Paul Spain:
JD Trask, great to have you on the podcast. How are you?

JD Trask:
I’m very good. Thanks for having me back, Paul.

Paul Spain:
Now today I’m keen to hear about your journey in business and in technology. So maybe we can start at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about where you were born and where you grew up.

JD Trask:
I was born just outside of Palmerston North, out behind Massey there. So kind of rural. And that meant that I was a long way from town, so I couldn’t even go to the local dairy. So, you know, once we got a computer, when I was about 7 or 8 years old. I fell in love with that. That was kind of my connection to being able to do whatever I wanted with projects. And I always use the saying that as a kid, I really loved Lego. And when I discovered programming, it was like discovering an infinite box of Lego bricks that were stored inside the computer.

JD Trask:
And the only real limitation was, was my brain good enough to solve the problems, to make the stuff I wanted? So I fell in love with computers then. I put in my Encarta 94 CD-ROM at one point and typed in software because we didn’t have the internet yet. And I read about this guy, Bill Gates, and I was like, oh wow, sounds like there’s also money in software. This is also of my interest. And so got a comp sci degree, went and worked for Intergen for 3 years when I graduated. And then struck out on my own at 23 with a company called Mindscape. Mindscape built dev tools, but we did a bunch of services work as well to pay the bills because I was, you know, it was not— didn’t come into it with a lot of money. I was 23.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah. So just rolling back to Integrite, why did you land at Integrite and what did that look like? Who were you working with? And, you know, there must have been some takeaways from that period.

JD Trask:
Yeah, 100%. So I was running at at university, an e-commerce site, a blogging platform, and a PC repair company where I drove around the Manawatū fixing people’s computers. And I actually only applied for one job at the end when I was graduating with Intergen. And they hired me into their grad programme. I met Tony Stewart at one of the first interviews. So Tony was the managing director there. I met so many key people in my life. I learnt a lot from the folks there.

JD Trask:
One of the first things I did when I joined was sort of ask the question, who actually owns this place? And there were 3 key directors that worked in the business, Wayne, Paddy, and Tony. And like my first thought was, okay, so what do they need me to do? If I make them successful, I’ll be successful. And so I worked pretty hard there, to be honest. I think 5 out of the 6 6-monthly periods, I booked more billable hours than anybody else. And so I just threw myself into it. Huge learning opportunity, sucked up as much information as I possibly could, saved every penny I could ’cause I knew I did wanna start a company at some point. I’d even told Tony this in the first interview and I think I was very lucky that they were so entrepreneurial that they didn’t see that as a negative, saw it as a positive. Yeah, and so I ended up meeting a chap there called Jeremy Boyd, JB, and we ended up setting up Mindscape together.

JD Trask:
leaving together to start that. So I will, however, give him a shout out on the fact that even with all of that programming experience, that dude ran rings around me when it came to programming. I was like, he’s who I want to be when it comes to programming. So yeah, we’ve made a good team.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, fantastic. And so what was your vision for Mindscape?

JD Trask:
Well, initially, having joined Integene and worked with some of the tools that they’d built internally for their dev team to accelerate delivery. So they had things like their own object-relational mapping technologies and things like that. Keep in mind, this was in 2004. And I was like, this is really cool stuff. This is really accelerating delivery, but there’s not really standards out there or products that people are using around this time. This was, of course, pre-Microsoft putting LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework in. That would come years later. And so we decided to focus on developer tools to accelerate the delivery of software.

JD Trask:
And we built a range of different products that we sold mostly internationally still, which was great. Everything was priced in USD. That was back when the New Zealand dollar was at about 80, 85 cents, I think. So it’s come down quite a bit. Yeah. So we sold those products, but we were really bootstrapped. So we also did joint venture work. So we teamed up with Natalie Whitaker, and the Movac folks to deliver things like Givealittle.

JD Trask:
So we were a shareholder and creator of that platform. We also built a business valuation company, an inbox mining business, a few different things like that while we were sort of figuring it out. I do say to people, starting at 23 sounds really impressive, but I’ll also acknowledge that my 20s of running a business was really trial by fire, figuring out what actually works, what doesn’t, how fun it can be to be an employer, how not fun it can be to be an employer. Those sorts of things. I used to do all of the payroll by hand because I wanted to understand how that worked, all of those sorts of things. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
How, from a business perspective, would you have described what you were aiming to achieve with Mindscape?

