The Awareness Advantage: How founders should be thinking about marketing if they want to make it all the way to exit
News from the New Zealand startup ecosystem, straight to your inbox thanks to today's Presenting Partner, Vanta.
Good morning Caffeinators!
Happy hump day to those who celebrate. For those who don’t, hopefully this curated Caffeine content will get you through.
On top of your usual Daily Shot and podcast pick, our own founder James Hurman breaks down the ‘Awareness Advantage’ and why you might want to be thinking more about marketing than you are currently.
Plus our partner Vanta is offering the Caffeine community $1k off their trusted compliance and security platform. Click here or see more below.
And to finish, a nice story for those who got more worried than usual about the power of OpenAI as a company after yesterday’s newsy.
Finn & the Caffeine team
It’s Mental Health Awareness week and there’s some fascinating new research by Seek on happiness in the work place. As RNZ reports, “it found only six out of ten New Zealanders were happy at work. But among the Boomer generation, it was more like seven to eight out of 10. Generation Z and Millennials were the least happy.” Finance topped the list with workers most likely to be happy with hospitality and tourism coming in last. Read more.
New Zealand Business Hall of Fame 2025 nominations are open! Established by Young Enterprise in 1994, honouring those who have achieved a lifetime of excellence in business and commerce, demonstrated exemplary leadership and innovation, and made a positive impact on the community and the broader economy. Read more.
Listen to CEO of AdaptDefy Mike Brown on the Business is Boring podcast: where they dive into his journey to becoming a wheelchair user and the insights that followed, including the creation of Adaptdefy Limited and the development of the LapStacker. The disabled community is often so underserved by both business and Government and it’s great to have someone with Mike’s insight shine a light on it. Check it out here. Listen here.
The Awareness Advantage: How founders should be thinking about marketing if they want to make it all the way to exit.
For years now, people involved with startups have observed the common pattern of bright young companies growing very quickly for two or three years, then all of a sudden plateauing out and finding it much more difficult and expensive to find new customers.
I remember talking to someone at Facebook back in 2020. Just like me, they were seeing this pattern in their own data. And hearing about it from their customers, who were mad that their cost per acquisition seemed to be increasing the more they upped their spend.
Investors all over the world were experiencing the same – portfolio companies doing great when they invested, then living through the existential hell of slowing growth, increasing costs, and valuations becoming difficult to justify.
It’s why I wrote my book, Future Demand: Why building your brand among tomorrow’s customers is the key to startup success. In the first chapter I describe this growth plateau phenomenon, and I can’t count how many people have told me ‘OMG that’s exactly what happened to me’.
While the plateau is a mystery to most, its causes are obvious to anyone who understands how marketing actually works. Read more.
The ‘We F*@kin Love Startups’ podcast features Talent Army founder Troy Hammond talking to people in the New Zealand startup ecosystem and beyond.
Nicole Retter is the sole Founder and CEO of PAM.
🤖 PAM stands for "Personal Admin Manager" and is your Family's own Digital PA
👩🏽💻 Nicole has been a marketer for 20 years, working in big ad agencies, and digital agencies delivering festivals, and guiding sole traders.
🚀 Her specialty is supporting Start-ups and SME’s, and due to your limited resources, we get to be creative in our approach and make a big impact fast.
🧑🧑🧒🧒 Nicole is the proud Founder of PAM, an app currently under construction to support busy families to thrive by reducing/sharing all the family admin crap we’re drowning under. She will be its first customer.
💁🏻♂️ In this episode, Nicole goes deep into the PAM story and the lessons she has learned to bring this product to the world!
We’re really proud to partner with Vanta because they offer something game-changing for founders: a faster, smarter way to tackle compliance. Whether it’s SOC 2, ISO 27001, or other standards, Vanta automates the process, getting you audit-ready in no time and saving you up to 85% of the costs. Plus, it helps build the trust that your customers value. To support the NZ startup community, Vanta is offering $1,000 off—just click here to claim it. We're all about solutions that make life easier for founders, and this is definitely one of them. If you’d like to know more, here’s a webinar they’re hosting next month.
SAVE THE DATE: VANTA WEBINAR
Unveiling the Future of GRC Roadmap
Date: Wednesday 16 October
Time: 12 pm NZDT
SIGN UP HERE
Looking to future-proof your GRC programme? Join Vanta on Wednesday, October 16th at 10 am AEDT / 12 pm NZDT for What’s New in Vanta: Unveiling the Future of GRC Roadmap. In this exclusive webinar, Vanta’s CPO, Jeremy Epling, will showcase the latest product updates and roadmap insights designed to help security teams scale more effectively. Whether you're growing your GRC strategy or staying ahead in compliance, this is the session for you.
Whatever happens today, you’re having a better day than OpenAI’s social media team; it’s official press account was hacked by Crypto scammers.
Fresh from announcing the latest iteration of their potentially world-changing technology, Open AI was brought back down to Earth yesterday.
Interestingly, as Tech Crunch notes, this isn’t the first or even second time Open AI associated accounts have been hacked by crypto scammers:
“In June 2023, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s account posted a similar message promoting the fictional PENAI crypto token. And just three months ago, the accounts of OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki and OpenAI researcher Jason Wei were hacked and used to publish scam posts identical to the post on the OpenAI Newsroom account today.”
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co. Look after yourselves and each other and we’ll see you tomorrow.