. By that time, it was 11:30pm he literally went home and started coding that night. The next day, he had the first. He had the beginnings of a prototype, and that was how Us Nicely started.

Paul Spain:
Wow. So before we delve into the rest of the story, maybe, you know, walk us through what is Us Nicely, you know, today. You know, how did it. How has it sort of varied, you know, in simple terms, from that initial.

Paul Spain:
Vision of a really quick and easy way for people to be able to offer their feedback.

Aaron Ward:
So Ask Nicely Today actually matches the same vision that we had when we started right back at the beginning, which is this idea of helping businesses deliver the best experience to their customers. I think there is a truism today which wasn’t as.

Aaron Ward:
Warmly embraced 10, 15 years ago, that it’s the businesses with the best experiences that win. Not the best marketing or the best sales, but those that can actually deliver upon their promise. And at that time, and this is the thinking that went into Us Nicely, we said, well, if experience is as if not more important than marketing and sales, well, look, we’ve got these big stacks of software for marketing, and we’ve got big stacks of software for sales, but almost nothing for experience.

Aaron Ward:
Doesn’t it make sense that at some point in the future, businesses will have some type of stack of software that helps make sure that every customer experience is awesome? And in terms of the start of our snice thing, we said, well, okay, well.

Aaron Ward:
If that’s possible, if that’s likely.

Aaron Ward:
One part of that stack, in fact, probably the most essential start of it, is helping people measure the customer experience. Let’s figure out if we can tell whether a customer walked away happy or not. And if they did, they’re more likely to come back for more. They’re more likely to tell others about them, and the businesses with the best experience will win. And so the starting point for Us Nicely was just creating a very simple way for businesses to measure the experience that they were delivering to customers. And we did it with the world’s shortest, simplest, easiest survey, which was a single click on a rating and a single comment, which now is reasonably common at the time. Totally revolutionary and totally counter to the conventional wisdom around we must ask you 50 questions and inflict a really painful experience upon you.

Aaron Ward:
So, yeah, we started as a very simple way to measure the customer experience. And what we found was as businesses, and particularly service companies that had lots and lots of frontline employees that were delivering the experience to their customers, they were coming back to us saying, hey, we love how well instrumented our customer experience is. Now we’ve got really tight measurement, real time, right across our business, down to a team or even an individual level where we can measure the experience that everyone’s doing. So we know exactly right across our company what the standard of experience that our customers are getting now is.

Aaron Ward:
We’d like to figure out how to make that number go up. And there’s quite a difference right. Between measuring our customer experience and actually improving it.

Aaron Ward:
And that was what Ask Nicely evolved into. We became a platform that helped motivate and reward frontline employees for making every customer experience awesome. And.

Aaron Ward:
That’s how the Ask Nicely platform evolved. It became a recognition and reward platform for frontline workers, which I’m. To me.

Aaron Ward:
I think that’s probably the biggest takeaway from Ask Nicely was the effect that feedback had on people at work.

Paul Spain:
Yes.

Aaron Ward:
Like frontline workers and service companies typically don’t get much feedback at all. And if they do, it’s because something’s gone wrong.

Aaron Ward:
Which is not a great experience. Right. It’s tough being a frontline servicer. We saw this through Covid the amount of science, particularly over the U.S. where, where you go into a store and you’d see a sign by the checkout saying, please be nice to our team. Today, companies were understaffed. Customers were stressed out. That stress would be reflected onto the frontline staff in these businesses who themselves would get stressed and chances are not turn up tomorrow.

Aaron Ward:
And then this cycle, you know, got worse and worse. I think businesses really realized that how important it was to really support frontline workers so that they could turn up and be their best for every customer every day. Yes. And so what Ask Nicely became was a platform that helped businesses and managers within those businesses catch their people doing things right.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic.

Aaron Ward:
All right. We know that.