JD Trask:
Well, it’s going to sound a bit trite to start with, which was the ability to earn enough money to pay ourselves. Once we got past that, it was all about accelerating software delivery. So how could we just make teams more productive? productive, more effective, and deliver things faster. And things like Lightspeed, for example, which was the name of our object-relational mapper, that was the highest-performing object-relational mapper in the market at the time. It ended up getting used by a lot of folks. And so that was our sort of lens, was developer tools built by actual developers.

Paul Spain:
During this time, as well as, you know, give a little all the other, you know, things that you were involved in, building. What became Raygun was one of those projects. Tell us how that got started because, you know, Raygun’s gone on to, you know, to incredible success as a product. But how did it all be— how did that kind of, you know, begin?

JD Trask:
So we built Raygun in 2012. We launched it in 2013. And interestingly enough, it was built entirely off something I’d learned from JB when I’d started at Integent. which was he taught me when I first started, he said, look, put a bit of code in here that when an unhandled error occurs, it sends you an email about what happened. I said, oh, that seems like a smart idea. And he’s like, yeah, this way you can fix something before the customer actually bothers to contact support, because most won’t even bother to tell you that something’s broken. And I was like, well, that sounds really cool. And then we were thinking about what products would help software teams.

JD Trask:
And I was like, why don’t we productize that whole notion of keeping you informed about things going wrong automatically? And so we built Raygun for that. And at the time, Raygun was simply a product of Mindscape. Eventually, we actually sunset everything else that Mindscape was doing and just basically converted the company into Raygun. The other benefit was it was our first subscription product. And I say to any young entrepreneur out there, starting every month at zero is a really, really painful game to play. Knowing that you’re starting the month with a certain amount of revenue kind of booked is a game changer.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

JD Trask:
That really helped. We were observing things that were happening over at Xero and kind of going, okay, that model looks really good. I like the way that works. It was very predictable, very easy to— people were putting together really good stuff on SaaS metrics. We learned how all of that worked. Yeah, so that’s how it ended up. And it’s a great product. It’s still a great product.

JD Trask:
It still sells well.

Paul Spain:
And I mean, in terms of making That decision, this is obviously, it was a really, you know, a key point in the future of Raygun, Mindscape, for all of your staff, shareholders. Was it just the two of you at that stage as the shareholders or?

JD Trask:
Yeah, at that stage it was. So we raised a little bit of capital in 2014, which was the first capital since starting my business career in 2007. that we’d brought on. As I say, we bootstrapped the business and our actual starting capital had only been $10K per founder. And so it was pretty lightly capitalised. When we did the 2014 capital raise, we wanted to make sure that we were very clear that we were sunsetting the Mindscape things, that we weren’t creating any expectation around that side of the shop and things like that.

Paul Spain:
So that was kind of a key because you wanted to go in and raise that capital, you realised, hold on, we need to have a very, very clear picture here. Crystal picture, yeah. Yeah, otherwise it’s gonna muddy the waters, it’s gonna be a challenge. So that helped you step into it. If you weren’t raising money, do you think you would’ve still made that same decision or would it have maybe taken you longer?

JD Trask:
Probably would’ve taken me longer. As much as, I mean, I’m not a huge capital raiser, to be honest. I’ve only ever raised 2.3 million Kiwi in total ever. And of that, probably $500K came from my own pocket. So it’s not a huge amount of money that we’ve raised across various businesses over various years that are generating millions and millions of dollars in export revenue. And honestly, just to argue with myself, which I hear is a talent I have, is maybe we left opportunity on the table there and we probably should have taken maybe a bit more, but we’ll see.

Paul Spain:
So yeah, walk us through the capital raising and how much were you raising at that point? ‘Cause you, as you say, you haven’t gone out and raised a lot. What was it at that point?

JD Trask:
So when we kicked off that first raise, we had loaded in about $1 million in commitments. And so a lot of that was coming actually from people that we’d done joint ventures with previously. So this was a great opportunity to kind of continue to work with people that we’d worked with before. In simple terms, you would potentially call it friends and family, but it was more like business acquaintances and friends that we’d built other businesses with. So that was really cool overall. We ended up doing a little bit more in that round after it closed, and then we did a top-up round in 2016 for, I think it was about $900K. And that was really to support our physical expansion into the United States. So I moved up to Seattle for a period of time.

