The Gatherer Volume 6

to say it as a joke. Everyone has an idea – it’s getting off your butt and executing your idea that makes the difference. Rob: Is there a crossover for the CARDEALS2ME app to

Rob: Shaun, you are clearly an innovator and fully- immersed in the tech world. You’ve mentioned that you’ve just returned from Tech Week in London. You’re heading to the US shortly to Silicon Valley – tell me a little bit about that. Shaun: It’s been a hell of a 12 months – it feels like ten years, it really does. Silicon Valley is going to be exciting. Rob: Have you been before? Shaun: No, never. Like I said, it’s only been 12 months and I can’t imagine fitting in any more travel than we already have – but Silicon Valley is going to be amazing. We’ve been selected to showcase for Startup Grind, by Google Entrepreneurs for their global conference in February 2018. Rob: Wow! That’s an accolade. Shaun: We’re pretty pleased with ourselves. Rob: How did that come about? Shaun: Literally, applications and then a few interviews wearing a shirt and boxers for the early morning Skype call – trying to be as professional as one can at 2:00 am in the morning while the kids are sleeping upstairs! It was a great process to go through. We were able to speak to some prominent venture capitalists over there as part of that process and they were excited about our product. A little validation along the way certainly helps to keep you motivated and to keep you moving, I think. Rob: Shaun, I remember the first time we met 12 months ago and you were off the back of a successful career. I have to say, you do seem more relaxed at the moment and you’re smiling a lot. You’re obviously enjoying the journey. What’s the impact been like on your family, you mentioned a lot of travel? Shaun: Massive. I was working in a six to seven day trading environment for a very long period of time, so I missed out on a lot of children’s and family events as one does in a professional career. This has been amazing in terms of the pivot. I’ll be working and up at 2:00 am in the morning – with some crazy way to do something different (that the product already does), or ‘trialling and erroring’, or emailing someone, or dropping yourselves emails [Wrays |Intellectual Property, Trademark & Patent Attorneys] worried about the state of the world at 3:00 am in the morning.

Rob: It’s interesting to hear you say that. One of the key things that we’ll wrap up with is finance. Startups are notoriously difficult to raise finance for, what’s your journey? Shaun: Bootstraps. We knocked back a lot of investment for no other reason than I wanted to own all the success or the failure initially. I was quite nervous – coming out of an industry that I knew quite well, to an industry that I had no real concept about. We didn’t start out to be a startup. We didn’t start out to be an entrepreneur. We didn’t start out to be a technology based company. The way that I saw the business, when the concept first came to me, was a small business that was globally scalable which used technology as its product. Then, from that point, there was a very steep cliff from which we fell into the startup ecosystem, which has been amazing – the support, the structure, the networks, the co-working spaces, the people, the characters, the mentors, the good, the bad and everything in between. You learn from it all – and that’s certainly been a big part of the fall. Things like podcasts, interviews, events – you have to immerse yourself in it to get the best out of it. And that’s certainly been one our plays, trying to forge those relationships and build our network, and our team, off the back of that. Rob: It’s really refreshing talking to you, Shaun. I’m really glad that your product is successful, that it’s becoming even more successful, and that you’re possibly pivoting in to other markets as well. I really look forward to seeing how you grow in the future. Shaun: Fantastic. Thank you, Rob. I really appreciate your time.

But having the time to do the school runs, to pick the kids up, to be there for the Father’s Day breakfast and to do all those things that I wasn’t a part of previously – now I essentially get to manage my own days and that’s certainly a big step. To be honest, I can operate the company from a laptop on the beach – which I had to do when we up and saw some family in Queensland. That was a fun experience, being in the pool and doing some high level emails. Rob: I like it. You’ve obviously been on an interesting journey so far. You’ve mentioned ‘evolve’, ‘global’, ‘pivots’, you’re laughing and having fun, you’re enjoying your family life – it’s obviously hard work though. What advice might you give to other entrepreneurs like yourself or even somebody who isn’t at that entrepreneur stage yet, they’re actually sat in their professional career and in the back of their mind, Shaun: You have to love it. For all the ‘yes’s’ and all the excitement you may receive, you’ll get a million and one ‘no’s’ or ‘don’t bothers’ or ‘it’s never going to work’. Someone will shoot it down. Someone you think is going to be an advocate, won’t be – and then that will take you back ten steps. I think it was Wayne Gretzky who said ‘You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take’ – and that would be a key learning that I’ve tried to run with. I would have been upset if ten years from now I looked back and someone else came up with a similar idea and executed it – and I was that grumpy old man who sat there saying, ‘I came up with that idea first’. Ideas are the easy part – it’s the execution that really takes the time, the passion to really push through. Rob: Execution is something that I think all entities struggle with. You’re right, the ideation and the creation of the path is probably the easy part. It’s actually rolling your sleeves up and getting the work done that is the tough piece. Shaun: 100 percent. It’s when your idea hits people and it makes sense. I used to laugh and tell people, ‘It’s not like we’re building anything amazing, like drones that scare away sharks from the beach’. And then I heard someone come out with literally the same idea a few weeks ago. I thought that was amazing because I used thinking ‘Should I? Could I?’ What advice would you give?

some other market that you’ve thought of? Shaun: Yes, 100 percent. Essentially being a

matchmaker service and system, we developed our product so that we could deploy it into any country, globally, within four weeks. The product is very flexible and can be applied to a lot of different things, from tendering government items to stationary really. The platform’s been made and however we label it moving forward is irrelevant. The reason we focus on automotive at the moment is because it’s a market and a sector that I understand. So it was an obvious choice to go into and to cut our teeth on. And also to change consumer’s perspectives as well. It’s not easy to say, ‘Hey look, don’t go in to the classifieds that you’ve been using for ten years, try this weird thing that’s totally different’. That’s not an easy task. Rob: Your credibility is coming through your advocates though, who’ve used the service and love it. 10,000 app downloads in Australia and New Zealand? Shaun: Yes. There’s been a lot of traffic. We’re trying to utilise that traffic and make sure everyone gets a good experience. Rob: You say ‘we’ a lot. In my mind, I think of this as ‘you’. Who is ‘we’? Shaun: So, ‘we’ is people like Wrays, my lawyers, and Prime Financial. We’re lucky to have partners and we view them as part of our team. They are people who are on board with us, and who have been there from the start. Our developers are external to us, but they’re considered an in-house team, because of the strength of our relationship. When I say ‘we’, I even mean our dealers and our advocates. It’s a big net – especially when you’re trying to be this small little company that can essentially operate out of a café. It has been a team building exercise. I think you need to have all of the facets of a business – you need partners, relationships to really make it happen. Or there’s no point.

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