Colin Goudie from Social Pinpoint

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0:06 Colin Goudie: What drives you to make bold moves, to build something that didn't exist before, to live, lead, and choose life with intention? Welcome to Perspective X. I'm Pauline Fatowi, and this is not your typical business podcast. Each episode, I get to speak to extraordinary entrepreneurs and leading innovators to unpack what truly fuels their journey. Not just the wins, but the inner work, the overlooked decisions, the mindset shifts, and the personal moments that sparked something bigger. This show is about the ripple effect of choice, the kind of deep accountability that lets us respond to life rather than react to it. Because when you realize everything is temporary, and you are the creator of your own experience, you start to play the game differently. So if you're curious about how people build meaning alongside success, how they evolve through challenges and shape the world with intention, this is your invitation to listen in. Perspective X, where we go beyond the highlight reel and into the moments that changed everything. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

1:20 Speaker C: I missed a family holiday to Gold Coast, so they went up to Dreamworld and I stayed home for 3 days and just coded, coded, coded, got it to a point over probably a 2-week period that we were able to demo it. And overall it was about a 6-week period between when we really kicked it off and then it was ready to go.

1:37 Adam Spencer: Hello and welcome to a new episode of Welcome to Day One, the podcast for Aussie founders, startups, and the organizations that support Australian entrepreneurship. Welcome to Day One is brought to you by the City of Newcastle's brand new innovation platform, Nui Hub. Today on the show, you'll hear from Colin Goudie, the co-founder of Social Pinpoint.

1:55 Speaker D: Hey, I'm Colin Goudie from Social Pinpoint. Social Pinpoint's a software as a service platform aimed at the community engagement space.

2:03 Speaker C: Most of its clients are councils and large infrastructure projects that need to create a place for the community to collaborate with them.

2:10 Adam Spencer: But first, I'd like to tell you about another organization that is helping startups succeed in our region. The City of Newcastle is a big supporter of entrepreneurship in our region and has recently launched a brand new digital hub called Nui Hub. Nui Hub Nui Hub is a growing and vibrant community of Newcastle startups and founders. It's a central hub where you can learn about what's going on in our ecosystem with events, available jobs, and other resources. Welcome to Day One is brought to you by the City of Newcastle and the brand new innovation community digital platform, Nui Hub. Now, let's go back to day one where this story begins.

2:48 Speaker C: So originally, Social Pinpoint, was purely a mapping tool. So basically giving a way to communicate geospatially, so putting a place or a, you know, a spot to your concern or your suggestion for councils and government. Basically an advanced survey. So rather than just filling in a survey or throwing an idea or a suggestion to council, you can actually pinpoint—

3:10 Speaker D: that's where the name came from—

3:12 Speaker C: Social Pinpoint being a very map-based, location-based collaborative tool.

3:17 Adam Spencer: Before starting Social Pinpoint, Colin worked for a mining company pretty much straight out of university, and that is where Colin met his co-founder, Charles.

3:26 Speaker C: Charles and I met in 2002 at a mining software company. So he was on technical sales side and I was in development. That was my first job out of university as a developer.

3:35 Adam Spencer: Colin went out on his own using his skills that he had developed as a coder to help businesses implement software from a little company you may have heard of Atlassian.

3:45 Speaker C: I'd gone into the Atlassian consulting space.

3:48 Speaker D: I spent about 6 or 7 years, you know, remoting into different people's businesses, implementing Atlassian software for them.

3:56 Speaker C: That's my background.

3:57 Adam Spencer: Having been exposed to the world of software as a service through Atlassian and just through the rise of SaaS businesses around that time, Colin and Charles were excited by the opportunity presented by such a business model.

4:09 Speaker D: I mean, we were looking for a way to get into the SaaS business.

4:14 Speaker C: We wanted to build a web SaaS tool that we could sell.

4:17 Adam Spencer: They were excited to build a product that could be built once and service a large number of customers. An opportunity was just around the corner through a personal relationship that one of the founders had, a tender from Port Stephens Council. They wanted a tool built to help them engage with the community.