JD Trask:
For about 3 years, we expanded into trying enterprise sales, those sorts of things up there. Yeah, and so that was it. But the company was cash flow positive overall around that point.

Paul Spain:
That’s a great, great position to be in.

JD Trask:
Yeah, I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve been on boards of other companies and I assist other people and I invest in other companies as well. It’s just not really my character to want to be on the treadmill of capital raising. I prefer the adventure of actually navigating the business. I don’t empathise well with the people who are like, every 6 to 9 months I’m out here raising capital.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, maybe we can delve a little bit into the US.

JD Trask:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Tell us about the trigger. It’s a pretty big deal to decide to up and move to the US. What age were you at that point?

JD Trask:
I can’t do the maths. Probably my mid-30s-ish. Yeah, so moved up there, moved to Seattle. In retrospect, and you know, I like to try and be as transparent as possible with folks, like what did we get right and what did we not get right? What we got right was me being in Seattle was probably a good thing. I built relationships across Amazon, Microsoft, all of those things. Building a sales team in Seattle was probably not a smart idea in terms of just pure cost of folks in that area.

Paul Spain:
Yes.

JD Trask:
I had people saying, look, if you’d built this in Arizona, it would’ve cost you about a third the amount and been more effective. What we also found up there that worked was that the sales motion did work for us, but it didn’t actually generate revenue any faster than product-led growth did. And so we ended up shifting from more of an enterprise sales motion into how would we have stronger customer success and support. So leave product-led growth to actually acquire the customer, followed by expansion driven by a CS and account management function. So that side of things for what we learned went pretty well.

Paul Spain:
Yep. Now for someone who’s not familiar with the software business, explain what that would look like in terms of product-led growth.

JD Trask:
Yeah, sure. So product-led growth I often think of as being the product kind of quote unquote sells itself. So how do you make it so that a person who who’s signing up and just having a tinker or is curious is not confused or overloaded, that the onboarding is smooth, but then that you put in growth loops. So for example, do you make it easy enough to add the team? Is there an incentive for adding the team? Is it something that just works? And so that’s where you get the product-led growth. The reverse of that being a more traditional sales process, maybe where you have sales development reps or business development reps, so SDRs or BDRs. Mm-hmm. These are the people that are dialing for donuts. They’re calling out to people, they’re sending emails.

JD Trask:
They may be also trying to qualify inbound leads as well before handing it to an account executive to work the deal, if you will. What we found is you obviously put in place a whole lot more humans and that has a whole lot more cost. And as I say, they were actually closing larger deals. But what struck me as interesting was that the actual slant of the revenue line didn’t really move. It just shifted to less bigger deals, if that makes sense. So it was making the total dollars work, but it was kind of like, but this is much less efficient than what we were already doing. What should we do?

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

JD Trask:
Now, I didn’t end up shutting that down out of any sort of necessity, but around the end of 2018 was the birth of my first child. So we decided to move back to be closer to family. And then with COVID hitting, we still had some folks up there, but largely it was very difficult obviously to manage a foreign team at that point. And so we had to trim that down. We still, today we’ve got some people in the US again, but not in the sales capacity overall. So lessons were learned. We did acquire the revenue off the back of it. And it’s certainly probably a learning for me to take into future businesses and things we’re doing.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Walk us through what what the growth sort of looked like and what that enabled you to do as your revenues kept sort of building? Because as a recurring revenue business, it’s pretty significant when you start building a good recurring revenue base, right?

JD Trask:
Yeah, so it was nice to sort of shift to being in charge of our own destiny. So past the first few million dollars in annual recurring revenue. The other thing that we found, is while post-COVID we certainly saw an uptick in churn with business failures, overall Raygun is a very, very sticky product. Our very first customer from 2013 is still with us. The lifetime value of the customers on there is huge. And even that churn, as I say, with companies shutting down sort of post-COVID, that really only affected the sort of startup sort of layer of the customer base, which was significant to be fair. I don’t want to underplay it. Nobody likes to see churn tick up.

