Entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley, and Building Count: Insights from Chris Smith

Paul Spain:
Greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host Paul Spain and in this episode I’m talking with Chris Smith, co founder and chief executive of Count, an AI powered accounting platform for automation and real time insights that aims to take on Xero and other accounting platforms. Chris founded and scaled successful ventures previously like Dash Tickets and and Story before heading to Seattle and working with companies like Amazon and Meta. Now he’s tackling the accounting world with this new tech business Count. Before we begin, a big thanks to our show partners One NZ, 2degrees, Spark, Workday and Gorilla Technology for their support of the New Zealand Tech Podcast. And a reminder, we’ve got a listener survey running right now and we would love your feedback. It’s super quick, can be completed in under a minute, so. And it really helps us improve the show as well as providing useful anonymous insights to attract and retain show partners, which helps us to invest back into making NZ Tech Podcast even better.

Paul Spain:
Plus, there’s a sweetener. There are some great giveaways up for grabs for those who enter and complete the survey. We’ve got a Motorola Edge 60 Fusion smartphone, Logitech Keys-to-go portable keyboard, Logitech Casa Pop Up desk for a slick mobile setup. Two of those and One NZ Warriors jersey. So if you could head across to nztechpodcast.com/ survey or check the link in the show notes to enter. Alright, let’s jump in. Chris Smith, great to have you on the podcast. How are you doing today?

Chris Smith:
Doing excellent, thanks for having me, Paul.

Paul Spain:
Well, nice to have you visiting New Zealand. Keen to hear a little bit about your backstory. Your software account sounds really interesting, but yeah, we’d love to hear a little bit about where it all began for you. When did you start taking an interest in tech and entrepreneurship?

Chris Smith:
I’ll take you way back. So I grew up in Seattle as a little kid and as you’re probably familiar, Seattle’s such a big tech epicenter of the world. Microsoft headquartered, Amazon headquartered. So I just was always fascinated by tech. I was surrounded by these amazing companies when growing up and I always wanted to do my own thing in that space and grow from there, but I didn’t have any experience in technology. No one in my family was from technology, so it was a cool dream, but I never actually had any support or experience in that space. And so this is a little cheesy story, but when I was in high school, Lord of the Rings came out when I was in high school and I thought what an amazing movie. But not just because It’s a cool movie, but because of the technology that was used in that movie and that actually when I was thinking about where to go to university, I was inspired to actually come to New Zealand for university because of Weta Digital.

Chris Smith:
I thought they were doing some incredible things at the time. So I actually moved to New Zealand when I was 18 to study at Victoria University. My kind of like secret goal was if I get an internship at Better Digital, that would be my way into being able to work there. Since I didn’t have experience, but I thought I could use my charisma to get me an interview.

Paul Spain:
How did that go?

Chris Smith:
Well, I never got that internship, but there’s a cool full story here. When I was at university, I moved here not knowing anyone. I was kind of all alone. My mom came with me for the first two weeks but then left. So I was by myself. And turns out there was a lot of other international students that also had moved to New Zealand and didn’t have a support system. So while I was at Victoria, I actually started a social club for other international students and then started just expanding it for any student who wanted to join the social club. And we started hosting a lot of events and the event started growing and growing.

Chris Smith:
And after about three months, we were hosting events of like 2, 3, 400 people. They started getting quite big to the point where we were like, we need to sell tickets to these events and went to look at the market. And back then, 20 years ago, or almost 20 years ago, you only had Ticketmaster and Ticket tech. There was none of these newer age ticketing platforms. So I needed to either spend $8 service fee per ticket or what I ended up doing was creating my own ticketing system. I like to call it the world’s worst ticketing system. But it’s was free, right? Because I created it and so just created this really simple ticketing platform, hacked it together myself. But we were selling tickets to all of our own events.

Chris Smith:
Well, it turns out all the other small promoters and bands in Wellington also didn’t want to pay those large Ticketmaster fees. So they came to us and said, hey, can we use your platform? And it grew and grew from there. And we ended up creating a business called Dash Tickets where we expanded all across New Zealand and sold tickets. And the cool full story here is Weta Digital. Weta, the company actually opened a museum and started doing tours. And for a few years there, we were actually selling tickets for a lot of the Weta experiences. So that’s cool. Yeah, cool connection there.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah, tell us what, what were you studying at Victoria University?

Chris Smith:
Funny enough, even though tech has always been like my, my passion and my obsession, I really wanted to pair it with the knowledge of business. So I was actually studying international business and marketing when I was at Victoria because I was like self teaching myself. Coding and tech while studying business at the same time.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Okay, now what was the journey to get from, you know, that study? Obviously there was DASH tickets in there, but you know, you’ve got, you’ve been involved in. Storey was a company you’re involved in, which I remember visiting or at least chatting with probably someone from the team there. The Kiwi landing pad in San Francisco, which would be going back probably good, maybe in the direction of 15 years. And you worked for others like Meta. So what did that journey kind of look like through to now?

Chris Smith:
Yeah, I’ve lived many lives in my 38 years. So after starting Dash, we grew that for several years, I think four years. We ran Dash and then ended up selling it to a company called Ticket Direct. They were another New Zealand ticketing company that was really focused in sports and corporate events. So they acquired DASH to really help expand their kind of music and concert scene. Cause that’s where we were really focused with dash. And then I was trying to figure out what to do next and I had an itch to start another business. And at the time I was with a really good friend of mine, his name’s Sunan.