4:34 Speaker D: When we saw that proposal, we went, hang on, we could do this just as well as—

4:39 Speaker C: I guess we saw the tool that Port Stephens had bought and then we went, we could do that, there's no reason why we can't build that. And that ideally had a higher annual fee, like, you know, like a higher license so we could deal with less clients because we'd come from the mining sector. So we knew that it was easier to, at the time, easy to support less clients with higher value and sort of went after that niche.

5:00 Speaker D: You know, I think more and more councils are realizing that the most vital source of information is people, like not, you know, not always just engineers, you know, like how to build infrastructure, it's actually the people who are going to be affected by it.

5:12 Adam Spencer: They didn't end up winning that business, but a short while later, another council, Lake Macquarie, wanted a very similar product, which really made the Social Pinpoint team think—

5:20 Speaker C: Hey, this is actually an interesting idea. And that's where we decided we could build this tool and actually do it as a SaaS product and sell it. So that's, that's what we did.

5:29 Adam Spencer: So Lake Macquarie had approached Colin and Charles to build the software they were looking for.

5:34 Speaker C: I think at that time we were known as software implementers a little bit, that we could build software.

5:41 Speaker D: Now that's where the cool—

5:42 Speaker C: and this is, I guess, part of the relationship building is, you know, they gave us a go. You know, locally, we told them, we were upfront, we said, we're gonna charge you an annual license for something we don't actually have yet, but this is what it will look like. We did all the mockups and all that. Obviously the tool looked nothing like the mockups by the time we sat down with Lake Mac and went through with them all the bits they wanted. I missed a family holiday to Gold Coast, so like they went up to Dreamworld and I stayed home for 3 days and just coded, coded, coded, got it got to a point over probably a 2-week period that we were able to demo it. And overall it was about a 6-week period between when we really kicked it off and then it was ready to go.

6:18 Adam Spencer: After they finished the initial build in mid-2013 of what would be the first version of their mapping product and demoed it to Lake Macquarie Council, the guys decided that that would be a good time to officially start the company.

6:31 Speaker C: So we registered and formed the company on 1st of July just to make it easy for the tax. Well, not tax, but you know, just the financial year. So yeah, the original tender was even through Charles Charles's consulting company at the time, but then we switched everything over to Social Pinpoint Pty Ltd, and from that date, I think 1st July 2013 was when it took off.

6:49 Adam Spencer: So even though the company was formed and they were off to a great start with a customer, it was a slow build.

6:55 Speaker C: Charles and I were not full on this for, until, I mean, for years probably, it was always something that was, I wouldn't say on the side, but I mean, we were at the stage of life, Charles is a little bit older than me, but where you've gotta make money and you have a mortgage and you've got all this sort of stuff. So there was never an option to go full into this thing. It would have to work alongside us generating whatever revenue we had on the side. I continued to do Larsen Consulting for years after we started Social Pinpoint. But obviously it just went, you know, it flicks over at some point where then you become full-time on your startup 'cause you're making enough money. It's like, I think if you guys read The Barefoot Investor, they talk about I think it's the trapeze or something thing where, you know, never let go of the other one until you've let go of the other.

7:41 Speaker D: And that's, and like, I agree with it. Like, yeah, you can, I mean, look, if you really love an idea and you wanna throw everything at it, go for it, especially if you're young.

7:48 Speaker C: But when you've got, you know, responsibilities, it's pretty risky to do that stuff. And I don't think you need to.

7:55 Speaker D: You don't need to be a millionaire at 25 or whatever it is. You know what I mean? Like, there's, you got decades. It'd be nice. It'd be nice, but yeah, there's decades of time to, you know, do 5 different businesses, you know, so don't rush it. Like, we knew this was something that had some legs, but were we 100% committed early?

8:12 Speaker C: Like, we were still trying to work out, is this the product we want or is this something else? Like, but it was pretty evident a year or 2 in that there was something there, you know, and then we ran through that Slingshot program and that sort of helped just align priorities. I think it just reaffirmed that we did have something there. So then let's, 'cause at that time we were totally remote, all that, we just got a little office at the business center and said, let's hire someone there. And it wasn't too long after that that we actually moved offices again, but there was a period where we just, I just, I guess, set up shop and started to try and do it more seriously.