JD Trask:
But there’s also very little you can do to actually control a company that’s going out of business. So that was good. We also, this kind of blends the last 2 questions, but I’ll share this as a story and one that I maybe saved some other people making my mistake. Our very first enterprise customer was Nordstrom. And for those Kiwis who don’t know, Nordstrom is a massive department store across the United States. And they reached out and said to us, hey, we are looking at using Raygun. What’s it going to cost? And we’re like, oh shoot, first enterprise. This was before I went to the United States as well.

JD Trask:
And said, what’s it going to cost? So we’re like, oh shoot, what’s a big number? So we pulled out $25,000. Nothing, right? Absolutely nothing in retrospect.

Paul Spain:
Mm-hmm.

JD Trask:
But we pitched them $25K and they were like, okay, cool. Yeah, we’ll do that. So they put Raygun in and I ended up going to the US with Jeremy and we met up with them. and had a conversation. We ended up, and we do this with a lot of customers. In fact, it was one of my frustrations with the sales team. They’d always say, oh, this is JD’s friend. And I’m like, they might be my friend, but they started as a customer.

JD Trask:
And because I engage with them enough, we are now friends. And I wanted to really instill that within the sales and CS people. It’s like, you can build a relationship, a friendship off business first. Anyway, I got friendly with them and I was chatting with one of their team. And I had 2 questions. Firstly, how’d you hear about us? And secondly, what do you think of that price? And he said, well, firstly, he heard about us through a podcast. So, you know, hints, do podcasts. They can make you money.

JD Trask:
And he was driving to work and he heard me on Scott Hanselman’s Hanselminutes podcast.

Paul Spain:
Nice.

JD Trask:
And he was like, oh, we have this exact problem with our web platform. I’ll put in Raygun. And again, back to product-led growth, he said it was great. He said, I got in and 15 minutes later I got full error tracking. Like, this is fantastic. And I said, okay, now what about that price? And he said, yeah, you’ve got to figure out your pricing. I said, well, what should I learn? And he said, well, if you’d put another zero on that, no one would’ve even blinked. And I was like, so I could have charged you $250,000? And he’s like, yeah.

JD Trask:
He said, the other thing that stood out was he said, nearly everything else we buy, the first thing that customer does is send multiple consultants to our office to spend like the next 2 months with us getting this set up. And I said to him, I was like, well, should we have done that? And he’s like, not really. He’s like, I think this is actually a strength that you should sell. Because he’s like, it did only take 15 minutes to set up. And most of our sort of mind space, often when we’re looking at products is, God, how painful is this going to be to actually get in here? So that was something that really sold well to them and a lot of lessons to be learned.

Paul Spain:
How were you able to then take that learning, obviously you’ve got an existing relationship in place at a particular level, but take that knowledge on board for future enterprise deals. But also, if you’re able to, how did you then navigate that with Nordstrom in terms of, oh, how do we make this more commercially viable? relationship and that it didn’t stay on mates’ rates forever.

JD Trask:
Well, to be fair to them, it wasn’t on mates’ rates. It was on chump change because I was the chump. So even the Nordstrom deal actually made a fair bit of money. We did increase the price over time a little bit, nowhere near the 10x like we could have. But to be honest, I often look at these situations and I think, the value of the learning of the conversations I had there are significant. In fact, in many ways it feels very similar to how I was learning a lot at Intergen when I joined there. I could have stayed doing stuff myself, and that’s why I said I was glad that I didn’t because they really helped inform me about the value of what businesses see, the real numbers that are going on, and I learned so much from that. And so that’s probably worth more than just trying to lift the price on the customer.

JD Trask:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
What do you take away in terms of the impact that, you know, let’s say you’re selling something for a 10th of the price that you could sell it for. What sort of impact does that have on the overall business? Obviously, if you, you know, you think of your business today, if you had 10x the revenues, there’d be a whole bunch of things that you would be able to invest in and do, you know, that would help, you know, that and every other customer.

JD Trask:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Right. So you must have gone through a bit of a process of thinking, oh yeah, we do want to make sure these things kind of sit right.

JD Trask:
Well, I would probably say I didn’t make the mistake a second time.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

JD Trask:
Yeah. It was like, okay, cool. Yeah. Other customers that started to look like a fairly low price. We even set a bit of a fun internal challenge. I said, right, we close a 6-figure deal, you guys can shave my head bald. And so that actually did hit. a few years back.