Chris Smith:
And we were at Wellington Zoo just hanging out and there was no information besides like the plaque that they had next to one of the animal enclosures. And me and him were, had all these questions. And so we actually pulled aside a zookeeper and said, you know, asked all these questions and they went into the most incredible stories about where those animals came from and all these amazing images they pulled up on their phone. And that gave us a big inspiration of like, why isn’t there a really easy tool for these incredible institutions like Wellington Zoo to share their stories with their visitors and the world. So that’s when we created Stories spelled S T Q R Y, which was essentially a mobile app that many different institutions could basically subscribe to, load their content and build out these amazing storytelling systems. We expanded quite quickly. We basically integrated with almost every major attraction in New Zealand. So we were in Auckland Art Museum, the automotive museums, and from big cities like Auckland all the way to smaller cities like Nelson, we were up and down the country, which was really cool.

Chris Smith:
And then we started expanding into 10 different countries around the world. So we Started getting a big international exposure. And then that journey led to actually launching a new product called Ticket your, which was a ticketing solution for these attractions. So they really liked our storytelling component. And they kept saying, like, could you use this to upsell? Upsell. Upsell. That’s always the buzzword. And so we launched our own ticketing system, Inside Story, and that blew up.

Chris Smith:
We started getting very large contracts with large museums, like the Guggenheim in New York was a huge client of ours. The Seattle Space Needle, the Seattle Zoo, the Seattle Aquarium. So large US and international clients. But we needed to raise funds. So we had raised some smaller amount of funds. Our kind of seed round in New Zealand with some incredible partners like the Ice House and a few notable angels like Gareth Morgan, who were just incredible supporters of us when we were. When we were younger in that business. But we wanted to raise a larger venture round, so we wanted to kind of look in the US for what, what a raise there could be.

Chris Smith:
And that’s when we partnered with Callahan Innovation and Kiwi Landing Pad to help tap into that network. We ended up raising a series A venture round there. We raised about 5 million and then ultimately sold that business about five years later.

Paul Spain:
Oh, wow, that’s. That’s great. And then moving on from. From there amongst, you know, some. Some other bits and your cv, you landed at. At Meta.

Chris Smith:
Yeah, that was. That was an incredible opportunity. So after I had sold that business and did a few other things, I really reflected on what I felt were some gaps in my experience. And one of the things that I realized I wanted to learn a lot more about was how to create technology at massive scale. And there’s not really a company out there that has scale like Meta. Right. It’s 3 billion devices, had a Meta app on it. And this amazing opportunity came up where they recruited me as a principal engineering manager for their release tooling team.

Chris Smith:
So I was basically responsible for developing the tools that Meta used to release all their apps to the world. So you can imagine, like, if Instagram goes down, it’s like world war. Like everyone’s like freaking out. It’s top page of every article, big news. So launching those apps was a very meticulous job. And we launched these, like incredible AI models that we would do gradual rollout. So we would build this tooling to say, release Instagram to a million devices and then we’d collect all these data points and analyze them to realize, is this build healthy or should we stop the rollout and roll it back and like just gradually roll out with Bigger and bigger data sets. We were analyzing billions and billions of data points every second.

Chris Smith:
So we were creating AI models and machine learning algorithms to detect the health of builds and then the tools to manage that rollout. So incredible role. Met some just amazing people, but also learned how to build and scale tech at just massive scale.

Paul Spain:
In a role like that, how, you know, I guess you have a pretty large group of people that you’re working in. So how, you know, how close to the technology do you get in terms of, you know, hands on in a role like that? I imagine there’s, you know, there’s people to do everything right.

Chris Smith:
There is. Right. You’re right. So in that story I just shared, there was a team that was like specifically responsible for. There’s every single independent little thing. The cool thing about my role though, we were responsible for all the tooling. So even though there were specific teams that developed like the different AI model here or machine learning algorithm there, or the different pipes to collect the data, my team ultimately was at the center because we built the tools that all that stuff plugged into so that it could be surfaced and managed by the team. And so it was a really eye opening role because I got to dabble in a little bit of everything.

Chris Smith:
I didn’t get to the code level of every single part, but I really got to learn how each of those components were thinking, how they were architecting and it was able to just tenfold my experience and knowledge in developing technology solutions.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s great. I guess you look at Meta and they’re probably pretty mature in a lot of these areas. Right.

Chris Smith:
It’s funny. So they are very mature in some ways. But literally before this team I was on was formed, it was like three people who would manually deploy the apps. There was this one guy named Chuck, he basically owned the keys for Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and would literally manually deploy them to the app stores himself.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Chris Smith:
So for, you know, there’s always magic happening behind the curtains, even in mature businesses.

Paul Spain:
How many people, you know, in engineering, types of roles within. Within Meta?

Chris Smith:
Oh, it was tens of thousands. But just in our release world there was probably 150 engineers just handling release. Wow.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, wow.

Chris Smith:
But again, you know, when you push a button, 3 billion devices would be updated with one of our apps.

Paul Spain:
So incredible.

Chris Smith:
The scale was pretty massive and so.

Paul Spain:
That must have been a pretty fascinating environment to be working in. Yeah, the people you get sort of exposed to and so on. When you’re based in sort of that Silicon Valley and Bay area. Pretty interesting. What was that period of time like for you? What were the things that really stood out?

Chris Smith:
It’s a great question. Silicon Valley is hard to explain. It’s like no place in the world. Every person there is on a mission to create a billion dollar company. It’s wild. When you talk to entrepreneurs or business owners or employees or anyone anywhere in the world, people have goals and ambition and it’s amazing. And everyone’s goal and ambition is special and to their own. But in Silicon Valley, everyone is like, I will either die or I will create a billion dollar company.

