Our Angel at My Table event was a sell-out again this year. The evening was great fun, with inspirational candidates and insightful wisdom from the judges! Continuing a trend from previous years, there was a mix of financial and social goals from the entries. This is a growing trend, with an increasing number of start-ups focusing on more than financial outcomes. It was fascinating to hear the discussions around why this is happening and how it could work, especially with the diverse audience that this event attracts. We have great events lined up for October and November, and have started planning something special for December/Christmas.

We’re excited to have recently launched our online membership platform. This platform enables members to maintain their listing on our website. This is just a first step, as we will be exploring options to use this platform to serve up special content and benefits in the future. Thank you to all the members who worked with us to get their listings updated. We have a healthy volume of traffic through our site, especially from searches looking for NZ Software companies. If you are interested in listing your business on our site, as well as receiving the other benefits, please visit www.nzsa.org.nz to find out more about our company and small business membership options.

Roger Ford
President, NZSA

Market Measures benchmarks the sales and marketing activity of New Zealand’s technology companies, providing you with useful information for planning your sales and marketing strategies.

To find out more about Market Measures and to view past years' reports and resources click here 

By participating in the study you can compare your company's performance against your peers and US counterparts. You will be emailed the results of the study, including the final report due out in October 2017 (worth $375), resources like eBooks, infographics and videos, and the opportunity to attend events nationwide discussing Market Measures results and implications. Take the survey

The survey closes at the end of the day Thursday 5 October 2017.

The NZSA Members' Directory is now live. All current NZSA company members are profiled in this directory. They’re a very creative, hard-working and dedicated group of businesses.

Visit the Members' Directory.

For any questions or special requests please contact NZSA Admin

October 10: Ruth Brown - Head of User Experience, Trade Me, 'Culture and Performance - Lessons from Trade Me'
November – Tuesday 14 November - save the date
December – Tuesday 12 December - save the date

Recent Events

An Angel at My Table

Broadband Compare

Overall winner
Congratulations to Broadband Compare who impressed our angels to win the top prize at the 2017 Angel at My Table event. Broadband Compare rates over 100 providers by price, speed, data limits to help Kiwis find the provider most suited to their location and need.

Squawk Squad team and Debra Hall, Angel Investor

The People’s Choice Award
The People's Choice Award went to Squawk Squad which connects people across the country and overseas to traps and NZ sanctuary projects - defending our native birds with the swipe of a thumb.

September dinner: The Promapp Growth story, Ivan Seselj

Ivan Seselj, CEO of Promapp

At our September dinner we heard about the challenges of bootstrapping Promapp from zero to $10Mill Annualised Recurring Revenue (ARR). Starting in 2002 it took nine years to get to $2Mill ARR. Now they are putting on $1Mill ARR every few months.

The early years were the hardest. Thanks to tips from Ken Morse they figured out how to price and sell Saas. Ivan lists defining culture and values early, appointing an advisory board, attending Saastr and putting marketing at the centre of the business as critical steps to success.

Today ProMapp boasts 98% retention thanks to their Customer Success Team who treat every client like they're the last.

Ivan Seselj and Sarah Berkowski from Promapp

We're delighted to welcome these new company and individual members who have joined since our last newsletter.

Individual
Jeremy List
Pip Gilbert
Sean Connelly
Jannine Wilkinson
Leanne Hobdey

Company
Swaytech
Swaytech is a specialist marketing & communications agency focussed on unleashing the full potential of NZ tech companies.

Sjones Ltd
Sjones is a Dunedin-based technology firm focused on providing tailored information technology solutions to help business achieve their business objectives. The team of professionals will happily help you to deal with networking and software development projects.

Zeta App
Zeta App Software Development Studio provides business to business and business to consumer app development and project services.

Garage Startup
Startup Garage's ethos has woven itself into the fabric of the Wellington entrepreneurial lifestyle. It's a meetup group, started by Creative HQ, where founders, investors, and luminaries from many backgrounds come together to share their stories and invaluable experiences. It's at these events you get the chance to see under the bonnet, hear what makes a startup redline and tune up your knowledge on topics that matter.

IBM - Watson Summit shows Kiwis that AI is here
There's a real buzz in the market about artificial intelligence. AI is fuelling a new technological era where organisations can make a step-change in their operations, their customer experience programmes, and their infrastructure investments by gaining insights from data that they've never been able to analyse before - whether it was locked in reports, patient records, websites, images, or audio files. We're changing that with IBM Watson. Read more

Hudson Gavin Martin - Self-help steps to stay cyber-secure
Being cyber-secure is now a business issue, not an IT issue, and taking practical steps to protect your business against a cyberattack is critical. CERT NZ (Computer Emergency Response Team - a team operating since April 2017 as part of MBIE, handling cyber security incidents) issued a report recently covering its first 3 months of operation. This report indicated that CERT had received 364 reports of cyber incidents in that period, with phishing, malware, unauthorised access, scams & fraud and ransomware accounting for roughly 70% of those attacks. Read more

Ubiquity - Marketing Automation - more than just a platform
Marketing automation as we know it has been around for about a decade. Yet despite this, only 49% of companies on average are using the technology, and 85% of B2B marketers believe they're not using it to its full potential. Type "Marketing Automation" into your search engine and you will come across not only a plethora of marketing automation tools (in 2014 there were already over 200 worldwide), but also countless numbers of articles, blog posts, whitepapers and infographs on what it is, why you need it, and how to start using it. Heck, it may even be how you came across this article. Read more here

Simmonds Stewart - VC term sheet deep dive video series on negotiating Series A term sheets in Southeast Asia for start-up founders
This is the first in a series of 10 videos presented by Lee Bagshaw on negotiating Series A term sheets in Southeast Asia. The aim of the videos is to help start-up founders understand the technical content of a typical term sheet, and to highlight the areas that are best to focus on in negotiations with potential investors. Watch here

Competing in a world of sectors without borders
Digitization is causing a radical reordering of traditional industry boundaries. What will it take to play offense and defense in tomorrow's ecosystems? Rakuten Ichiba is Japan's single largest online retail marketplace. It also provides loyalty points and e-money usable at hundreds of thousands of stores, virtual and real. It issues credit cards to tens of millions of members. It offers financial products and services that range from mortgages to securities brokerage. And the company runs one of Japan's largest online travel portals-plus an instant-messaging app, Viber, which has some 800 million users worldwide. Retailer? Financial company? Rakuten Ichiba is all that and more-just as Amazon and China's Tencent are tough to categorize as the former engages in e-commerce, cloud-computing, logistics, and consumer electronics, while the latter provides services ranging from social media to gaming to finance and beyond. Read the recently released McKinsey & Company report here

Conferenz - Advance Cyber Security Summit
Advancing cyber security through leadership, innovation and strategic partnerships at the 2017 NZTECH Advance Security Summit, we will be diving into the progress developments and uncovering challenges that confront us in tomorrow's cybersecurity landscape. 25 October, Wellington. Find out more

Callaghan Innovation – is a government agency supporting hi-tech businesses in New Zealand. Callaghan Innovation’s purpose is to help New Zealand businesses succeed through technology. Three grants are available to help businesses succeed.

1. Getting started - Are you in the early stages of, or new to, R&D? A Getting Started Grant will give you a kick-start to help you take your product, process or service solution from development through to commercialisation.
2. Project Grant - Is your business new to, or trying to expand your R&D? A Project Grant can help you take on larger or more challenging R&D.
3. Growth Grant - Is your business an experienced R&D performer? This three year grant will help you increase your R&D investment.