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, humans are best motivated by positive feedback. We’ve known this since we were at kindergarten when, you know, we used to have the little star chart and we did something. Well, you got a little star beside your name. And we know how that felt. I still remember how that felt. I still feel that way today.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Aaron Ward:
And so us Nicely was delivering, and, you know, this is its dominant task for service businesses today, is to make sure that we’re capturing all of the positive feedback from customers and delivering that through to frontline workers so they know that what they do matters. They know that it’s something that the customer appreciates, that their boss appreciates, that leadership appreciates. And I think that’s the thing that fuel that gets them out of bed the next day to come and do it all over again.

Paul Spain:
So from those early ideas and that initial bit of code that was quickly put together overnight, how did you, I guess, plan out to build out the business from, you know, from those initial ideas and, you know, how closely would you say you were able to kind of follow those initial thoughts on what it might look like?

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, it’s interesting. All right. So we had a vision from day one that us Nicely had the potential to be a global business, to be a global brand. We looked at this category around measuring customer experience to start with and we said, well, actually there’s no, there’s no leader in this space. You know, you ask somebody, how do you, how do you, you know, how do you go and get feedback from your, from your, from your customers? And people shrug their shoulders and go like, I don’t know, is it like Survey Monkey or something?

Aaron Ward:
When people answer a question with a question, it means there’s no answer.

Aaron Ward:
And we saw a very real opportunity for Ask Nicely to become that answer. And so from day one, we had this intention around Arsenal actually becoming a market leader in the customer experience space.

Aaron Ward:
And a recognition that the US was going to be the market to win for us to establish that leadership position and from there to go and build a global brand. Now, it’s a gross oversimplification to get to this conclusion, but that’s sort of what happened.

Aaron Ward:
We became the number one rated experience management platform on the planet.

Aaron Ward:
It’s a platform called G2, where our customers would go and put reviews on there. For us Nicely we had the highest rating.

Aaron Ward:
Well beyond.

Aaron Ward:
The next best competitor, which was a business called Qualtrics, which was sort of at least 100 times bigger than us, yet our customers liked ours better. And there’s something measure about that, right? Because we were delivering an experience to our customers that was good enough that not only would they hang around and continue to buy our product, but they would go and talk about it on review sites like that. And that’s essentially the promise that we made to our customers. If you buy our software, it’s going to help you deliver an experience that your customers will come back for more and tell others about. And so there’s a nice little duality around making a dream come true for your customers that can also come true for you.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s pretty Cool. So how did you make that happen? Because you’d learned some lessons earlier in terms of that these things can be expensive.

Paul Spain:
So what was the journey of getting from you and John to this great global business? How did you fund it? How did you decide who to bring in for the journey? How did that look like in those earliest years?

Aaron Ward:
Well, right back at the start, I think, and taking a lesson out of the previous business, we worked very early on getting validation from customers that what we. Not what we built, but we wanted to build would actually solve a problem for them. So before we had anything, like any software, I was taking the concept of it and a screenshot that, that John had built on that first night. Perfect. I shopped at around.

Aaron Ward:
12 different businesses of all different shapes, sizes and flavours here in New Zealand and said, we’re thinking of building something like this. You know, if we built this, would you. Would you be interested? Would you. Would you pay money for it? And of those 12, 11 said yes. And the 12th said, I bought something like that last week. And that just, you know, I think it just really validated that this was a. Was a problem for companies and they were interested in some form of solution to it. Whether that was ours or not, we didn’t know that yet, but it really validated that it was worth leaning into.

Aaron Ward:
And then I went to. At the time, John was still doing a bunch of contract web and mobile development for other people. And it’s nice. There was sort of a nights and weekends thing for him, and.

Aaron Ward:
I was now fully convicted that this was a real thing and I needed to get him to work on it full time. So I went to a friend of mine that I’d done some work with previously and said, hey, I need you to buy this product. He said, well, you haven’t really got anything to show me. There’s no software here. I said, yeah, but I need this guy to work on it full time. Can you write me a check for $3,000 and we will build this product that I’ve just described to you? He wrote the check on the spot. I took it back to John, said, look at this, we’ve got three. We’ve got our first customer.