Chris Smith:
Like, it’s the, the drive there is insane, almost unhealthy, insane. But because of that drive and because of that competition, it has fostered a community that is like no other around the world. I mean, there’s so many opportunities there that you just can’t replicate anywhere else. And as much as people say, oh, we’re going to try to create the next mini Silicon Valley, it’s just they’ve hit this epicenter of just repeatable success. And I think because of the repeatable success and community that’s been built there, there’s also the functions for liquidity events, because that’s always the issue with any business is who’s going to. What if the end goal is to sell it, who’s going to buy it? And in the Valley, there’s a plethora of businesses that can buy you. Right. And so it’s an ecosystem, not only talent and opportunity for growth, but also the ecosystem for raising funds and ultimate liquidity events.

Paul Spain:
And I mean, what were your networks like? Cause you obviously could have kept incredibly busy within Meta, there being so many people. But of course there’s all sorts of things going on, you know, more broadly in the Valley as well. What things did you find yourself sort of plugged into?

Chris Smith:
I will say it’s hard when I was an entrepreneur for so many years of my life, to be in the Valley as an employee. Cause all I wanted to do was like chase ideas and. Because the cool thing is like, if you go into a cafe in Auckland, either people will be there reading magazines or just hanging out with friends, or someone will be sitting in the corner working on their laptop. But if you go into a cafe in Silicon Valley, like every single person in there is on their cafe with like three people over their shoulder, like trying to wheel and deal all these opportunities and it’s the vibrancy and like inspiration there is so high. So being around that just, I couldn’t not scratch that itch. And want to go and start my own company again.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, so tell us how that came about with count.

Chris Smith:
Yeah. So one of the things I always remembered back in my previous entrepreneur life with Story and Dash was the. The lack of financial clarity I had because I wasn’t a trained accountant or didn’t have any financial experience. With all the tools that existed out there for bookkeeping and accounting, I never felt like they ever helped me as a business owner, be a better business owner. I felt like they were just a means to an end. And honestly, that’s how the tools still are today. You use them because you need to pay your taxes, need to file gst. You use them because you have regulation on how you have to track and categorize things for payroll.

Chris Smith:
That is the driver of why people use these platforms that exist today for accounting and bookkeeping. And that doesn’t create. It creates a need, but it doesn’t create a want. People don’t want to use their accounting platform. They are required to use their accounting platform. And so what that also leads to is people not deriving a lot of value out of that platform to help them run their business because it’s something they dread doing. That’s the biggest way I could describe it. I remember dreading having to go and do my monthly bookkeeping when I was running these businesses.

Chris Smith:
I just wanted to be out there selling and building. So that was always this problem I wanted to solve. The thing I had in the back of my head, which was, how could we make accounting more engaging, more intuitive, provide a platform that actually helps uplift business owners? And then one day, when I was at meta Last year, January 2024, I was talking with a couple friends who run their own CPA firms or accounting firms, and they were just complaining and complaining and complaining about the tools that they were using. And they were just like, chris, one day you have to build a new platform for us. And that, funny enough, was the aha moment where I connected my. My personal experience in pain with this. This funny moment where they were joking, but kind of not. And my reply was simply, if I build this, will you be my first paying customers? And they said, absolutely.

Chris Smith:
And I said, will you ink that? And they said, yep. So I did my first sell before I even had a product or an idea. And but the great thing there is I was able to work with some accounting firms to actually build out the platform. So it was built in conjunction with some incredible accountants and bookkeepers. And fast forward, today we now have a fully fledged and in Market product.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it’s quite mind blowing to me that, you know, it’s been what, 18 months? How long has it been? When did, when did you start on development of Count?

Chris Smith:
Yeah, so we started dabbling kind of in February last year, but we really got focused in and honed in on what the product would be around October 2024. So we’ve only been building for, for just over a year.

Paul Spain:
So how do you build something that quickly? How do you do it?

Chris Smith:
One of the biggest advantages of being a tech entrepreneur historically as well as working at Meta, is I built up this network of just some of the biggest, best talent from around the world and was able to compile a team of people I’ve worked with before. So we were able to jive and move quickly together. But then also honestly just that bootstrap mentality of no matter what, we’re going to get it done. So 3am nights for a year is really what it took to get there. But we were able to bootstrap the whole business so we raised no funds until a few months ago.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Chris Smith:
So we were able to develop the whole product in market with several hundred customers before we took on a dollar of investment.

Paul Spain:
That’s impressive. So you built out sort of feature set. Tell us a little bit about the team that you’ve brought together. Who have you got and what do they do?

Chris Smith:
Yeah, this space is really fun. I think accountants get a bad rep. I think everyone thinks of accountants as like a cold spreadsheet number people. But honestly it’s been one of the most amazing and fun industries to be in. Because what I found is that a lot of accountants and bookkeepers do what they do because they really care about helping people grow businesses and understand the way that numbers can become their superpowers. And so when developing the team we really wanted to think through like what, what is the composition of people we need on the team and the different roles. And one of the areas that we saw in a lot of the current providers, the ones that have been around for decades and kind of have gotten stale, is support. If you’re using an accounting system right now, think about the last time you needed to talk to support or you had a question and how stale that experience was.

