You have to break the rules, says founder

In the middle of Covid lockdown, Nicole Retter found herself balancing two preschoolers, a new role and a severely injured husband. 

“I needed something to help me streamline the chaos,” she says. However, when she went looking for a tool that might help, there was nothing. Knowing she wasn’t alone, Retter decided to do something about it. 

Over the next couple of years, Retter built PAM. Through AI, PAM acts as a digital personal admin manager that juggles the mental admin so parents – particularly mothers – can take a load off. 

“Families are busier than ever; the overwhelming amount of admin and coordination needed to keep all the wheels moving is exhausting and negatively impacts all family members' mental health and social wellbeing,” Retter says. 

Retter recently completed Ministry of Awesome’s Electrify Accelerator programme. She was selected from the 20 female-led startups to receive $40,000 investment from Even Capital and New Zealand Growth Capital Partners in the form of a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE). That investment provides the funding to launch PAM into the market for early testing.

While Retter plans to launch PAM with only 50 families, the platform already has a waitlist of 900, which has been reached by word-of-mouth. The next stage will be supported by a funding round which Retter says is planned for later in the year.

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Retter sits down with Caffeine to discuss the lessons she’s learned as a founder. 

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What do you wish you knew starting out? 

I wish I knew more about low coding tools. There are many tools, like Make, that work without any coding experience. You could build your entire prototype in a day, even hours.

Instead of thinking that you’ve got to build the all-bells singing, whistling, dancing whatever it is, you can go in, prove your solution and get funding before investing tens of thousands of dollars.

Because of my background and determination, I could have probably built a prototype myself if I’d known.

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What’s been a big learning moment for you? 

As part of the Electrify Conference, we had to get our pitch decks in two weeks before the conference. Now, if you know anything about startups, it’s that things change fast, especially in the early stages. I had to change my deck a week out. 

I emailed the Electrify team, and they were just a blanket, ‘No, we can’t change it; there’s a deadline. You’ll have to figure out how to talk around your outdated slides.’ 

I used to work in events with AV teams and know it’s an easy change. I broke the rules and went online to figure out who the AV Supply was for Saint James, called them up, didn’t say who I was but that there was a problem with the slides, and got an email address. Within five minutes, I had my new deck sent to them and swapped out. 

I went back to Electrify and said, I’m sorry if I stepped on any toes, but I’m a startup; we don’t follow rules.

I won, so that means it was worthwhile doing.

At the conference, I was having a conversation with Kathleen from Even Capital. I told her the story, and she was like ‘I love hearing about startups doing that stuff; that’s what we want; we want people to get stuck in’.

If you don’t think something’s right, give it a crack. It’s better to try and potentially fail than to sit and wallow in something that doesn’t feel right.

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Who helped you in your startup journey? 

PaperKite came on board as our development partner, but they provided so much more than that. I was looking for a development agency to challenge me because I have a strong personality and a lot of experience, but I’m also not an expert at everything. 

I turned up, saying, ‘Here’s my design for this app with 20 different features that will solve every single aspect of a family’s life.’ 

Rob Holmes, the PaperKite discovery director, challenged me to whittle it down to the smallest, tiniest grain of sand that benefits people. Once we got there, we started playing with things like all the different types of AI.

That relationship [with PaperKite] has meant so much. They believe in PAM and have probably spent more hours pro bono than I have actually paid them for. 

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What is the best advice you have received?

My mother is the biggest rule-breaker you’ll ever meet. She’ll break the rules just because it’s a rule – it’s the way she’s inclined. 

She always says, if there’s a rule you don’t think makes sense, don’t follow it. She would say, if you’re not going to hurt anyone, and there’s a rule, and it’s getting in your way, and you don’t think it makes sense, then break it. 

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What advice would you give to an early-stage startup founder? 

Create a village of support. You have your partner and family, obviously, but you need people in the trenches who are actually doing the same thing. With Electrify, we had a cohort of 20 women, and then you had a mini group within that who were doing similar things; we could share knowledge. 

These women will be with me for the rest of my career – we have built such amazing relationships. It’s a sisterhood – everyone’s just got each other’s back. 

I’m now creating a little post-Electrify group where we catch up fortnightly. It’s not like networking peers; it’s the people you can go to when you feel like giving up, and they get it. 

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What was your first foray into entrepreneurialism?

I don’t remember doing lemonade stands or anything like that, but, as a young kid, my dad taught me to ski. I would fall over, have tantrums and get really upset. 

I negotiated with him that if he paid me every time I fell over, I wouldn’t cry. At the end of the day, I would have made seven or eight bucks and my dad didn’t have to deal with a crying kid. That was quite a good little money spinner.