Aaron Ward:
He immediately picked up the phone, rang all of his clients and fired every one of them on the spot and said, I’m building a startup. So that was the moment that he went all in on it. And that’s when life started to get a bit serious. Now. Now this is a real thing. You know, he and I both had Auckland mortgages. We Both had two young kids, so this thing, you know, this thing needed to fly. And I guess the other, the other learning from previous experience was, you know, bootstrapping is.

Aaron Ward:
You know.

Aaron Ward:
Isn’t a favourable path. My wife was not going to endorse that. So we, we had to go and raise some money. Yeah. And so we, with that early conviction of we had. We had less than four or five customers, we went and raised a tiny, ridiculously small angel round, which was the start of our.

Aaron Ward:
Capital journey.

Paul Spain:
Right, but that was enough to get you started, because get started, you ended up doing how many capital raises through your journey?

Aaron Ward:
I’m not sure I could count them all. I think I’ve blanked out a number of them. But the dollar figure adds up to 50 million US that we raised into that company.

Paul Spain:
And when you look back over that journey, what sticks out most as the hardest time? You obviously, as you’re saying 50 million, that’s a pretty substantial amount of capital get invested. But you don’t go asking for that sort of money unless you need it. So there must have been some stresses and pressures along the way.

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, totally. I mean, you ask for the hard times. I’m trying to think of, like, which were the easy ones.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Aaron Ward:
Okay.

Aaron Ward:
So the whole thing’s hard, right? I mean, it really is. It really is. I think it’s. I think that what changes is the flavour of hardness. Right. I think startups graduate through different stages and each stage has a different flavour of heart about it. And that’s the thing that’s kind of frustrating about the whole startup journey is like you have some success in a given stage, you feel like you’ve cracked some code and you go into the next stage, you’re like, oh, that code’s irrelevant to the new code. That code doesn’t work in the new stage.

Aaron Ward:
And so in some ways you always feel like you’re new at this. And it was certainly the case for me. And I was nicely through the last five or six years of the journey. I’m sitting there with a CEO title on feeling like the least experienced person at the table. We’d always try to recruit people into the executive team that had mileage on the clock in businesses that were, you know, the stage after or even later stage than us, so that we could take learnings out of those experiences and pull them into us nicely. And again, I’m the one that feels the most, you know, naïve and.

Aaron Ward:
Least experienced through it. The way that we look to address that was right from a very early stage, making sure that we were getting.

Aaron Ward:
Feedback from people that we really respected and trusted and had seen more rodeos than we had. And so right back from that first angel round that we did.

Aaron Ward:
John o’, Hara.

Aaron Ward:
Really respected entrepreneur here in Auckland, came on board, backed these two clowns sitting in a garden shed, you know, to build something worthwhile. And he was that very much that first believer. And it was his belief in us and endorsement of us that I think made it attractive and interesting for a bunch of other people to become investors or become involved in the business in some way. And so, yeah, I think most important in Ask Nicely’s journey for me was the co founder choice and John. And then secondly, the people that we were able to work with to help steer and guide the business early on, like John o’. Hara. And then the second significant name to come on board was Mike Cardin. And back at that time, we’re going back to 2014, there’s a very, very short list of people that had gone and built software, service software as a service business and seen that journey right through to the end to some form of exit.

Aaron Ward:
And I think at that time Mike would have been one of like three, four people in the country that had had that experience. And I’d known Mike for a few years, but I was able to share the concept of ask nicely with him and he said, I think that’s got some legs.

Aaron Ward:
And he came on as a investor advisor, went onto the board and then was super impactful through the journey of Arsenic right through to Series B.

Paul Spain:
So some really key elements there in terms of people that backed you and supported you and you were able to lean into. Right through the journey.

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, totally.

Paul Spain:
And then tell us about.

Paul Spain:
Stephen stepping back from Arse Nicely.