Chris Smith:
Likely you didn’t get an answer to your question or it was very long or, or with some outsourced person who doesn’t really have context or understand. So one of the big things with Count is we wanted to make sure that every person on the team understood context, meaning that we, we, they’re either trained as a bookkeeper or we paid for training for them. And that every person on our support team is not only charismatic and empathetic, but also that they are fully trained CPAs or accountants. And so our team, across our support and onboarding teams are all trained bookkeepers and accountants who will really engage and help and support customers in a way that they should. But then even to our engineers and our QA teams, they’re also now trained bookkeepers because we put them all through training. And so everyone on our company is basically now a qualified bookkeeper. But we have a big mix of engineering, qa, onboarding, support, operations.

Paul Spain:
Wow. Wow, that’s fascinating. And so where is your team based? Yeah, how have you done that? Have you built the remote team sort of spread out around the place or more in person?

Chris Smith:
How does it look? We’re a little bit of both. I mean, I love the fact that with the way technology is today, you can tap into the best talent anywhere in the world for the right job. So we definitely support a remote and global culture and team. But we do have two primary headquarters, so Wellington, New Zealand and Seattle, Washington in the US So those are two main centers that we’re developing out and where we will be hiring a lot of in person people and opportunities. But of course we want to work with the best people, so we, we fully support remote and global work.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, gotcha. And so how big are those teams at the moment in each location?

Chris Smith:
So they’re growing. In total of a company, we have just about 30 employees in total now in Seattle, about 4 of the employees are in Seattle and in New Zealand we have two so far. And then everyone else is remote, so we have those small in person teams. But we are hiring so little plug here. We’re constantly hiring really focused on partnership managers, so roles that can support our accounting firm partners as well as engineering.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Oh, that’s, that’s exciting. So looking, looking at sort of the future, you know, what do you see the role of New Zealand, you know, playing in the, in the business overall? I think, you know, Kiwis will be, our listeners will be, you know, very, very, very curious how we, you know, how we fit into that. Yeah, that picture overall, or is it too early to kind of know what shape the business sort of takes over the years ahead?

Chris Smith:
Yeah, I mean, of course, early days, businesses always pivot and change. So I think there’s always gonna be a lot of opportunity for change and growth. But what I can say is that I have spent more than half my Adult life in New Zealand and it is such an incredible country for creativity, inspiration. People like to support each other and boost each other up. It’s also a great place to test new technology because New Zealanders are very forward thinking. It’s a very stable economy. So when developing out a system like this, it’s a fantastic market, especially when you want to tap into the kind of small business market. So we really plan on making New Zealand a core function of our business and likely the headquarters for kind of our Australasia play as we expand globally.

Paul Spain:
How do you sort of, you know, position yourselves? Cause you know, there’s always multiple players that are trying to disrupt any industry, I suppose. And you know, we’ve got some pretty big, big players in that sort of accounting space for small to medium business, of course. Zero, very, very well known, incredible New Zealand success story. You know, how do you see sort of carving out market share against these sort of players who’ve got really big teams and an ability to invest back into their products in ways that I guess are reflective of their scale?

Chris Smith:
Yeah, I mean that’s of course the billion dollar question. Right. And so I think there’s a lot to unpack there. The first thing is you really only have a few large, large market dominators in the space globally. You have Intuit, which is one of the largest companies and their product QuickBooks, which is the largest accounting platform in the world. You have a lot of enterprise solutions like NetSuite. And then of course you have the amazing New Zealand story, Zero, which holds a very large market share in New Zealand, Australia and they’re starting to expand that reach globally as well. But the problem with those platforms is every single one of them was created over 20 years ago and for some of the bigger ones, 30, 40 years ago, and they honestly just have not really evolved since then.

Chris Smith:
The problem when you are a monopoly, and this is not true just for accounting, this is true for literally industry. When you become a monopoly player and you become a stock exchange company, you now have less focus on engaging with the customer and more focus on maximizing every penny out of your customers to deliver shareholder value. That’s just the reality of it. It’s easier to make money by increasing your prices than it is to acquire new customers.

Paul Spain:
And so sounds like a blow on.

Chris Smith:
Some existing companies right there, but it’s a true statement. Right. It’s much easier once you already have dominated a market to just say, hey, I’m going to take more money from you. And people can complain all they want, but the reality is if there’s no real competitor or alternative option, they can complain all they want, but they’re gonna pay it. And so I think now is such a great time because technology is changing and evolving so fast. There’s so much innovation and excitement that can be developed in the accounting space, especially to like, not just handle the accountant accounting part, but also empowering business owners to run their business in unique technological ways that, you know, this is where the time that we wanted to take the leap. So what really sets us apart is we aren’t taking just a niche approach like looking at smaller industries or vertical plays. We are coming at it from a viable full zero replacement.

Chris Smith:
So everything that you can do on zero, you can do on count. So from the bookkeeping to account reconciliation, invoicing, bill tracking, payroll, time tracking, every core function that you need to run your business, you can do and count. The difference is our interfaces and experiences were developed today, not 20 years ago. So we’ve taken the learnings over the last couple decades. We’ve talked with what businesses today want to see how they want to run and operate their business. And, and we were developing a platform to streamline that. And also we are just almost half the cost of these other platform subscriptions. So business owners will not only have an improved experience, they will save a lot of money every month as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, I was curious. I thought, I didn’t think Xero was over 20 years old. I’m just having a look, saying 2006, they were founded, but of course their initial capabilities were. Yeah, we’re a lot lighter than obviously what you bring to the table today. So I’d say yeah, a lot of this technology is definitely not 20 years old. Things like payroll and so on. I don’t know how long that’s been around for them.