8:44 Adam Spencer: For the last few years, Colin hasn't really touched a line of code in the business, but for the first few years, Colin was doing all the coding and product development. When they were in a position to make their first hire, it wouldn't be a programmer. It would be for another really important role.

9:00 Speaker C: Our first employee was a customer success person, got her in, and I think in that next year we doubled sales just having another body there. You're trying to find someone who is really friendly and open and can take a lot of that burden. So like customer success is basically, I mean, I'm yet to see where you'd lose money with customer success person. So you've got something you can sell, then if you have someone who can support that, help keep someone renewing and/or expand their use of your tool, then that person's going to pay for themselves pretty quickly.

9:33 Adam Spencer: Following on from that great first hire, the team just continued to grow from there.

9:38 Speaker C: I've told you the complexity now because they've sold, so there's more people, but the actual Social Pinpoint side would be, I don't know, nearly 30 or something like that. But the whole company, because it's been bought by another one, is in the 60s or something, 60s or 70s.

9:50 Adam Spencer: The Social Pinpoint team is strong today, But how did they get there? Calder Outreach was one of their main strategies that the team employed early on.

9:59 Speaker C: Basically, the great thing, and this was before we used tools to do it, was, you know, load up every council in Australia and start sending their front desk.

10:06 Speaker D: The simple question was, can I please ask who's in charge of community engagement? Or it was something to do with, basically it sounded like a public member, someone from the public just wanting to know about their community engagement.

10:17 Speaker C: So they respond.

10:18 Speaker D: Generally the community engagement officer responds because they're like, oh, what's this inquiry about?

10:22 Speaker C: Bang, got them. Let's talk. I mean, that's how we started to grow from all the initial clients would have come back from that, that those discussions. Now when I say great, it's not like we scaled to 100 clients. There's, you know, there's 600 councils or whatever it is in Australia, and I think maybe 200 or 300 might be in the position to use our types of tools. So you're still trying to, and there's some bigger players in the market. But I even looking back the other day, and some of our clients now were ones that we originally emailed in that list, you know, that, they originally came back. But it was very manual at that time, you know, just sending out— you know, we had a pretty healthy conversion rate. Like, if someone came to us wanting a map, there wasn't really any other options. Like, our biggest competitor, who is from Newcastle, at that time didn't have a map.

11:04 Adam Spencer: Alongside outreach, Colin and the team made an early decision to invest in content marketing.

11:10 Speaker C: And it was for a period of 6 to 9 months or something where we put out a blog every week or whatever it was, twice, I can't remember the exact cadence, but It grew our site, you know, word count and everything. And there's some even now that still rank. Some of those articles were better quality than others, but at the end of the day, it gives you that page and that domain presence years later, which still, you know, you reap benefits from. Half the battle with startups is loving business and then staying in the game, not worrying too much about—

11:40 Speaker D: don't get in love with the particular solution or anything, like, and even the problem space, 'cause you're gonna be wrong most of the time.

11:45 Adam Spencer: And the last piece of Social Pinpoint's early sales and growth strategy was getting out there and meeting people at conferences.

11:52 Speaker D: Was in the first year, probably was, if not, it would've been the second.

11:55 Speaker C: So our first one was in Adelaide. We flew down, met a heap of people.

11:59 Speaker D: And like, I mean, that is, if you talk about why we, I guess, stuck with it, I think one of the other things we were talking about, was there any hard times and things like that or something like that?

12:07 Speaker C: There wasn't, but I'd say the thing that affirmed what we, you know, that we liked what we did is the people the customers.

12:13 Speaker D: I mean, the space, the community engagement space is full of people. I'm not, I'm an introvert, I'm not a massive people person as such, but these people are all communication people and marketers.