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, it’s so, you know, go right back to the start when John and I were sitting in this. Yeah, like literally sitting in his garden shed talking around the fact that us Nicely has the potential and we have this conviction that it can become a global brand and a market leader. Right back at that sort of daydreaming stage for us, we looked at each other and said, I don’t know, are we the right people to be running a global business? And the good news was we didn’t need to answer that question at that stage. We just needed to be the guys that started that. But I think philosophically we also recognize there might be a stage at which, if the business fulfilled that potential, that maybe there’s a stage at which it outgrows us. And, you know, maybe there’s a moment at which we need to sort of pass that baton on for somebody to take it and help it, you know, help it reach, you know, the next stage of its potential. And we tried to come up with a.

Aaron Ward:
We developed this ritual to, I guess, check in on where we’re at with regard to, you know, are we right for this, you know, am I the right person for this next phase? And so what we would do is we would get together.

Aaron Ward:
At the start of each year in January, of course, it’s summertime here in New Zealand, so we would go down to a local beach and we would spend three, four, five hours together checking in with each other and trying to see. Look around the corner and say, okay, what is this next year going to ask of us? We know it’s going to be different from the year that we’ve just come out of. And given what we think we need to achieve and what that year is going to require of us, am I the right person for that job? And we would give each other permission to give us feedback on whether I thought John was up for it and whether he thought I was up for it, and then what would need to be true for us to justify the seat that we. That we have. And so we would give ourselves, like, we’ll give each other really constructive feedback on what we would, you know, the upgrades that we would need to perform on ourselves to be able to.

Aaron Ward:
You know, lean into that next phase. And.

Aaron Ward:
We got to.

Aaron Ward:
Goodness, I can’t remember how many years and. But there was a point at which John said, look, you know, it’s starting to become a lot more about sort of, you know, leadership and governance. And I’m not doing much coding anymore, and I really miss the coding and I like the. I like building. Not less interested in this leadership stuff. And, you know, essentially sort of opted out of continuing. We were able to, you know, manage our way through that, which is. Well, it was very, very tricky time.

Paul Spain:
But, yeah, that would be easier said than done.

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, yeah. But in some ways we were able to sort of, you know, plan ahead and put a transition plan in place. So, I mean, that was a really, really healthy ritual for he. And I sort of found founder to founder feedback, but then mine as a founder, I then needed to figure out, well, who am I going to be able to have that conversation with going forward, you know, such that. Such that I can, you know, continue to be sort of fit for the role and fit for the phase that I’m in? So I ended up going and getting a executive CEO coach In Portland, where I was living with my family at that time, where the majority of the executive team was. And that was transformational for me and we were able to be a lot more proactive about my development there. It’s actually when I first started doing 360 feedback to basically get visibility of my blind spots and be proactive around them and long story bearable. We’d raised a big B round, raised a lot of money and scaled the business to where I think we had about 70 people in the company at that time.

Aaron Ward:
And I had lost the level of connection that I had with each person that I really enjoyed and valued when the company was sort of 30 or 40 people and I was starting to feel less effective as a leader. And so that became one of the signals that went into the conversation around is it time to find a new leader for US Nicely?

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So how did you progress forward from that point?

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, well, I think we’ve really thought deeply around what’s the nature of the. The skill set and the profile that’s going to be the sort of the best CEO for Arsenal IC going forward. And so now we have Tony Ward who’s in that role, no relation. And Tony is a Canadian national but married a Kiwi girl that he met when he was visiting Auckland as part of the 1990 Commonwealth Games. It’s the most awesome story.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Aaron Ward:
So he falls in love with this girl but also falls in love with Auckland and New Zealand, ends up coming to study at the University of Auckland and then spent time working with Spark, Microsoft, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey, Dropbox. So a bunch of wonderful technology brands here, predominantly in a sort of sales and country leadership roles which is just wonderful for us Nicely ended up being the, the head of North America for Xero. So we’ve got this person who’s lived this US New Zealand lifestyle, understands both cultures deeply and has this sales leadership pedigree from some of the world’s best technology brands. So just a. I feel super fortunate to have somebody like with that profile taking the reins of US Nicely going forward and he’s just doing phenomenally so I still sit on the board of US Nicely. I exited.