JD Trask:
And so the team all sat around with clippers and shaved my head bald in the boardroom for closing a larger deal.

Paul Spain:
Oh, fantastic. Well, we’re hoping there’s some footage of that that we can—

JD Trask:
Oh, there’s photos.

Paul Spain:
That we can include for those that are watching the video and a bit of enticement for the audio listeners to go and have a look for the video.

JD Trask:
My mum and dad were not happy about it, man. They were really, never do that again. I’m like, how many? I wanna get more deals.

Paul Spain:
Now, what can you tell us in terms of scaling up that recurring revenue? In the early days, obviously, you start with nothing, right? And then you build up. You’d exited the other things that that Mindscape had done. How quickly did those revenues grow and what can you sort of share with us in terms of those numbers?

JD Trask:
Yeah, so in the lead up to COVID, growth was fairly strong and fairly repeatable. There was maybe some months where there was bits of wiggle room, but really the question was kind of how much growth, not is it growth, which was good. COVID hitting was a mixed blessing. There was and there wasn’t sort of like updrafts for us. You saw certain companies absolutely explode in COVID. We didn’t get that. But we, at the same time during COVID didn’t necessarily get so much headwinds. It was really the post-COVID world and how it hit the tech sector.

JD Trask:
So, again, not making excuses, but I used to sort of say to people, I don’t know that that many folks were quite as aware how heavily the tech sector got hit because frankly, it’s an industry that’s had 20 years of kind of going, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, we’re doing super well. That it was like no one’s going to write a lot of stories about what’s going on there. And it still hasn’t actually recovered to pre-COVID in terms of the size. Even with the AI boom kicking off, we’re just starting to see those developer roles starting to increase again, which is quite crazy.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

JD Trask:
We also saw an increase in competition. And so that certainly started— we saw more people enter into particularly the error reporting category. So while we may have been a pioneer in that space, now it was being done by a range of different parties. So we needed to continue to broaden out the product range, provide more of a holistic solution. And dare I say, jumping from back then to right now, you know, one of the big things we’ll have launched over the next 6 months is the full agentic version of Raygun. So in 2023, for example, and even now we have this running, but in 2023 we experimented with the idea that when a fault was detected, that an agent would simply build the fix and raise the pull request. So we have that kind of happening now inside our business. We’re looking to make that available to our customers.

JD Trask:
And I often say that to people when it comes to AI, is to think, what is the actual real root thing that the customer actually cares about? And at the end of the day, for Raygun, it’s not that it has a beautiful UI, it’s not that it helps you prioritize things, it’s not that it can show you trends over time, blah, blah, blah. You just want your software to not suck, right? You don’t want it to blow up on your users and you want it to be fast. Well, in theory, an agent could be receiving that telemetry data continually and just continually make your product better. And so that’s where the next stage is. The other thing though is that while one of the things that had been a limiter for us was how many products could we launch, well, in the age of AI, and we’ve already now got thousands of organisations on the books, what’s to stop us from saying, why don’t we launch 10 products in the next 12 months that actually allows us to kind of go toe-to-toe with some of these much bigger providers? And then lastly, this sort of touches a little bit on your point earlier about maybe profit maximisation. I think with AI, if we are to actually go towards the deflationary future, I think the profit maximizers are in for a bit of a wake-up call. And so that’s what I think is happening with the SaaSpocalypse. I think it’s what’s happening with the megatechs.

JD Trask:
I make the comment to anybody, if you work for an employer with more than 1,000 staff, good luck. that we are not having to scale on human capital like we used to. And so that’s the, to borrow the Bezosism, your margin is my opportunity. Well, some of them don’t have good margins because they’ve loaded up on people.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

JD Trask:
So they can’t provide much. And even through the SaaSpocalypse, it’s like, I don’t think it’s that necessarily that AI, well, AI might eat a lot of SaaS, but it’s been that we have continued to grow SaaS companies under this belief that at any point they can flip to profitability. Now, they’ve kind of done that with Reagan the whole time, but a lot of these companies are still losing money hand over fist. And so now they’re having to demonstrate that they can flip to profitability. And it turns out all their money is being eaten by salary costs and stock-based comp. And so you’re just seeing this absolute bleed out occurring across a lot of these SaaS companies as they kind of go, You’re shifting from being valued on a revenue multiple to a classic EBIT multiple like it probably should have always been.