Paul Spain:
Maybe that’s more like 10 years or something. I know one of the complexities that companies like Xero have is going into different markets. There’s a whole lot of unique things that you have to do. So, you know, we often hear, you know, United States isn’t, isn’t one country. It’s, you know, it’s like a collection of 50 countries and so on. You know, every state’s got their own sort of unique things in terms of payroll and all of those bits and pieces. You know, New Zealand, Australia, uk. Yeah, every market’s a little bit, little bit different.

Paul Spain:
So yeah, for you to be able to sort of feel like you’ve got a, you know, you’re On a similar level to zero, is that, you know, just in one or two specific markets or like how big is that? Is that journey to match out sort of capabilities, you know, across the board?

Chris Smith:
Yeah. And you know, I think technology has evolved so much with open APIs and the ability to do deeper integrations that a lot of things that would have taken those companies years to implement because they were kind of paving the way for that, is so much easier to implement and integrate today. So, for example, you’re 100% right. Sales tax in the US is a nightmare because not only is it at a state level, some states, like where we’re in Seattle, go all the way down to the city level. So you have to understand the city level tax of where you’re doing a job. So if you’re a company that has jobs in like 20 different cities, you’re paying 20 different taxes, tax returns. So it’s insane, the complexity. But the amazing thing is there’s so many connected APIs nowadays.

Chris Smith:
We were able to tap into all of these databases and build out complex sales modules in the US for every single state in about four months. And so the capabilities of today’s world are just evolving because everyone’s moving more towards this open API play. And then for New Zealand, we’re super excited actually to announce that we’ve been approved by the IRD to do direct integrations here in New Zealand. So we are preparing for automatic GST filing and income tax filings directly from the count platform. So you truly will be able to run your business end to end directly on count. But again, those APIs are now available and the process of how to integrate with them is very well mapped out. So we get to take advantage of a more mature ecosystem in that sense.

Paul Spain:
How hard is dealing with the payroll parts and how developed is that side of things for you?

Chris Smith:
Yeah, so our approach for payroll here in New Zealand is actually a partnership model. So we’re partnering with well established payroll companies to embed and integrate into count. So for example, we just launched our integration with thank you payroll, so you can run payroll directly in thank you payroll and it’ll auto reconcile into account without you having to do anything. And we’re working on it with several other major payroll providers. So our play in this space again is one that we’ve learned from some other players who have kind of made you use payroll solutions that they’ve developed. And we really wanted to create more of an ecosystem so that everyone can pick the technology that’s best for their business. But still Ultimately have an automated experience.

Paul Spain:
Okay, gotcha. So that’s kind of. Yeah. Tapping into the partnership. So yeah, that’s big. So I guess that means the subscriptions will vary according to what their subscriptions are sort of thing. Okay, yep, that makes more sense. I was trying to get my head around because I know these things often take a long time to develop.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s cool. And what do you see the long term risk revenue opportunities are beyond the sort of the base subscription. Yeah. Because we see things these days such as offering up from within the accounting platform, the ability for customers to pay their bills and for all of that stuff to get taken care of. And sometimes it might be a clip the ticket or other aspects of that. So how do you see that side playing out? Are the partnerships that you have on the payroll kind of, you know, part of that? Cause if you’ve got a lower, lower subscription base, and we know it took zero, you know, only really until recent years to start turning any sort of a profit, you’ve gotta make it work commercially too.

Chris Smith:
Right. So a lot there I think from the first part is technology is a lot cheaper to run these days. And because we’ve been able to build off of a modern tech stack with a really like AI and automation first approach, our cost to run our platform and develop and expand it and support it is much cheaper than a company that was started 19 years ago. Thanks for that fact check. And you know, just managing and maintaining legacy stacks. I can tell you from my experience at Meta, of just those 150 staff, maybe 10 were working on new platform and it was 140 staff just supporting legacy systems. And that’s the issue you have where cost explodes. Technology is just in a very different place these days.

Chris Smith:
And so we are able to run a much more lean operation, but still have just as high output and scale capability. But still it is a business, so we do have to make money. And so your, your point in where the expandable revenue opportunities. Yeah, we look a lot through partnerships. How can we expand our partnerships and tap into some really great expanded revenue opportunities through partnering with amazing partners in this kind of industry. But also I think there’s a lot of unique adjacent functions that we can build outside of accounting. We really have this kind of mission where we want to empower business owners to run their whole business on count. And so when you think about what are all the other aspects of technology that business owners might want to use and have as more of an integrated solution, we’re really looking at those type of those Verticals to also bring into counter or partner.

Chris Smith:
So I think there’s a lot of opportunity when you think of it as a bigger play.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Okay, that’s interesting. Are there any particular other areas that you can talk about that are potentially coming up over the next few years?

Chris Smith:
Yeah, great question. So first one is payments. You hinted at this and one of the features we’re working on right now is direct bill pay. So right now in Xero, if you want to pay batch of bills, you essentially have to prove all the bills in Xero and then download a file which you then have to go to your bank and upload. And it’s a multi step process to pay bills. And we’re looking at building direct bill pay into account. So with one click you can pay your bills on a schedule. Make it really seamless and easy for businesses to expand.

