The Pitch:

Over 6.6 million US households of buyers, designers and sellers spent US$1.5 billion on DIY jewelry in 2007, up 19% on 2006. More importantly they are rushing online, spending $100m, up a whopping 100% on 2006. Ponoko is in a unique position to service this large and rapidly growing online market.

The problem these designers and sellers face is the cost and complexity to make and sell their creations. And this is leading to a lack of unique jewelry easily accessible to mass market buyers.

The Ponoko solution to this is an online supply chain service that makes it easy and affordable to buy, make and sell designer crafted jewelry. Their online marketplace delivers a DIY jewelry buying, making and selling service at 50% less cost than the equivalent offline process and saves 90% of the time traditionally involved.

Over time they hope to expand into other vertical markets – eg, the overall US craft vertical is worth about US$50 billion per year.

The underlying excitement about Ponoko is that its unique ‘buy/make/sell’ online marketplace earns 5x more per sale than traditional ‘buy/sell’ online marketplaces. This is because they provide an on-demand product making and delivery service in addition to the traditional marketplace sales service. In short they are redefining how products are designed, made and delivered – and riding on a new wave people are calling the post industrial revolution and web3.0.

All performance indicators are trending upwards and revenues are flowing at a sustained 3.8% online sales conversion success rate. This innovation and traction continues to attract high profile investors, partners and media.

Accomplishments to date:

• Revenues have grown at a compound rate of 42% per month since September 2007.
• Website traffic has grown at a compound rate of 46% per month since January 2007.
• Nearly 10,000 personal factories have been opened.
• Highly successful US businessmen have been appointed to their advisory board (see ‘Principals & Previous Experience’ details below).
• 2 manufacturing nodes have been established – San Francisco, USA and Wellington, NZ.
• Selected to launch the world’s first ‘buy/make/sell’ marketplace at the prestigious TechCrunch40 event in San Francisco, USA.
• Selected to launch at the prestigious DEMO events in both San Diego & Palm Springs, USA.
• Selected to present at the world’s mass customization and personalization conference at MIT in Massachusetts, USA.
• Supreme winner of TUANZ Business internet awards.
• Featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, BBC News, WIRED Magazine, BusinessWeek, MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch.com, Engadget.com, VentureBeat.com, Makezine.com, Core77.com, Idealog, NZ Herald.
• USA accounts for 70% of revenues.

Development plans:

• Focus on marketing, particularly providing online marketing tools to empower our marketplace designers and sellers to tell their stories and engage in ‘social selling’.
• Providing tools that make it simple for anyone to design a product that can be made at the click of a mouse.

Key Challenges:

• marketing – engaging more users, more often at more profit.
• product – making it super simple for the novice ‘designer’ to design products they can click to make.
• operations – bedding in the next make-on-demand technology, beyond laser cutting of plastics and timbers.
• finance – cash to fund growth.

Principals & Previous Experience:

• David ten Have (founder/CEO) – previously co-founder/CTO of Provoke, NZ’s #1 design led web development firm.
• Derek Elley (founder/CSO) – serial entrepreneur, previously co-founder/CEO of First Rate (NZ’s largest Internet marketing agency, sold to ASX:QXQ in 2006), co-founder / CEO of Calcium Software (NZ’s first email branding agency), co-founder/CEO of Sparkbox (NZ’s leading angel investment company).
• Fred Durham (Board advisor) – founder/CEO of Cafepress.com, the world’s largest personalized goods marketplace hosting 11 million unique website visitors per month, adding 2,000 new shops and 45,000 new products daily.
• Graham Hill (Board advisor) – serial entrepreneur, founder/CEO of Treehugger.com, the world’s #1 green blog, sold to Discovery Channel (NASDAQ:DISC) in 2007.
• Ross Stevens (Board advisor) – one of NZ’s leading industrial designers, previously with Philippe Starck and Fisher & Pykel.

What they want from an investor:

• NZ$1.25m.
• Minimum investment NZ$10,000.
• Offer closes 26 June 2008.
• Ideal for investors looking to invest in US focused online marketplaces, user generated content websites, online retail of digital or physical goods, online supply chain solutions, manufacturing-on-demand, digital or industrial design.

Dave’s Commentary:

Ponoko has the ingredients to make a great New Zealand success story. I remember talking to David ten Have a couple of years ago, when he said he was bored with the virtual world and wanted to use the Internet to enable making real things. He teamed up with Derek Elley, and they’ve gone on to build a very strong team … if you view Angel investment as investing primarily in people, you’re off to a great start right there. … if you view Angel investment as investing primarily in people, you’re off to a great start right there. They’ve managed to put together a string of successes which any NZ startup would envy.

Ponoko have been very successful in building up a community (in the true sense) of users, and the underlying technology is very cool. Laser cutters, Rails, plenty of AJAX … yum. But the key source of confidence for me came from Ponoko taking the jump and opening an office in San Francisco. One of their key learnings, according to David tH, is that “you have to be there to be there”, ie there’s no substitute for actual presence in the North American market if you want to do business there. Many New Zealand startups could do well to learn this lesson.

Disclosure: I’ve invested in Ponoko in a previous round. The share price is up, which is a good reflection that they’re starting to realise their early promise.

Contact details:

Derek Elley
derek.elley@ponoko.com
Tel: +64 21 88 66 81

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Welcome to our first opportunity posting – PlanHQ, a Wellington-based Software-as-a-Service play ready to go global.

The Pitch:

PlanHQ is a web-based subscription service that allows business to create, action, track and achieve their business plan. The whole team is focused on execution, completing actions, achieving goals and tracking progress against financial projections. Team members are reminded of – and held accountable for – reaching targets. Board members, investors and advisers are kept informed with regular progress reports. A completely up-to-date comprehensive business plan document can be downloaded in Word or PDF any time.

Accomplishments to date:

In 2007, PlanHQ launched version 1 of their product, reached 100 paying customers, presented at DEMO (see the video), hired a US VP Marketing, and has signed up VC and Business Coaching companies to help these companies better manage their clients. They’ve received NZD 300K in angel funding to date.

Development plans / Key challenges:

PlanHQ plan to expand their NZ market this year, as well as big push into the US market this year, which will require significant resources. Meanwhile product development will continue apace, to continue to add functionality to adapt to clients’ needs and scale for both numbers and sizes of businesses.

Principals & Previous Experience:

See the team profiles on the PlanHQ web site.

What they want from an investor:

• NZD 300-500K
• Experience in closing deals in the US

Dave’s Commentary:

PlanHQ has a real chance of developing into the killer app for managing growing businesses. It’s no secret that business discipline is traditionally a weak point for rapidly growing tech companies in particular, and PlanHQ is sexy enough to make planning more interesting, relevant, transparent and even fun. From my investor’s point of view, anything that increases buy-in and accountability of an entrepreneur has to be good. They’ve clearly captured the imaginations of a number of players in their key target markets, so the challenge is to build on their successes.

Their board of Tim Norton, Rowan Simpson, and Rod Drury can only be described as a Wellington Web 2.0 Dream Team. They’re smart people with a successful track record with great resources bent on making PlanHQ successful. And it all comes from their own experiences trying to get the business plan working for you rather than vice versa.

Contact details:

Tim Norton
Tel: +64 21 463 331
tim@planhq.com

If you’re planning to act on any information on this site, be sure to read our disclaimer.