Paul Spain:
Now you’ve got this dual focus. Now you’ve got Raygun and you’ve got Autohive. Walk us through how Autohive came about.

JD Trask:
I’m an engineer at heart. I don’t write code during the week, but I do love coding and thinking about software and systems. So 2023 kind of comes along, the ChatGPT moment plays out, and I was like, didn’t know how, to be super clear, But I was like, this changes absolutely everything. And so I had our all-hands in March 2023. And to be honest, normally I go in there and I say, right team, here’s where we want to be in a year’s time. Let’s figure out how we get there, rah, rah, rah. And all I knew was that actually it was kind of like a base law of physics had changed and I didn’t know what it was going to do. And so I was feeling a little bit of stress because I was thinking, God, Those sorts of meetings, to me anyway, I feel like that is my time to shine, to really rally the troops behind something.

JD Trask:
And I don’t have a really clear picture to sell them. And so I shifted gears and I thought, rather than actually painting a picture for the future, I’m going to go and do a retrospective on how different business leaders had handled substantial change when it was occurring. So we walked through stories like Jeff Bezos leaving the hedge fund when he saw I think it was 2,400% annualized growth rates in the internet and sort of saying, hey, when you see that sort of growth rate, there’s something to it. We analyzed Bill Gates’s internet tidal wave memo. We talked about all these concepts and what we had to do. So really more sort of set the scene that not only were we gonna have to think really hard about what was gonna change, we were also gonna have to invest a lot in our people, So in May ’23, we paused for a week. And what we did was we, the first few hours of Monday morning, I had the whole company do a software engineering hiring test, but they were allowed to use ChatGPT. And so suddenly, you know, bookkeepers, customer success agents, everybody was passing an engineering test.

JD Trask:
And might brag a little bit here, but like we have a bloody high bar on engineering talent in our business. It’s where, you know, I’ve always wanted to attract the people who want to work work on hardcore stuff. And so the fact that everybody could pass that test was a real, oh my God, kind of moment for particularly the non-engineers. And then we broke everybody up into separate cross-functional teams and we built agents for the whole rest of the week. And the idea was to present them on Friday midday over sort of a brown bag lunch. And we already had people running local models with speech-to-text, text-to-speech, asking questions about how the company operated, what are the processes for this, And they would talk back and all of this. And it really sort of helped open the eyes to the potential of what was happening. And it did do what I was hoping, which was help us have higher caliber conversations.

JD Trask:
Suddenly people were like, no, I know what an agent is because I built one last week. I know where the limits were. I know what hallucination is. I know why I wouldn’t trust this or how to strengthen some of these prompts. And everybody loves to call it change management. But it went fairly well. I will say, for those first 2 years, ’23, ’24, we, like a lot of organisations, had some believers and some non-believers. And so a lot of the folks that left over those 2 years left, like, I still kind of chuckle because the primary reason in the exit interviews was, I’m so sick and tired of JD talking about AI.

JD Trask:
I’ve got to go somewhere where there’s no AI. And so that, that was sad watching, watching people leave or not see the future and not get excited about the future. But it helped. And it turns out that that all went pretty well to plan. In, in 2024, I was sort of starting to look at what the strengths and weaknesses were of using these different AI tools. And I largely mapped out like, where are the weaknesses for me as a business leader on how I both run our company and how the company operates with AI? But I largely felt at the time in 2024 that this was the missing piece for how I would operate the company. Put another way, I was going home on the weekend and doing research into AI and I’d be using, say, the coding agents. I was like, these things are bloody fantastic.

JD Trask:
And then I’d put my CEO hat on on Monday and be like, oh cool, Gemini can summarize a 2-sentence email. Like, what the hell is this? This is not the future.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

JD Trask:
So it was like, no, how do we run a company this way? So we built Autohive through the end of 2024 and early ’25. We were dogfooding it ourselves. And I was having conversations with people because there was still, and there still is, a lot of non-believers around AI. But it’d be like, but how are you achieving some of these things? And I would explain to them what we were doing. there was an increasing demand to say, well, can I see this? Can you show me this thing? Can you? No, sure. Okay. So we decided we would launch it as a product. And so we launched that in late June ’25.