Chris Smith:
We already have invoicing so you can do bank transfer, credit card payments within all the invoices. So we want to just continue to expand the different payment options and capabilities there. So payments is a big one. People got to get paid and people have to pay. So definitely. And then the other big one is HR tech. So being able to empower our customers to manage their contractors and employees and then have really seamless integrations into payroll, but really have a fantastic way to monitor and manage your employees as well. So a lot of HR tech, a lot of payment tech.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. How do you see those sort of business requirements around say HR tech evolving company like yours? You’ve got operations in Seattle, operations in Wellington. You’ve got a whole lot of remote people that must create some complexities for you in terms of. Yeah, how you, how you manage that team, how you, how you pay them. So is that an example of the sort of stack that, you know, capability you want to, you know, build out across the product?

Chris Smith:
Yeah, I was going to say we manage our employees and pay our employees so seamlessly because we use this really cool platform called Count. But I mean, in all seriousness, that that’s one of the best ways for us to build our platform is we use our platform so we feel the pains and the needs for opportunities and growth because we rely 100% on our own platform to run our business. So as we go and expand and hire this incredible individual in Ethiopia or Pakistan and we have to manage the HR and the contracting and the payments, we face those challenges because we’re using our own platform and we know where the gaps are and what to expand on. So we like to live the pain so we can Solve the pain.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Okay. And tell us about sort of moving from bootstrap to being funded. What has that journey been like?

Chris Smith:
There’s a lot of pros and cons of getting funding, obviously a lot more pros, but when you’re bootstrapped, you have this mentality of just like, I gotta do whatever it takes and you get really, really scrappy and, and that was fantastic. It’s the way I’d recommend for all entrepreneurs is you really want to try to find product market fit before you take on funding because the requirements or expectations once you take on funding drastically change. So when we were bootstrapping for the first 12 months, it really allowed us to pivot really often, try new things, fail fast, which is definitely still things that we focus on today. But we’re now a lot more KPI and goal driven now that we’ve raised because we have people who have believed in us and invested in us and we want to be able to show growth and show the fact that we are achieving what we told them we would achieve. And so a lot more structure it gets put in place, which is great. You need that structure to be able to grow a successful business. You just want to make sure you do it at the right time, where that structure won’t hinder you finding product market fit and that you can use it to accelerate your growth once you’re ready.

Paul Spain:
And so what did it look like for you in terms of deciding, you know, how and when you would go and raise funds and then what that journey looked like?

Chris Smith:
Raising funds is really tough right now. The global economy is different, to say the least. There’s a lot of money out there, but people a lot more conservative with, with how they they fund opportunities. It used to be this golden saying of we will fund a team and an idea. And that is not so much the case these days. I mean it’s, it’s the critical checkboxes that have to be checked. But there’s now this other one called traction. And so even for those pre seed funds that would never really focus on traction and you could raise pre revenue, it’s just becoming harder and harder and harder to do that and it ends up becoming kind of a full time job if you try to raise money pre revenue because you really have to find the right investor or firm who believes in your vision and your team and that takes a long time to find that right one.

Chris Smith:
But there is a lot of flush money out there if you focus on traction. And honestly, for focusing on revenue is the best focus a Business owner can have anyways. But as soon as we were able so we knew that we didn’t want to put our focus on raising until we were able to produce some traction numbers. And that doesn’t mean scale or volume. It means can you create a process that you can show some sort of ability to repeat? So can I do X and get a client and can I do X again and get another client that is showing traction, that is showing that you’re building product market fit and creating a repeatable process so you don’t have to have a hundred clients, you just have to show that you can get more than one client.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And what have been some of the most challenging parts of the the journey for you so far? Because, you know, we know, you know, building in any business is really, really, really hard. And of course you’re building something where you’re dealing with customers and different time zones and so on. The technology must be moving pretty quick. So, yeah, curious what learnings you’ve got to share.

Chris Smith:
So far, technology is amazing. We are at the coolest point ever. And I will probably say the same thing in six months from now. Yeah, technology is evolving so fast. And what’s cool about that is we have gotten into the age of prototyping in a day. I mean, when you had to hand code everything by scratch and have the deep education and knowledge on how to code something from scratch, prototyping could take months. With vibe coding these days, you can have a prototype over a weekend. Like, it is incredible what you can do.

Paul Spain:
And. And for those who are listening that maybe aren’t coders. What is Vibe coding?

Chris Smith:
Vibe coding is this kind of new phenomenon that’s really popped up the last couple years with the power of AI. Before access to public LLMs, coding was this mystery that only people who studied in dark corners of universities, computer science, knew how to do. And it was quite a mystery. But AI has really transformed it where it’s brought the ability for people who are not coders to be able to speak naturally about what they want built. And AI will translate what they’re saying into programmatic code. And not only will it code it, but it’ll also spin it up in an infrastructure that will run the code for you. So vibe coding is a really cool way to. To just naturally talk and produce a product.

Paul Spain:
And to that sort of disconnect between the fact that you can vibe code. But then when you’re building something serious, there are requirements around cyber security. You might be working in different platforms where you can’t maybe use AI to the same extent. Can you just talk a little bit to that difference in your experience with with Count and whether you’re still able to use AI to assist in the coding and if that helps from an efficiency perspective?

Chris Smith:
Yeah, I think in some industries, AI coding, whether it’s AI assisted coding or full Vibe coding, is definitely applicable, especially in less regulated industries or where accuracy is not critical. But for an industry like accounting where one extra zero could mean a business paying 10,000 in tax or 100,000 in tax, accuracy and precision is absolutely required. And so just as everyone listening has used an AI chatbot before and it’s got a response back that was not correct, or you’re like, that’s not what I asked. Why’d you respond that way? Same thing can happen in Vibe coding. You could lay out your question and what you want it to build perfectly and and it could misinterpret or hallucinate and still produce something that has the wrong output. Or worse, you don’t know it has the wrong output, but it did something in the back end that could be catastrophic. And so we can’t risk that when building such mission critical software. For example, if we want to release a new reporting module or we have our own UI in Count for payroll so you can view all your pay runs and all your history.

