1. How did your startup journey begin?
Computers were always prevalent in my life growing up as a kid and I was always "the one" whom friends, family and even teachers would turn to for help. I was told recently of a story by my folks the other day - I don't quite recall it but 9-year old me was pulled out of class to help the computing teacher. In the early days when computing classes in Primary School were only just being taught, the teacher at the time didn't know how to get the internet back online. The modem sat in the Library, so it was always the librarian's job to get them connected... but I guess she must've been away that day. I had never thought anything of it, it was just something that always clicked with me.
Growing up I mostly worked in retail doing sales or customer service but whilst studying at Computer Science at University I was over it, often standing around on the shop floor feeling bored. When a fellow student Matt Hare (my co-founder) was talking to me about how he was going around small businesses fixing PCs and building websites in and around classes it caught my attention. The flexibility and freedom to work your own hours and to be making $30/hr well... You couldn't ask for anything better as a uni student right?
It's funny looking back on some of your old work and to see how you have grown but one of the first sites that Matt got me to build in January 2014 was Phoenix Auto.
Over the course of the next few years we kept growing, getting more and more clients with leads coming through from Matt's business Spiderweb Solutions (IT Consulting). The Hatchet* journey started in order to provide a clearer message for our customers in offering; custom software, websites and web hosting rather than IT consulting. It's been built through referrals just making sure we do the best we can. It's only now that we are starting to market ourselves.
2. What are you working on at the moment?
We have been doing a lot of work with Jeff and his team at DrawHistory building out websites, they have the designers and we have the developers and it's been a really good synergy. It's extremely fulfilling working alongside NFPs and organisations with a cause which is DrawHistory's M.O.
Day to day we continue to develop and work on business critical custom software solutions for our customers. They keep throwing more and more challenges at us. Often once people begin working with us that fleeting idea they thought was never possible gets thrown around. But we make it happen.
It's been empowering to see businesses being able to scale and grow at such a rapid pace due to some of the automation we have put into their businesses.
One particular exciting project is in the works: https://flanno.com.au/, a street-wear label established to help support Mental Health & Suicide Organisation, is something we are proud of. With a big thanks to Meerkats, we have been able to begin creating an eCommerce website (pro-bono) for the lovely duo Kat and Penny after they pitched the idea at Social Impact weekend. Keep an eye out on that one!
3. What do you hope to get from the Spacecubed community?
We gave it a good solid 8 months working from home before making the decision to move into the "big smoke" and have been enjoying the last 2 years ever since. Segmenting work from home is part of our culture, we don't take work home with us.
As a business owner working in a community and environment such as Spacecubed it eliminates the burden of managing cleaners, office supplies, electricity, lease agreements, insurances, tables, furnishes and most importantly the bog rolls. These little things slowly eat into your time and instead we rock up, sit down and get to do the job we love.
Being apart of the community has allowed us to network, grow and meet some cool people along the way #krew. The weekly membership newsletter containing events, updates and insight into other startups has provided us the type of interactive, up-to-date and relevant education you cannot get anywhere else in Perth.
4. Can you share with us a success story you've achieved from when you started this project?
To name one... https://www.dogshome.org.au/ was recently launched in March 2019. Their previous website was built on old CMS that took ages for staff to upload content and required them to manually write code. It just became a nightmare trying to put up (and pull down) 20 dogs a week. Switching them over WordPress, we managed to hook into their animal shelter database system and sync them automatically. To help an organisation (pro-bono) eliminate 200-300 hours a year in management costs and deliver a modern responsive website that will sit with them for years to come is something we are proud to be a part of. When you think of them doing that same task for the next 3+ years the numbers add up really fast (just the way we look at things).
Hatchet are always on the hunt to create new success stories for more people and their businesses. Check us out at https://hatchet.com.au