JD Trask:
So we’re just coming up to 1 year of the product being out there. It’s doing really well. Our own team uses it a lot. And the thing that’s different between Autohive and Raygun is Raygun sells definitely into a tech team. It is used by software developers, product managers, SRE people, those sorts of things. Autohive is for business. So we created an agent creator where it’s like, if you can literally just describe a thing you want to happen, it will build the agent for you. So that no-code element where it’s like, hey, yep, lean on us for our tech expertise.

JD Trask:
So even if somebody wants a hardcore agent talking to a database, We can guide your tech folks through it, but really we’re also an interface to the team members who are not total nerds and just would like a helping hand. And so yes, there are specialized agents that will do things like code reviews for you and, you know, your banking stuff for you and all sorts of stuff, whatever you can imagine it can do. But we now have these 2 brands. So we’re gonna surface, for example, the agents and capabilities under the Raygun brand that sell into tech teams rather than muddying the water purely by saying, come to our everything product over there. But yeah, uptake of that’s been really good. It helps drive our company. You might have seen things recently about how some of the megatechs have been tracking tokens of use by users in the company. Now, we were doing that 2.5 years ago, but never incentivized it.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

JD Trask:
Never said, hey, we’ll pay you a bonus if you use more tokens. It was more about helping understand who in the business needed more training. Just kind of going, hey, if you’re near the bottom of the table, it’s more likely that you just haven’t quite clicked yet to how to work with this. And so it was a positive vibe more than a negative.

Paul Spain:
That’s really good. And talk to us a little bit about launching a whole different business in Autohive. How have you looked at this in terms of You know, do you focus more on establishing in the New Zealand market or do you, do you take that sort of full, you know, global approach and be up against some, you know, some, some really big giants in the, in the market? What’s been your approach?

JD Trask:
Yeah, so I’ll start by saying first and foremost, the goal is, is international. So Raygun, for example, is 93% export based. And at the risk of touching on politics briefly, I fundamentally believe that if New Zealand wants to be prosperous, it all comes down to having strong trade surpluses. It’s not about how to weaponize tax against each other. That’s just dumb. We just need to sell more to the world than we consume and ideally sell a lot more to the world than we consume. So I want to be part of solving for that. However, you’re right.

JD Trask:
Where you start, you have an impact. We’ve got a strong early contingent of Kiwi customers across all sorts of categories. We’ve got political parties as customers, we’ve got tech companies as customers, we’ve got brokers as customers. As I say, it’s a generalized business platform with the domain-specific elements are usually in the agents. That’s what I say is I think the idea of sort of having these hyper-verticalized agents will be something that’s relatively short-lived. So if you’re a company that makes AI for window cleaners, it’s like that’s going to be subsumed really quickly into something that’s more of a broad platform. However, the challenge is how do you make sure that the onboarding and learning is focused enough for a person in a vertical? So that’s been our challenge. So we have a marketplace, for example, with Autohive where you can go and check in different categories, pick up different agents to solve different problems, In fact, you can even publish your own agents to provide to other people in there.

JD Trask:
So right now, the Autohive brand is probably in reverse of the Raygun one. So it’s probably more like 7% international sales and 93% domestic. That’s fine though, at this point. We haven’t spent a lot of money trying to go global with that brand. You’re right that there is a huge amount of money being spent overseas. Give listeners an example. I talked to a YouTuber, semi-prominent, but this is still a niche about AI, and it would be about $40,000 US to sponsor an episode to say, hey, you’re going to get a 10-second read in here. So folks are spending a lot to break in there.

JD Trask:
We are leaning a little bit on the PLG side of things. The marketplace stuff is working really well though in terms of driving awareness. And then I was chatting with somebody actually on the way here, kind of the standard business approach of, okay, now what we do is we look at the funnel, we find where the biggest drop-offs are, and we just work relentlessly as a team to keep nibbling, destroying those blockers, making the product better.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. How have you made the decisions around what are the top things to focus on and to build out for your customers?