Chris Smith:
We Vibe coded an experience and then tested it and showed people and got feedback on it and was able to sit with our customer and iterate that experience with them. And so we didn’t have to go away and say, all right, let’s schedule a meeting for a week from now and check back in. We could do it, live with them and build something really fast and then take it to the team and build an account really quick. So it is allowed for us to test ideas with customers and test ideas internally in days, not weeks or months, which I think is one of the coolest learnings or like hot takes I can give is, yeah, if you’re a core product, I wouldn’t trust Vibe coding in it yet, but you can use it on the edges in so many cool ways. And then I think the other big thing is with this world of AI and automation becoming such a focal point, I think one of the reasons we’ve been successful with Count is because at our core we say we are AI first, but human powered and we put the human element right there at the top. Because I think so many companies are putting AI in every single sentence and really almost hiding the human nature of a lot of stuff. And I think especially what we’re building, accounting AI can be there to automate the tedious, but it should be there to empower the humans to collaborate. The advisor, the accountant and the business owner.

Chris Smith:
How can we make that relationship stronger and more successful by taking away all the tedious noise and empowering that relationship. So in a world of AI, I think the companies that focus on human engagement will actually be the winners because people, I think it’s just gonna get so crowded and noisy. On that new side, how do you.

Paul Spain:
Work through and sort of, I guess, you know, solve the, you know, the technical challenges that you’ll get building something new. Right, you put something together and it’s like, oh, that’s a bit slow, that’s not working so well. And yet, you know, you’re trying to roll out a whole lot of new, you know, new features and capabilities but you need to be able to, yeah, support existing customers and bring them on board. I think I got a message about what you guys were doing a week or two back and I jumped to the website. It was like 5 seconds, 10 seconds and it was like, oh, what’s going on? Their website’s not opening and going through a bit of sign up and so on. It was like, oh, where’s the, oh, we’ve got an error here. Where’s the security code to sort of validate? And some of those things are a little bit slow and you expect these sort of challenges, right? You’re building, you’re building something new. You know, you’re going to build fast things, things are going to break.

Paul Spain:
How do you kind of balance up that, you know, that engineering effort and capability and I guess the fact you do have customers joining you from multiple time zones as well. So you’re trying to keep people pleased from, from every which direction.

Chris Smith:
Yeah. So I love that you bring that up because I think again, it comes down to what a good customer account looks like. We are trying to build a really cool business platform for businesses to, to grow their business on with those customers. So we want customers to give us feedback and so we create these, these loops for those customers to engage with us. Every week we all jump on the phone with the customers. I give out my own personal number to thank you thousands of our customers because I encourage that engagement. And our promise to our customers is that we will move fast. Security and privacy is at the core.

Chris Smith:
We’re SOC 2 compliant. All of our data is stored in a very encrypted way. But on the surface of the platform we want to move Fast. So we kind of ask our customers for a little bit of leniency to say this is a journey and we want you to help us shape the journey. We want you to be a part of building it. We will ship and build new things every week for you. But that means that it won’t be perfect all the time. And that’s kind of a part of the cool journey I think because you know, it’s like what a lot of these amazing platforms today like Slack and Notion did, they said hey, we’re going to just move fast build with you.

Chris Smith:
And that means there’s some tolerance a little bit of like if you go to the site at 10pm There might be a, you might have to wait a few seconds while some new things are loading or deploying. But that means that every week you’re going to be seeing cool new features that you’ve been helping to collaborate on and create. So I think it’s an evolving platform but I think it’s our customers really resonate with that because they get a help shape the product and help shape the journey versus traditional enterprise solutions which have these very long release cycles and it takes months or years to release customer feedback and sure it might be a little bit more stable but you know there’s pros and cons to both sides and this is just.

Paul Spain:
It totally is. You know we were chatting before we started recording around that varying people but you know my team included with Xerox around single sign in SSO options and I think a lot of people have been wanting to be able to sign in with their entre IDs or SAML OAuth these types of capabilities. Cause there’s some real security benefits of that stuff. And you look back, I think the original request there with Xero date back over a decade and they’re still making comments around oh we’re testing this with a group of partners and so on in so long time. So yeah, it is interesting kind of looking at those different approaches and I guess there are a group of customers that will be much more open to things sort of, you know, breaking and having challenges while you’re building and then yeah, probably a different group who are looking for something a bit more mature. So that’s all part of the journey, isn’t it?

Chris Smith:
It’s part of the journey and I think you know our promise to all of our customers is that we all core functionality is stable all the time. It’s just on the edges where we try to expand and move fast and I think it’s a really cool way to build. As you just said, it’s not for everyone, but it creates this really cool collaborative ecosystem where people are like, I’m going to run my business on this platform. So I want this platform to be human. I want to be able to engage with them and help shape it and work with it. I think that’ll resonate with more people. And we’ve seen that as we’ve started scaling and growing. Our reviews and feedback from accountants all over the world and business owners has just been phenomenal because our support team listen and we action things that people ask for and want to collaborate with us on.

Paul Spain:
I saw on your website you do live chat support. So I guess that’s something that gives people that sort of quick feedback and so on. How do you lean into kind of AI to help with that so that you can cover more hours or what’s your approach currently to that support? Because you can end up getting swamped pretty quickly, right? And end up needing a really, really big team.