Aaron Ward:
Operationally last year and that’s given me permission to go and work on the new thing. Unfortunately I still suffer from the startup gene. My wife would prefer that this wasn’t the case but it is what I am. So it’s. So it’s time to go and build a new business and that’s what brings us to the company that I’m working On today called Huckleberry.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So tell us how that came about.

Aaron Ward:
Well, Huckleberry is.

Aaron Ward:
The world’s first voice AI360 feedback.

Aaron Ward:
Platform. And so there’s some really obvious overlap between Huckleberry and Ask Nicely on a number of levels. So firstly, it’s feedback. Again, it’s not customer feedback. Now we’re talking about feedback from your teammates. And it’s directly informed from, I guess, much of my experience going through the Ask Nicely journey and thinking around how do I upgrade myself over time, how do I see my blind spots that I have and be able to take action upon those so that I can increase my impact in my role. And.

Aaron Ward:
You know, that in most businesses is a really painful process, very similar to what customer feedback was 10 years ago before us Nicely came on the scene. People send out these long surveys to all their teammates. Typically happens once a year. So for 364 days of the year, there is silence, you hear nothing. And then at the end of the year, maybe, maybe some of your teammates suffer the indignity of filling out these terrible, awful, long surveys with ratings and sliders in them.

Aaron Ward:
And it’s a process that just nobody loves. Nobody loves providing feedback. Nobody loves being a manager that has to wade through raw verbatims and then turn that into something.

Aaron Ward:
You know, that’s not going to traumatise people in their team and the poor person that has to receive it. I just look at that and think, oh, my God, feedback is so essential to the human condition. It’s literally how we evolve.

Aaron Ward:
All the highest performing athletes in the world.

Aaron Ward:
Levelled on the feedback that’s typically delivered to them via a coach.

Aaron Ward:
And yet in a professional sense, the way that we deal with feedback is these terrible, long surveys. So Huckleberry is here to save the world from that process. And we have created a way where people can talk rather than Type, which takes three or four minutes rather than 20 or 30. And then there is no manager or HR involved in the process. Feedback goes directly to the individual, but thanks to AI in a format that’s only going to be helpful rather than hurtful to the individual. And then Huckleberry has a particular innovation to her which is unique in the sense that that feedback travels with you.

Aaron Ward:
In your career. You can take it from role to role and from. From company to company, essentially build your reputation based on what your teammates say about you.

Paul Spain:
What a brilliant idea. That’s great.

Aaron Ward:
Well, let’s see, let’s see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we’re, you know, we’re less than two months into that journey, we’re right back at the start of the startup journey, which is super exciting. And now we’ve got lessons from, you know, three or four other businesses to go and pour into this. So let’s see if we’ve learned anything from that feedback.

Paul Spain:
Oh, I’m sure you have. So for folks that are curious about Huckleberry, is there a product they can sign up for yet? Where are you at?

Aaron Ward:
Yeah, you can. So for anybody at work, you can go to gethckleberry.com and sign up for free and use Huckleberry to get feedback from your teammates. You don’t have to set your credit card. Your company does not need to have a subscription to it. So in this sense, it’s a little bit like LinkedIn. We want to make sure that all the world’s workers have access to feedback, good quality feedback when they need it, so they don’t have to wait for a feedback day inside their company. And then.

Aaron Ward:
Businesses are able to subscribe to Huckleberry to get integration with their systems and be able to roll process out at scale across hundreds or thousands of their employees.

Paul Spain:
Brilliant. Well, really appreciate your time, Aaron. Great to hear some of your story. And I think listeners will be very curious to follow the Huckleberry journey following your incredible success with Ask Nicely.

Aaron Ward:
Awesome. Yeah, thanks, Paul. This has been great.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, thank you so much. Cheers.

 

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