Welcome to The Raise. This week, we have the pleasure of speaking with Toby Hilliam, Founder and CEO of Appetise, (previously known as MenuAid).  Since founding in 2021, Appetise has: 

• Gained over fifty thousand users of its B2C app.

• Raised over four million dollars in venturing funding, including Icehouse Ventures and OIF Ventures.

• Count the likes of Fonterra, Lee Kum Kee, Tegel, and Angel Bay as clients of their B2B Insights platform. 

Toby is refreshingly forthcoming in the lessons they’ve learnt in such a short space of time. We cover a lot of ground, from the strategy of pivoting to a B2B+B2C hybrid business model, their sales process to blue chip customers, watching his team thrive as they’ve grown, and a big reveal about their Aussie launch 👉

“We noticed founders themselves moving over there, putting boots on the ground, leading by example and treating it like a startup from scratch, like it's a brand new business. So we've decided that first thing next year we’re moving to Sydney. We're going to set up the Appetise office in Sydney, start building out our own team, and just treat this thing like a brand new startup and just start again. We've got a playbook now, but being very conscious that New Zealand and Australia are very different and we don't want to sort of take anything for granted.”

Watch, listen or read for more ☕️

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Check out the full length interview or follow us on Spotify for the new episode.

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Skim the show notes from our chat with Toby Hilliam:

How they got Fonterra as a customer

“It was a bit of a hail Mary. We just found this incredible woman, her name's Kelly. I think we got very lucky, right timing, got her on the right day of the week where she was just happy to take a bet. It was pretty ruthless. She said, I want to do a one month trial and I'm not paying for it unless it's valuable. We thought it's just worth a crack with someone like Fonterra. And that one month trial shifted from a two and a half grand potential value to what’s now a seven figure contract. It's a worthwhile bet by both parties. In terms of our sales process, it's been really focused on finding a core champion who gets really excited by what we're doing and can see the pathway to value. And then we're basically just trying to find a way to build a really solid business case with them that kind of fits within budget that they can sign off on. And once we can, and that's normally maybe through a two to three month trial or proof of value. And then once we have that, it allows us to then share the business case with the wider business and try and tap into new budgets. Often marketing, unfortunately, is the first thing to get cut when times are tough. So looking to try and get into the research budget or into maybe the sales and category budget as well.”

Taming a B2B + B2C Business

“We realized that we're almost like a horse with two heads and where the heads are kind of running in different directions where half the business really wants to focus on the consumer and building a fantastic experience and making sure they really thrive and get benefit from the platform. Whereas the other side is trying to capture as many data points as we can. And so those things don't always go together. So part of that strategic work was to figure out where are we trying to get to as a B2B insights company and what are some of the current limitations with our consumer offering and how can we build a roadmap that ensures our B2B customers keep getting value and our consumer app is still delivering the value it should. It's then changed the way we work as a business. So we now have different business divisions in the team. Some are focused on consumer, some are focused on B2B and then we have a team that's actually dedicated to like the underlying infrastructure that holds it all together. It’s been a really awesome growth opportunity within the company. We're about 25 people now and so being able to have different leaders emerge in the business lead people and run their own teams be the ones that connect information throughout the business. Watching team members who were like third and fourth hires still here today, three years later, leading teams is really quite inspiring. It's a challenge, but in our eyes, we don't have a business without the consumer app. That's a really important part of our business. It's at our core. And we know if we can get that right, we can then help brands really bring a consumer lens to how they run their business, which is our core vision.”

On mixing-up your advisor network

“I've had a couple of bites at the startup cherry with varying success. I think having advisors is super important. And the key is being really transparent and really clear with the advisor what you want to get out of the relationship and what the business needs. Then mutually acknowledging that once we've achieved that, the advisors done their job and it's an opportunity to bring in the next person. In the beginning, we hung on to some advisors for a little bit too long. What we've found really healthy is having this constantly evolving network of advisors as you get to new tiers, you can bring in new expertise, new thinking, who can start to drag everyone up another level. That's been the biggest unlock for us is thinking about who can get us to the next stage and being quite relentless at repeating that process.”

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Trends we’re noticing: SEO for ChatGPT

ChatGPT is now providing sources for many of their responses may have big probably great and previously unconsidered SEO implications.

1. Don't start undervaluing SEO content. It's easy to think you won't need it, until you realise that ChatGPT needs to get its source material from somewhere.

2. This may result in additional referral traffic from ChatGPT and could be of significant commercial benefit.

3. Ask yourself if you, or your agency, knows how to optimise for AI yet. They should.

Tech Spotlight: SaaSmas 2024 Party

Wellington SaaS collective is back what’s going to be another banger Christmas party on Wednesday 11th of December, 5pm ‘til late @ Dockside, Wellington.

Join the annual celebration of the fastest growing sector in the New Zealand economy.  Last year’s event had everything; a beatboxing opera singer, a slam poet, an incredible speaker, plenty of dancing and sold out with close to 300 attendees. Don’t miss out on the festivities 🤸‍♀️