JD Trask:
Well, I always say to the team that before we ship, it’s like 98% vision. And once you ship and you’re in contact with the customers, it should become 90% what is the customer pain that has to be resolved? Because you don’t want the arrogance of your way of working to not apply elsewhere. And so we’ve just been relentlessly buffing out any of the things that are confusing to people, making it better, in there overall. The product-led growth stuff in particular, and we’ll take a step down into this because the audience might find this interesting. It’s things like saying, hey, AI is expensive. Okay, so we have a freemium model with Autohive. You can sign up for free. We don’t have that with Raygun.

JD Trask:
If you then invite team members, we’ll give you even more free credits. If you actually make agents and publish them, we’ll give you more free credits. And so we try and create this thing where it’s like, this is a safe place to come in and use AI. Second of all, I want to be clear, this is actually a little bit of a difference between the Raygun brand and the Autohive brand. Within Raygun, you’re familiar with software developers. If you send them a note and said, hey, do you want to jump on a call with a salesperson? Straight spam, right? But right now within AI, everybody’s trying to figure it out. And so people are really hungry for that human connection actually on like, teach me how to use this. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Yep.

JD Trask:
So we’ve been running events for the last year across New Zealand training people. We’ve probably trained well over 1,000 people on using Autohive and AI in general. And I do say that to people, which is a lot of what is on Autohive is portable. I just want to see Kiwis really level up their understanding. This is a magical, magical technology. And so the more of that I can help drive into New Zealand, the better.

Paul Spain:
Those are really good, by the way. I’ve attended a couple of those sessions and really helpful. And as you say, even if somebody isn’t, you know, say, committed to Autohive as their platform for AI, there’s some really good learnings and takeaways from, you know, doing those sessions. So it’s a brilliant initiative. It’s great to see those happening as actual real-world in-person events, be it across the road at Auckland Business Chamber, or, you know, I think you’ve been doing them, you know, all around the country, right?

JD Trask:
Yeah, we’ve been, we’ve been pretty busy on them. I mean, I’m partly up here because I’m speaking at a few things. I’m doing a training session this afternoon and with a large customer up here. It’s really, it’s really great getting in there. The thing that makes it actually super fun is watching people click to AI. It’s like, oh man, once you see people go, wait, I can do that? Oh, this, you know, that, that’s actually a real It’s a real gift to be able to enjoy that moment.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, and there are possibilities probably for every person, just about every person and just about every role where there’s something that AI can do that will surprise you usually in a positive way.

JD Trask:
One of the things that we see with AI is as people start to automate more of the toil work, it actually frees them up to sort of pop their head up a little bit. And they start thinking more strategically. They start seeing how other parts of the business interact. And so part of this year’s sort of 12-month goal is to sort of reframe it that rather than people all working in the business, we’re all actually working on the business. We’re trying to delegate as much of the actual doing to these agents. Where this gets super interesting, and this is the compounding effect of AI, is, okay, so new models come out. These things are going to get smarter and more capable. But the key bit is grounding it in your business data.

JD Trask:
Making sure you’re using a system that is safe and secure. I know a lot of security is a big deal. We don’t use anyone that’s going to train on the data, those sorts of things. But it’s been one of these real eye-openers that you can sit here and get absolutely— I’ve never, no offense to anybody who’s ever sent me a report, but I’m like, I have not seen reports this accurate, this prescriptive about how we could be improving when humans have done it. And the fact that it takes minutes and it will be across multiple data warehouses and all this is just absurd. And that’s the piece, maybe we wrap on this point, but as an observation within New Zealand, we are still seeing people that think that because they got a subscription to something that they’re now using AI. And it’s like that may be true for a moment, but I would really encourage the business leaders to be rethinking how the organisation could be operating. Because we are all still trying to actually retrain our muscle memory.

JD Trask:
And if you think about it as simple as, hey, stop going to Google, I can actually ask the question here. Well, think about all of the things we’re doing in our businesses that really don’t make any sense in the age of AI. And to me, that’s actually the fun part of rethinking how we operate.

Paul Spain:
There’s so many exciting possibilities there in terms of leveraging these tools for good. We do have to be aware there’s the bad sides, there’s things that can go wrong. But the overall, if we as a country get our head around the right ways to utilise AI, has got to be really positive.

JD Trask:
I think it really would enable New Zealand to make a step change if we really lean into this. It is a bit disappointing that we’re not as heavily as some countries, but we should.

Paul Spain:
Thank you, JD. Much appreciated.

JD Trask:
Real pleasure.

Paul Spain:
Cheers.