Carepatron: ‘Who is the best talent, and where can we find them?’

Blackbird’s investment notes on Carepatron include that its founders ‘live in Tauranga, the Gold Coast of New Zealand, better known for surfers, retirees and kiwifruit than for software startups’. 

But David Pene (CTO) and Jamie Frew (CEO) have made major strides since launching Carepatron from the city in late 2021. An operating system for independent health practitioners – like therapists, chiropractors, and health coaches – to manage their businesses end to end, Carepatron now supports tens of thousands of users across more than 40 countries. 

Pene recently spoke about the Carepatron journey at Sunrise Aotearoa, and shared with Caffeine the role that being based in a smaller city has played in that story.

‍

How did you come to found Carepatron from Tauranga?

My wife is a doctor and they do placements as part of their residency, and she got placed in Tauranga. At the time I was working as a software engineer at Xero in Auckland and it was an in-office work culture, so I told my manager ‘I’ve got to move to Tauranga’. And he was like, ‘Oh, we don't have any remote teams’. And I was like, ‘Well, we could start one’. So we spun out Xero's first remote engineering team, and then we moved down to Tauranga. 

This was pre-Covid, before remote working basically. There was no real reading material out there for how to run remote processes and remote engineering teams so we were making it up as we went along. But it ended up working out really well for us during Covid because we knew exactly what to do. 

Jamie had been living overseas for a decade or more, then had moved back home to raise his kids. And out of serendipity, we met online in a kind of millennial fashion on LinkedIn. We were both looking around at who's who's in tech and who's thinking of doing stuff around Tauranga and that's how we got linked in with each other.

We caught up every week and discussed ideas. His wife is a clinical psychologist, so we're both deeply connected into healthcare. His mum was also working in the same department as my wife. So we set our eyes and focus on a particular opportunity within healthcare and saw that the market opportunity was huge. 

We started working on it as a side thing. And then we started to get a bit of traction and realised, hey, this can be a pretty big deal. That's when we quit our day jobs to go full time. That was in 2021 and the rest is history.

‍

You raised a seed round of $4 million last year, co-led by Blackbird and TQ Ventures. What role did your location play in that process?

Going back, we bootstrapped ourselves to a certain point until we felt like we had the right kind of metrics and traction to go out looking for investment, because taking on people's money is a pretty big deal and you want to make sure you can deliver. 

We pitched our pre-seed investment to Blackbird. I guess we were fortunate that it was post-Covid when videoconferencing became the norm. We met with the founders of Blackbird purely over video call, their investment committee gave a thumbs up and that was pretty much it for our pre-seed round. 

We had huge growth over the last year and realised we needed to take on more capital to accelerate this. Knowing that 50 percent of our customer base sits out of the US, it made sense for us to figure out a co-lead out of the US to make it easier for future funding rounds if we need to. We spoke with several different VC firms in the US only over video calling. We weren't too sure how that was going to play out – whether they wanted us to close over there – but it was fine. 

‍

What local agencies or networks have been helpful to tap into?

Outside of our investors, a huge resource that has been crucial is NZTE. The team is absolutely amazing, its advisory capability – the wealth of knowledge it brings is incredible. Te Puni Kōkiri has helped us with advisory capability and funding, especially when we were super broke – they were absolutely crucial. Then Callaghan Innovation – we pick up a few summer interns from =i for our research projects. It's really exciting for the interns and really helpful to us. 

‍

Where is your team based?

Talent is very hard to find in regional locations like Tauranga. There are technical people here, and they probably work for a handful of companies. We are quite fortunate to have our remote background and we look at it through the lens of, ‘who is the best talent and where can we find them?’ We have team members from Dunedin, Wellsford, Tauranga but the company at the moment sits across mainly New Zealand and Southeast Asia. We’ve had the opportunity to find the best talent and the crossover in timezones isn't that bad. 

‍

How have you connected with offshore talent?

The first employee came out of using a talent software tool from Blackbird. We needed a specific skill set for front-end developing and he was one of the first on the list. He ended up being amazing and we were like, okay, we need to hire this guy. And then he brought on another three developers that he knew, so that was word of mouth. Then it became more of a strategy for us; [now] we do a lot of stalking on LinkedIn and job ads.

‍

How have you connected with customers while based in Tauranga?

We weren't sure if people in the US would be like, ‘Who are these two random dudes from Tauranga?’ Healthcare data is really sensitive and private and would they trust us? I think we've proven the theory that they absolutely do trust New Zealand as a brand. I'd say we speak to around 30 different customers every day, whether that's over message or video call, and they're completely fine with it as long as the times match up. 

‍

What advice do you have for other founders based in a smaller regional city?

What's tricky about being in a regional location is access to people doing things at a similar stage to you – other startup founders. You learn a lot by just speaking with other founders. Then on the flip side, you feel super-energised by other founders; people that are trying to change the world, they have really infectious energy.

We do video calling and networking events, but there's nothing like being face to face. We're fortunate that Blackbird has a lot of events that we’re invited to. And we do catch up with tech people and founders in Tauranga – a really small set of people – which is handy as well. 

‍As told to Caitlin Sykes