Island life and the school of fishing
Iwas lucky enough to spend last week on Atata Island, north of Tongatapu. Blessed with a storybook desert island environment, a great reef for diving and a thriving population of ‘‘Flying Fox’’ giant fruit bats, Atata ticks the box for me in terms of a holiday destination that is authentic and comfortable, but not too flash.
The village has two thriving churches, one of which we attended last Sunday. Apart from being treated to some worldclass singing it was also a great place to talk to the locals, who make their living from agriculture, working at the resort and fishing.
Fishing there is old-school. Generation-old walking nets for the shallows, and hand lines for the deep water outside the reef. Remarkably, the tough Islanders catch big tuna and blue marlin on hand lines, something that’s hard to believe until you see the callousridden patina on their hands.
I asked Tenni, one of the best singers, what the secret was to catching a marlin on a hand line. His answer was interesting. ‘‘You’ve got to focus on just one fish, imagine it down deep, understand its world and don’t worry about all the other fish down there’’.
My mate Rowan Simpson is a bit of a fisherman himself, at least when it comes to technology companies. And he’s got plenty of lines out.
After helping found Trade Me and getting Xero off the ground, he’s invested in 24 early stage tech ventures. Fourteen are still active today, a solid result in an often-fickle sector. This has allowed him and his team at Hoku to observe a fair number of companies as they go through start-up, expansion, growth and exit.
While still to patent a secret sauce, they’ve developed a pretty good feel for the repeated patterns that tend to result in some tech companies doing better than others. They’ve found the most successful founders are those that use data to track progress and inform decisions.
Part of this is the discipline around keeping an ongoing quality information flow to investors and stakeholders, but part of it is working out which things to measure and how to make the process as bulletproof and automated as possible.
You don’t want to be starting with a blank Excel screen every month. As well as being time-consuming, when you’re the chief of everything, it can result in small errors becoming big ones. And you don’t want broken formulas screwing up results or causing you to mislead shareholders.
You need a spreadsheet with guardrails to keep you on the straight and narrow, together with automated smarts around gathering, analysing and sharing.
A couple of years ago Simpson created Dr SaaS which provided an acerbic tool to give your software-as-a-service (SaaS) company a health check-up. The tool was pretty useful, if a little blunt, with colourful phrases like ‘‘your death is imminent’’.
Now he’s extended that idea to build a more sophisticated and less hurtful tool to help start-up and growth companies track progress and make informed decisions. It’s called OneMetric and it has just launched in beta form to 15 companies in Godzone.
According to the Callaghan Institute, there are more than 400 SaaS businesses here, from giants such as Xero and Pushpay, to toddlers like Sharesies and Banquer. I can only count about 190 but either way it’s a fair whack and a sector that has helped catapult technology into being our third-largest export earner. So chances are there’s a ready market for the platform.
OneMetric gives those companies the ability to have industry-standard reporting, with feeds from the likes of Xero and Google Analytics (now) and Salesforce (likely in the future). And the way it’s put together is truly like a spreadsheet with guardrails, but with the dashboarding already done and the formulas locked in.
The hard work is done and you can focus on moving the markers. Meanwhile you’re able to grant investors and stakeholders view-only access to keep them in the loop, and help you spend less time reporting.
It also maps out metrics maturity buckets for the five stages a technology company moves through as it gets better. You can flow from stage one where the start-up is just drowning in data, through to stage five where all the bases are covered, and the company is able to choose one metric at a time to obsess about.
It even helps you work out what that metric might be (as well as a countermeasure to ensure quality of the obsessive metric).
And that’s the killer part of this platform from my perspective: Getting all the groundwork done around gathering, analysing and sharing your performance means you can focus on just one number that will truly move the dial for the business.
Which really comes back to fishing for sailfish, Tongan style. You focus on just one fish, and forget about the rest, knowing they’re all being accounted for.
‘‘You’ve got to focus on just one fish, imagine it down deep, understand its world and don’t worry about all the other fish down there.’’ Tenni, Tongan fisherman
Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is a professional director, adviser and writer. His Twitter handle is @modsta and his hands are too city-soft to go fishing Tongan-style.