Hoist, is a ‘Platform-as-a-service’ startup has just returned to Wellington, New Zealand, after a three-week stint as part of their BNZ Startup Alley prize.
he company is founded by an experienced team, including ex-Xero Chief Architect Owen Evans, EndGame CEO Andrew Butel, and Product Manager Jamie Wilson
I spoke to Jamie before he departed back to Wellington.
“We came here to get our feet on the ground and to begin to understand the market," he said.
"It soon became evident that the market here is very different. It moves at a different pace all together than Wellington.
"We were told a few months ago that we were too early to be coming to the US and we’d be better saving our money and prize winnings from Startup Alley until later in the year.
"This couldn’t be further from the truth. If you’re an early stage startup, get here as soon as you can. The speed at which your company will grow is 10 fold over NZ, and from my own experience I can say I’ve grown a tonne professionally too.”
Hoist’s goal while in San Francisco was to grow their network, while learning the process of scaling a business in the US from people with intimate knowledge in the space.
During their visit, Hoist meet with various VCs and tech companies such as LinkedIn, Spotify, Heroku, Zendesk, Pivtoal, Inflection, Github, NewRelic, Salesforce and Intuit.
“We’re diving into a pretty complex ecosystem known as ‘Platform-as-a-service’, embodying everything from Heroku, Amazon, to Parse, and Hood.ie”, explained Jamie.
“Our advantage is two fold. First, the team has been working with small businesses for years to help them get their core processes and workflows into the cloud. Hoist is an extension of that, empowering other developers to do the same.
"And second: our product features focus on building deeply into the web, not just sitting on top of it like other services do.”
Hoist allows developers to easily build small web applications. They help with authenticating users against services by handling OAuth for the developer and running tasks when data changes e.g. running code every time someone creates an Invoice in Xero or QuickBooks, and a broad range of web application building tools.
Armed with better market insight and advice, Hoist are excited about the next step to secure a round of funding, and getting the first collection of customers live by the end of July.
We hope to have Hoist back at Kiwi Landing Pad in the near future.