Focus on moving the needle ‍

Serial entrepreneur James Donald is onto his third startup: six-month-old Ideally. 

His switch to the startup space took place a decade ago, following 12 years as a petroleum engineer in the oil and gas industry.

He began with tourism platform Leap Booking, before a series of trials and errors led him to found Yonder HQ, a New Zealand-based SaaS company offering an AI chatbot and review system for the global tourism industry.

The new gig, Ideally, is an on-demand insights and innovation platform that enables clients to rapidly test concepts, ideas and messages with their target audience and receive answers overnight. The self-service platform uses built-in generative AI to help get more people involved in customer insights.

‍TRA Labs and Previously Unavailable, which have already created successful brand health tracking platform Tracksuit, appointed Donald as founder and CEO in August to drive the company’s growth across New Zealand and Australia.

"When the concept of Ideally was put in front of me I really connected with the innovation and insights problem space, something that's been a key thread through my career. It had all the attributes of being a great business and I felt strongly connected to the purpose, to help teams grow great ideas," he says.

Donald says the platform will democratise access to research, which he describes as a time-consuming and friction-filled process in the business world, particularly for large companies. 

With ‘guardrails’ built into the platform, you don’t have to be an expert to use Ideally, he says. 

Ideally already has 35 Australasian customers and averages 10-plus users per client. 

At the end of next year, Donald hopes the majority of revenue will be derived from the much larger Australian market.

Recently, the company took on $2.15 million in seed investment led by Icehouse Ventures, alongside Brand Fund 1. The funding will go towards scaling in Australia. However, Donald says the Ideally team has its sights on the US and hopes to ‘understand’ the market by the end of 2024.

Donald has also recruited two co-founders to support the company’s growth; Joshua Nu’u-Steele has taken on the chief revenue officer role after leading Parkable’s international efforts as its global sales manager, while Brendan Cervin, who has a SaaS background, has been appointed chief technical officer.

Donald’s startup journey hasn’t always been smooth sailing but as he says “you learn as you go”. 

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What do you wish you knew starting out? 

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I was in a big corporate company and was ready to leave for something fun and mission focused. I don’t know if there is anything I could have done differently before I left to set me up for more success. 

I think you just have to jump in and be prepared to learn as you go – but don’t burn yourself or your cash out. 

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What went wrong, and what did it teach you? 

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What I did wrong, and it was a massive learning moment for me that I wouldn’t change for the world, was that I built a platform in the tourism space and I asked friends, family and people I knew, ‘hey, do you like it?’ Of course, they said, ‘yeah, that’s a great idea.’  

That was problem number-one. Don’t ask people who aren’t your core customers. 

You need to know who the customer is and ask them what their problems are. Is it big enough for them to care about? And with questions, you have to be careful about how you ask them so you’re not just validating your view of the world. It requires a certain humility and skill to provoke accurate responses. 

That tourism business failed within the first six months, and that hurt deep. But at the same time, it was pivotal for me to learn and understand why. 

It also led me into product development, which I didn’t know about as a skillset or discipline; I absolutely love it now. Funnily enough, it’s very similar to what I did in the corporate job before this, just a different industry.  

Then, in business number-two we developed a chat tool. We saw that people would put their credit cards into the chat, which was completely unsecure. What seemed obvious as a solution was to build a secure payment system. We built it and then crickets. No one used it.  

It seemed so clear to me with my engineering hat on, but we didn’t actually understand the peculiarities of what happens in the office with that person. We didn’t understand their jobs and what it takes to reconcile a new financial system. 

That was an interesting lesson: even when a solution seems obvious, there can be many reasons why it won’t be adopted. 

I wasn’t completely wrong because, for one of the clients, that’s their number-two revenue channel, bringing in something like tens of thousands of dollars a year. 

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Who have you worked with that’s been helpful? 

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There’s an umbrella that describes it all: community. In the near term, TRA Labs and Previously Unavailable, as Ideally would never have been possible without their backing. They are domain experts, and they really understand the problems and solutions in that space. 

Then, there would be mentors and other startup founders. 

I should call out one person in particular: Peter Dickinson. He's an angel investor and a mentor we landed through a supported course with Callaghan Innovation and Massey University. The course doesn’t exist anymore but it was around sales enablement and got deep enough to actually help us with specific problems and customers and hold us accountable. 

Peter complemented the course providers by coming in every week and asking the question: how are you going to move the needle this week? And I’ve continued a good relationship from there. 

I want to call Callaghan out, and even some of the supporting networks like local councils, because they play a massive role in the ecosystem. My last business benefited significantly from their support, especially getting it off the ground. 

The startup community is very open and sharing once you get in there. I’d encourage people to embrace it, in whatever shape or form it takes for you, and give back wherever you can. 

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What’s the best advice someone gave you? 

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Focus on moving the needle. For me, coming from an engineering background where I can see what the solution could look like, I have to make sure I don’t get sidetracked focusing on building a beautiful wonderful thing if I am not moving the needle to actually sell it or to earn the right to be able to complete what I hoped to build. 

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What does moving the needle look like for you? 

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It’s all around sales. Today, for instance, when I was preparing for the day, I asked myself, how am I going to move the needle? What activities do I need to do to increase sales? How can I help other people in my team with their sales activities? 

Not everyone likes to talk openly about money, but money is what enables businesses to employ people and to have the right to exist. So that should be the first thing you’re thinking about each day.

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What advice would you give another startup founder?

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Build a lot of pitch decks and test them with people. Pitch decks force you to think about the whole business end-to-end, not just the solution to the problem you’ve seen. 

Who is this customer? What types of customers are there? How big is the market? What are the incumbent solutions? How are you going to sell it? How much are you going to pay?

There are loads of resources out there to help you. One, which is not really a pitch deck, is the business model canvas. Then, there’s Y Combinator and Techstars.

And practise your pitch because you won’t get it right the first time. 

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What was your first entrepreneurial moment?

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I’m debating whether I should share this or not. 

I made fake IDs for people at school when Photoshop was becoming a thing. It had a magic wand and blur feature, and I just enjoyed playing around with it. Back then, the drinking age was still 20, and they weren’t strict on IDs.

So, I made one for myself, showed it to my mates, and they were like, ‘can you make one for me?’ I was paid in kind, not cash, and made about five before feeling really guilty about what I was doing and stopping. 

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Founder Feedback is a weekly series asking founders about their startup journeys. If you have a story to share, reach out to mary@caffeinedaily.co

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