Action that

By Matt Cooney, January 3, 2008 @ 6 am

Blame Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Or perhaps the Steves—Jobs and Wozniak—or even the Google boys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They set the model: two ambitious guys in a garage, setting out to change the world. And more than a few starry-eyed Kiwis set to out emulate them, creating the next tech giant in a bedroom or a corner of someone’s office.

Not many got far, though—because there’s usually more to the story than the garage would suggest. So welcome, then, to New Zealand’s latest generation of tech startups, who are bringing a refreshingly serious tone to their business. They’re well-resourced, well-staffed, and many have a full-on export focus.

Wellington startup ActionThis has released the first version of its web-based planning and collaboration tools. ActionThis.com shows the benefit of time spent building a business, and polishing, testing, arguing over … and shipping … the product.

“We’ve had more than 300 people testing this in everyday use—that started in April,” says chief executive Ed Robinson, who used to work in Seattle on the team that builds Microsoft’s developer tools. His new venture boasts a full-time interface designer and a quality control analyst—meaning that ActionThis is impressively polished for a 1.0 release. It already stands up against established competition (including US Web 2.0 sensation, Basecamp).

It even boasts a new kind of chart, an innovative ‘bubble graph’ that shows performance over time—and ActionThis has applied for a US patent to cover it.

Robinson is bullish about the Internet opportunity for New Zealanders, and the numbers show why. “The Internet right now is growing at about 10-20 million users per month,” Robinson says. “That’s four or five New Zealands a month—and 75 percent have credit cards. There are no trade restrictions on the Internet. You don’t have to get a visa. If you’ve got the right product, they’ll pay for it.

“So which model do you go for? Do you go for four million people [in New Zealand], or 1.2 billion worldwide?”

ActionThis is going for the big numbers, just like Xero, profiled in Idealog #8, and Tim Norton’s PlanHQ. “There are a lot of people trying other ideas,” says Robinson. “It’s really encouraging. What many of us recognise is that we have to do much of what the Silicon Valley people did in the 90s. They used to collaborate a lot more. There are a lot of opportunities that we can share with each other.”

Got that? Get started!