Chris Smith:
I think there’s a couple approaches we have with support. So I think the first thing we do is make the system really intuitive. And so the more intuitive the interface and experience is, the less support queries you’ll have for the like how do I do this? Or how do I do Y? And we do weekly reviews of all the support tickets to see are there common trends or issues and try to immediately address those in the UI or experience so that we can try to front load and reduce the inbound of repetitive support queries. But your question is really important, which is how do we use AI to support our inbounds and then also what does our team do and how do we scale it? So the first one is we use AI minimally, but in a way that we think is useful, and then get you to a human immediately. So what I personally hate is when you get stuck in those loops where it’s like, what’s your question? You ask and it’s like, is this it? And you’re like, no. And then it’s like, well, what about one of these 10? And you’re like no. And then you have to click, click, click, click, until finally there’s some button hidden in the corner that says connect me. If someone types into our live chat, we will present one answer using AI and then a big button that says need more help? Talk to our live support now.

Chris Smith:
So we try to find this great balance of. We’ve developed a really great help center that we’ve trained our chat AI on. So if you’re asking a question that can easily be answered and we can give you that data, we’d rather give you that instantly so you can be off and humming, but we make zero barriers for you to immediately engage and talk with our human bookkeeper, trained accountant, trained support team.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And I guess that’s pretty important, especially this early on in your journey. Right? Yeah. I still remember signing up as one of the first customers for what is now one NZ in New Zealand. I think they were bale south at the time. And yeah, their support was incredible at the time because there was. There might have been 100 customers or something. Right.

Paul Spain:
So I guess that’s gonna be a similar part of your journey as these things will have to evolve as the business sort of scales and evolves as well.

Chris Smith:
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I mean, it’s easy. We have a few thousand clients now, so it’s easier for us to maintain that. But as we scale, the question is, how do we maintain it? And I think it’s just reinforcing kind of what I said. We make support and human support number one priority of our product. And so that means we’re actively reviewing every single week what kind of questions and requests people are asking us. And then we don’t just action that with our support team, we action that with our dev team. So if someone is confused because they get to the invoice screen and they’re not sure how to reconcile it, and we just got 20 requests in about that, immediately our product managers are working with our devs to figure out why that is and how we can improve it.

Chris Smith:
So I think how we scale our support is not just a function of hiring more people and making sure they’re well trained, but it’s also a function of how are we actually doing that feedback loop and actually bringing it into our product to create a better experience. And that’s the great thing about moving fast is in a traditional larger platform, that feedback could take months to implement and that support team could get, you know, just swamped with the same repetitive stuff. But if we see something as a trend, we can one week later have some improvements that reduce those support inquiries overnight. And so I think there’s a big benefit in that moving fast mentality as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s exciting. So with the moving fast and so on, back to my previous thing around, sort of single sign on and entre id, is that likely to be a feature you’ll be turning on in the next month or two or how stacked up is your list of things and capabilities you want to deliver, or will that be 10 years away?

Chris Smith:
No. So we, I would say things don’t really sit on our backlog for more than four weeks or so because our team’s able to move so efficiently. But I’m glad you brought that up. We’re launching Google and Outlook, Microsoft Login right away, SSO that should go live this year and then we’ll look at larger ones. One of the cool things with our IRD integration is we’re also looking at enabling you to just log in with your IRD account as well and instantly provision an account on account for your business as well. So lots of opportunities, lots going on there.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s excellent. Anything else you wanted to add before we, before we wrap up?

Chris Smith:
I would love to ask you a question around, like, what excites you most in New Zealand technology right now? And like in this moment right now?

Paul Spain:
Oh, that’s. That’s a good question. I mean having, yeah. Having been at the New Zealand Aerospace Summit, Auckland Startup Week, you know, I think it is a lot of the new things that are coming through are really exciting, but also, you know, the impact of the bigger and more established, you know, firms that are part of our tech ecosystem and the opportunities that those together all create for the future. So, you know, we say look at Rocket Lab and you know, full disclosure, I’m a small investor in Rocket Lab. The flow on effect that a company like Rocket Lab can kind of have for the ecosystem. And, and when we look at, there’s a whole bunch of companies where their founder has spent some time at Rocket Lab and then they’ve come off and started something new. I think that’s pretty interesting.

Paul Spain:
Likes of partly and halter. But I think with our most innovative firms you get this massive impact into the broader ecosystem, which is great. So yeah, it’s always exciting to come across those that are doing new things and the impact that that can have on New Zealand as a whole. So, yeah, it’s exciting to follow your journey with Count and to see how that plays out.

Chris Smith:
Amazing. Thank you, Paul. I really appreciate you having me on the pod today.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, absolute pleasure. Thank you very much, Chris. Cheers. Well, that’s it for this episode of the New Zealand Tech Podcast. Big thank you again to our show partners, Workday, Spark, 2degrees, One NZ and Gorilla Technology. And of course to Chris Smith for joining us on the show. Now, before we go, a little reminder. If you haven’t just yet, please jump online nztechpodcast.com survey to share your feedback on the podcast and be in for a chance to win some of the great giveaways we have from Motorola, Logitech, and of course, the One NZ Warriors Jersey.

Paul Spain:
Well, thanks everybody for listening in. We’ll catch you in the new year, but stay tuned because we’ve got continuous episodes running right through the break. Both of the New Zealand Tech Podcast and the New Zealand Business Podcast. We’ve got some incredible interviews with top founders, including those from across the tech sector.