A head for heights

Central Otago is a magnet for thrillseekers and adventurers, and that pull drew mountain lovers Rob Stirling and his wife Sarah to convert a bus and shift to Wanaka.

That pull has also helped Stirling’s startup, Scannable, align itself with global customers and talent. 

Dunedin-born Stirling spent 20 years in the UK, with a dozen of those working for manufacturers of outdoor recreational and safety equipment, and he started Scannable soon after returning home at the onset of the pandemic. 

The company has developed a digital solution that helps those working at height keep track of their safety gear, and check manufacturer and health and safety data from their phone. But Stirling calls that the ‘tip of the iceberg’. 

The bigger picture involves building a platform that brings together height-safety equipment data – essentially digitising the industry’s supply chain, so manufacturers and distributors can add a ‘digital layer’ to their products that offers them, and their customers, significant competitive advantages.

 Scannable has a team of 10 – six in Queenstown/Wanaka with the rest working remotely elsewhere in New Zealand – as well as some additional contractors, and the startup raised $1 million from Hillfarrance and NZGCP in December 2021 and just shy of $1.9 million in a follow-on round.

Almost all the startup’s revenue is drawn from the Northern Hemisphere, and here Stirling talks about how being based in a location that’s part of a global ecosystem of mountain towns is helping build a global business.

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How did you come to be based in Wanaka?

We moved back to Dunedin and spent the first year of lockdown living on the Otago Peninsula.

We were really grateful to have a year back in Dunedin, but ultimately it wasn't where we wanted to build a lifestyle. In the UK and Europe, my wife and I orientated our lives around the mountains, so we bought a bus, converted it, and moved up to Wanaka. It was the only way that we could hope to live somewhere like Central Otago, but we decided that the benefits of living in the mountains were worth it. 

From Scannable's perspective why on earth would it make any sense to be based in Central Otago? The answer is that our industry – height safety – ultimately came out of mountaineering. All of the safety equipment came from rock climbers and mountaineers. 

The personalities in our industry are members of companies that do both recreational and professional equipment for safety. So there's a very strong cultural bond and customer empathy between the culture of the mountain town and the culture of the customers that we sell to…there's an ecosystem of mountain towns around the world and Wanaka and Queenstown are among them.

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How did you connect with your investors from your location?

I started the business in June 2020, and it took about a year of myself bootstrapping and prototyping and using a contract developer in Dunedin, before we moved up to Wanaka and started to seek investment – firstly from the angel network and then after a few trips to Auckland and exposure to different angel groups I plucked up the courage to approach a VC. Fortunately I approached Hillfarrance really early on and got validation that Scannable, and the size of the problem, would align with a venture model. 

I wouldn't have considered myself an entrepreneur before I started Scannable; I didn't really hear that phrase an awful lot in the world I've lived in beforehand, so I didn't have any vocabulary or expectations around what a startup should be, or the funding channels. From early on I became aware of Rob and Hillfarrance on LinkedIn and really appreciated the quality of the content and the collateral that he was putting out into the ecosystem. It had a global perspective that aligned with my experience being only a quasi-Kiwi at that point. 

So I went to them first and basically said, ‘I'd love to test our alignment thoroughly with you before I do that with anyone else’. And ultimately, that worked. 

It took me six or seven months full time to raise the first $1 million and we'd spent a week in hospital waiting for the arrival of our little girl and I was taking calls in the hospital halls, and far too much time that week on my laptop. So it wasn't it wasn't easy, but I would also admit that it was an easier time when there was more capital. 

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What other organisations have you tapped into to help you?

The first thing that I did was sign up to Business Mentors New Zealand. I've never heard it from anyone else as a recommendation, but it worked for me. I was introduced to Greg Fahey, who's CEO of Bison in Dunedin, and I hit gold.

We met and had coffee and he said, ‘I think you'll listen and I think the things I have to say will help you’. We had a coffee every two weeks, and he kicked me up the arse and held me accountable to what I was doing and told me when my ideas were stupid. That was incredibly impactful. 

And I then joined the Startup Dunedin incubator, and went through a 12-month process with them. They connected me with genuine people and gave us an opportunity to pitch in front of a bunch of people and get it horribly wrong several times before you had to do it in real life. 

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How have you found connecting with talent being based where you are?

When we closed our first round, they [the investors] said, ‘you’d better go and find a technical co-founder if you're going to build a tech business’. So we did – we found an incredible guy in Queenstown. You can't see every corner you need to go around as a founder but having Gene [Dower] as my co-founder is undoubtedly the best outcome I could have expected. 

He moved down to Queenstown because he has a huge appetite for paragliding and mountain biking. The way we describe it is that we love to employ risk takers at Scannable and people who know how to manage and mitigate that risk. That's a quality we find in the people that move to Wanaka and Queenstown, often because they are mountain bikers, paragliders, mountaineers, rock climbers, or competitive sports people, so they have a risk vocabulary and an appetite and a management process that is a lot higher than most other people. 

They're intentional people as well. People that have moved to Queenstown and Wanaka have done so not because it was an easy thing to do; they've had to work out how to do that, and they've done it. 

[But finding talent] it's hard. A part of this long- or medium-term story you're trying to tell is that you're based in a beautiful place, and people would love to come and work for you in that beautiful place. But in the short term there aren't many people that have a flexibility in their lives that means that they can take a risk on an early-stage startup and relocate themselves or their family into Central Otago, particularly in this housing market.

So we haven't brought anyone into the region nationally, but it has been a drawcard for us where people from outside of the country want to move to Queenstown. So we get inbound opportunities from amazing talent overseas because they want to orient themselves around Queenstown/Wanaka. Which is awesome but it doesn't mean we can afford them. 

Our strategy isn't to rely on any willingness to relocate. We have a remote-first policy, with a culture built strongly out of Central Otago. 

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What advice would you give a founder who's starting up outside of the main cities?

Definitely do it – or don't not do it. If you're 25 and you want untapped access to talent and capital, then there's a reason why a lot of people move to the west coast in the US and therefore, Sydney or Auckland in New Zealand. But I know more founders who aren't 25 and do have a family or a mortgage than I do 25 year olds.

I'm just incredibly optimistic that you can start from wherever you are and I don't think that capital is constrained to the hotspots.

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As told to Caitlin Sykes