There is a double-paged feature article on happysheep in the June Issue of NetGuide Magazine.
Unfortunately I’m not allowed to publish the article here, but it starts on page 16 and is available for sale from today.
My thanks goes out to Jorin and the team at NetGuide for the opportunity to answer their questions.
The 2008 NetGuide Web Awards were held last night and Auckland, and I’m happy to report that Zillion was a finalist in the “Best Trading Site” category and happysheep was a finalist in the “Best New Site” category.
Unfortunately we didn’t actually win either of the two awards, however Simon won “Best Shopping Site” with GPStore and “Best Gaming Site” with Gameplanet, two very well deserved wins! I’m especially happy to see the GPStore team continue to win the Best Shopping Site award, as the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to keep meeting and exceeding their rapidly growing number of customers is truly impressive. Well done guys!
The Web Awards did however highlight for me the relative lack of emerging web talent in New Zealand. In most categories, it was the same sites up for the same awards with few, if any, real surprises. I’d love to see more new sites launched in 2009 and more young people getting involved too.
But overall a really fun night, and my congratulations goes out to all the winners.
I read on the nzherald web site tonight that the iPhone will officially be released in New Zealand, seeming to give weight to the rumours that Apple have been secretly trialling the new 3G version in New Zealand for the past couple of months.
I have to say that I’m both happy and sad about this announcement. On the downside I’m a little annoyed that I probably paid too much for my imported phone just to have it a few months early. On the upside I guess it’s now only a matter of time before my SMS conversations become private again, with hopefully fewer and fewer people grabbing my phone just to see how it works!
I do hope that the new 3G version has better reception in New Zealand, as my iPhone kinda sucks in that regard compared to my old Nokia.
This announcement also makes the idea of creating an iPhone app for the New Zealand market more viable. I predict that we’ll see a lot of cool apps made for the iPhone, but before today it just didn’t seem worthwhile creating anything exclusively for New Zealand since the market would be so small. If the uptake of the iPhone in New Zealand is anything like the iPod, I guess we’re set to see that change.
We were so impressed by the huge number of volunteers who put their hand up to distribute happysheep stickers that this week we’ve decided to try something similar on Zillion.
We thought it would be a cool idea for sellers who are selling on both Zillion and Trade Me to include a little business card with their Trade Me parcels, pointing their Trade Me buyers to their listings on Zillion. This kind of direct marketing should be really effective as it’s getting into the hands of exactly the kind of people we want to reach.
Here’s what the card looks like…
Once again we’ve had a fantastic response to our invitation to help out, with over 60 sellers offering to include the cards in their Trade Me parcels. Check out some of the comments below…
“Hi I would like to request your free business cards please. This offer is very generous and it will surely be a good way to end up a sale.”
“Thanks for that! Will be good to give other people some more options for buying online.”
“Great idea please forward”
“Great, thanks, i’ll look forward to that. We are currently promoting all our listings on several sites quite vigouressly. I believe that those of us who try to keep prices down will start doing exceptionally well due to the huge increases in the cost of living. Zillion is assisting with that by once again having free gallery photo’s. As Trademe gets more expensive to list with, listings will drop dramatically”
“would love some business cards…about to get back into zillion ..Biz cards would help heaps”
“Haven’t sold much yet but do make a habit of telling my trademe customers where they can find me on zillion so cards sound a good idea. Thanks.”
“please send me business cards to include in the parcels I sell on Trademe. I have temporarily not relisted any items due to a slow trade. I intend to resume my listings with new items soon.
This is a great idea”
“I would be keen to start sending out Zillion cards, put me down for a hundred or so”
“What a brilliant idea! If it’s free, I would like 100 pieces (I’ve been a trader on trademe since 2004….am keen to gradually switch to zillion too:)”
“I would love some of these.”
“we would like some business cards - we currently send out about 100 packages minimum per week to our trademe customers.”
“could you send me some free business cards please 
like 50 or so if u can 
coz ur the best lol thx heaps n heaps :p”
“I think that is a great idea. I dont sell on Trademe but if I do, i would be more than happy to add your your card to them or anyone I sell to when I am at markets selling.”
“Hey thats a great idea, and would like some of these cards..cheers”
“Can i have some please? i still sell alot on tm and often put in emails about z, but this would prob get noticed more”
“Hey how you going, i like your idea of the business cards. Just new to using zillion sick of trademe haha. layout is much better and pricing is better for fees. How do we get the free business cards?”
“thank you very much! What a great idea Dylan.”
“Would love to include some in my parcels, thanks Dylan”
“hi there im a trader on trademe.co.nz i use it for selling things that dont sell on here and buying things i cant find on here. i use trademe quite alot i think it might help if i have about 200 ish cards so i can also give them to my friends and recomend them to you part of the 200 cards will go out with my packages i send away to trademe buyers.”
“I am more than happy if you would like to send me some business cards to pop them into all my outgoing parcels to promote Zillion.”
“Hi i just received your email , and would love to send them out with my other sales , I cant wait for Zillion to get bigger as it is a far better system than Trademe”
I really love little win/win ideas like this, and the total cost of the excercise was only a few hundred dollars. I wish we’d done it years ago!
A little over a week ago I was interviewed by StartUP and asked questions about Zillion, happysheep, nzflatmates and what it’s like starting a web site in New Zealand.
