Local tech service hits 500 million

Local tech service hits 500 million

Wellington software developer brothers, Matt and Nigel Ramsay, are celebrating with their team because they’ve hit a growth target this week. Their service, AddressFinder, has been used 500 million times.

“We started counting in 2007,” says lead developer Nigel.

“Our offering is popular with online organisations. As companies have moved online with deliveries, we’ve seen our service become more and more desirable.”

The brothers started off in different industries, Nigel in software and Matt as a pharmacist. Matt joined Nigel two years ago to spearhead strategies for improving customer support.

“AddressFinder had enjoyed natural growth but it was time to become customer-centric and get to know the customers better,” says Matt.

Now they work together to give their software a personal touch with phone calls, personal emails and the odd visit. “We’ve even sent a few customers cakes” says Matt.

Nigel works on the data updates and fine-tunes the software with the rest of the team: Naiki, Fiona, Kate and Alex.

AddressFinder
Simply put, the AddressFinder service is an autocomplete that verifies addresses. “It means businesses don’t have to muck around with mistyping or misdeliveries,” says Matt.

“Lots of our customers have moved from bricks and mortar stores to online, and they’re seeking business functionality and efficiency.”

The brothers expect growth to continue because they’ve recently expanded into the Australian marketplace.

“We’re growing our customer base in Australia and expect to increase quite rapidly there,” says Matt.

“Most of our current customers are based in New Zealand but we’re growing fast in Australia, especially with our free offer.”

Free model
Matt says one of the keys to AddressFinder’s success has been offering the service for free. “Most of our customers will never pay a cent,” he says.

“In fact, around 80% of our customers are making use of our service for free.”

The brothers say the freemium business model gives them a powerful business edge. “It allows new customers to try out the service without a financial commitment,” says Matt.

“Our profits come from the 20% who do pay because they consume a higher volume of verified addresses.”

AddressFinder’s paying customer base has doubled in the past two years.

Parent company, Abletech, develops other software products and services using a similar model. They focus on making the product highly functional without trying to extract money out of every customer.

“Our customers get the benefit of software that’s been fine-tuned to work well and they’re often using more advanced services like mapping, meshblocks and CRM integrations.”

Nigel says they’ve worked hard on the software to make it very easy to integrate.

“We’ve also made it easy to verify long lists of addresses so that’s popular with customers who do big mailouts, use metadata or need to clean up out messy addresses.”

Matt says he’s planning to buy the team “a very nice cake” to celebrate hitting the 500 million mark.

“Then we’ll get back to work towards our next goal - a billion.”

addressfinder.nz/
AddressFinder.com.au

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