Having now seen the video and the huge bags under my eyes, I can confidently say I need more sleep!
It’s pretty widely accepted that there’s no such thing as an original idea, but today the harsh reality of that horrible truth has hit me hard.
For months now I’ve been kicking around ideas for new sites to build, this time hoping to come up with something that a) didn’t require huge scale to “work” and b) had international appeal in the hope of earning some export dollars. I finally settled on an idea that I just loved, something that I would use myself and best of all, something that would only take a month or two to build and could be done at the same time as our existing commitments. It was a basic, but powerful idea.
I’ve spent weeks discussing the idea with everyone I know, drawing up detailed plans and even mocking up some pages. It was all super exciting, until today I stumbled upon a well executed site about exactly the same thing. If it was a half-assed attempt I wouldn’t be bothered, but no, this thing looks good and basically exactly as I imagined it would translate on screen. I think I would be proud to call it my own, and that says a lot because people tell me I’m damn fussy!
But there is a small window of hope. It doesn’t look like many people have signed up which means there are still plenty of people out there who would, but somehow the whole thing just doesn’t seem as fun anymore, which for me was what it was suppose to be all about.
Seeing something inside your head come alive on the screen is a huge thrill. It’s exciting. Now that I can sign up and use someone else’s very good interpretation of the same idea it has somehow taken the edge off.
Oh well, back to the drawing board.
I was discussing with Shane today about how difficult it was to find good people to join our team (great teams ftw) when he coined the interesting term the NZ-Idol effect.
Some pretty impressive musicians turn up to compete in American Idol, with any of the top 10 capable of producing a CD that would sell. NZ Idol on the other hand, doesn’t quite cut it, presumably because our talent pool is smaller. Hence the NZ-Idol effect, a B Grade show in comparison.
Maybe the NZ web scene is similar. Maybe New Zealand is just too small to produce an excess of talented web people. Or maybe they’re out there but they’ve already been snapped up? Or maybe they’re just not turning up to the audition…not looking for employment…busy working away on their own thing.
Either way, good web people seem really hard to come by in New Zealand.
We have a growing number of projects on the go, so we’re looking for a talented Auckland-based designer to join our team and spread his or her talents across our network of sites.
We’re looking for someone who:
We can offer work across all our sites (happysheep, Zillion, nzflatmates, Gameplanet Store) in either a full time, part time or contract capacity. We’re prepared to be flexible for the right person!
While previous experience is ideal, we’re also happy to work with someone young and naturally talented who’s keen to learn.
If this sounds like you, please get in touch (my email address is on the right) and include some examples of your work, and a list of web sites you like, and why.
We’re starting to think New Zealand lacks talented web people, please prove us wrong…
National announced yesterday that should they win the election, they’ll spend $1.5bn on rolling out a fibre network to deliver high-speed broadband into the homes of 75% of New Zealanders in the next five years.
This is bold move from National and great news for our Industry.
From my point of view, I believe that properly managed government investment in this kind of infrastructure is no different from government investment in roading and highways. Just as our state highways are critical to our country’s economic well being, so too is the “information highway” and access to super-fast Internet.
Of course careful work will need to be done to ensure we don’t end up with another monopoly. That would suck, but really, what’s the alternative? New Zealand’s a small country and it’s unlikely that the private sector would ever invest the kind of money required to get something like this off the ground properly.
I think that it’s great that National is taking the issue seriously and showing some bold leadership. I’m not sure if it would swing my vote, but it would certainly have a positive impact on my daily life. It will be interesting to see Labour’s response and how the debate unfolds leading up to the election.
Today I’ve been humbled by the huge number of good people out there who really want to see us succeed with our ventures.
About four hours ago we sent a happysheep email newsletter to just over 1,000 people, inviting them to email us if they’d like to stick up happysheep stickers in their local area. To my amazement about 40 people have already emailed to say they’re keen to help out. Wow.
What’s even more interesting, is that so far this afternoon only 20% of people have actually opened the newsletter. 20% of 1,000 recipients is 200, and of those about 40 have requested stickers. That’s about one in every five people wanting to volunteer to help out, for free.
Here are a small handful of the comments we’ve received:
“Hi, I would be happy to hand out stickers & plaster them all over, please send me some.
I am Queenstown - Glenorchy area”“great i will also hand them out in my shop and plaster them on vehicles give them away to customers spread the word”
“thanks - ps: send lots!!”
“hi ,i would love to help get the word out about HAPPYSHEEP !!!”
” We would love to receive some stickers. We have a shop at the Historic Village in Tauranga. The Village is becoming a thriving Arts, Crafts, Events and Community Centre - pretty much all the things happysheep is trying to promote.
A number of the groups that hold classes at the Village got together and are going to be running a range of school holiday classes - we have listed them all on happysheep. It’s great that there is somewhere we can promote them!! Thanks
“We get a lot of visitors on holiday as well as the locals and they are all looking for things to do and see around the region so the stickers would be fantastic so they know where to go to find that information. Thanking you in anticipation.”
“Hi, I would love some stickers please. I live in a hall of residence so can help spread the word!”
“Send heaps, ill put them in our bags when customers purchase.”
It makes me smile to think there are so many good people out there who are happy to volunteer their time to help us succeed. We may only have a small number of people on the payroll, but an excercise like this one quickly illustrates that our team is in fact a lot bigger than that
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