12:23 Speaker C: And not only that, they're in that space of trying to make positive change in the community, so they're just really good people. We'd come from, this is gonna sound bad, but we came from mining, so it's a big change when you're doing software that potentially is you know, quote unquote hurting the environment in some sense, in some areas.

12:42 Speaker D: But even the people that work in mining, nothing against them, but it's a different clientele. I mean, you know, and then to go to that, it was just, this is awesome.

12:49 Speaker C: So we had so much fun, like in the conferences.

12:51 Speaker D: Even now, the culture that we built in Social Pinpoint, I believe flows into our brands and known for being fun and stuff in that sort of environment and really being a leader of trying to keep it fun and relaxed and lightweight. Like every email we used, like we'd send in our language and stuff, and how I'm talking now, like we never— this is how I dress walking into a council building, you know, we didn't, we just went, we're a software techie company, we're not like your IT staff. Again, nothing against their IT staff, or the IT vendors they'd be dealing with probably is more appropriate.

13:26 Speaker C: And then that was one of the selling points too, like for them to do a website update that can take weeks to get through IT and out, does it? Where now we want to give them a platform that they have full control of. Their security and council can't get in the way as such, 'cause they're not in it, it's outside the— Outside. Yeah, so providing they have ability to use another platform, which they do once you have, get through some loops and you obviously have to have the data stored in certain areas and all that, but once you do that, then, you know, it was a really good selling point, especially back then, because everything moves slower in government.

13:59 Adam Spencer: And it was conferences that landed Social Pinpoint their first client in North America.

14:04 Speaker C: Our biggest growth right now is in the States, and the first clients we got were through conferences that we went there and got the client. It wasn't like years, it was, we got a few Australian ones, a fair few councils, like I can't remember when Newcastle came on, but it was fairly early. Some Sydney ones, and then I think we got one or two first sort of American ones, or North American ones. The mapping always evolved. Some of our biggest features were added because of, I think it was the Port of Vancouver in Canada, that they needed some, so we thought we were going into a quiet Christmas and we spent like weeks doing all these new advanced map stuff for them 'cause they were putting huge things around their port at the time that we wanted to support.

14:44 Adam Spencer: And entering overseas markets was always something Social Pinpoint was looking to get into.

14:49 Speaker C: Australia is like 20-something, at the time 22 million or whatever it was people, 24 or whatever it was then. America's 300 million. Then whatever we're doing here at that time, you know, the first year you hit $50,000. So you're like, okay, well, maths tell you then this should be a half a million dollar business if we'd started over there. Like, that's sort of the simple maths.

15:07 Adam Spencer: So the Social Pinpoint team have come quite a long way in the last 7 or so years and have grown in team size, customers, revenue, and features.

15:16 Speaker C: And even today we're still known as the map people, and I think we do have the best mapping tool, but we're not just a mapping tool anymore, we're a full platform, which people can set up websites and do all that stuff.

15:26 Adam Spencer: Colin always wanted to build a business that was profitable from day one.

15:30 Speaker C: I'd say all the time from when we started to close the finalisation of selling the product, it was profitable. And I guess that's what we did with Social Pinpoint.

15:41 Speaker D: And it's not always the right thing, but that we felt like that was, I don't know, it's just in keeping with Newcastle culture bit as well that, you know, if you're making money, you're less stressed.

15:50 Adam Spencer: I really enjoyed sitting down with Colin to talk about Social Pinpoint, and the last thing I asked was what his advice would be for new founders.

15:59 Speaker C: If you love business and how to start a business and run it, and especially if it's a SaaS business or whatever, all the tools you use, all the financial modeling, how you do all that, it's relevant to pretty much 99% of any other business.

16:10 Speaker D: So you can apply it to anything, and you don't get fixed, but you won't get as down when things don't work.

16:16 Speaker C: For your particular solution, you're happy, you're easier to pivot into something slightly different, and you can stay the long, I just think it helps you stay a bit more even-keeled for the long game rather than go, oh, I really love this niche, I'm gonna go at it, oh, it didn't work, I'm gonna kick it in and stop.

16:32 Speaker D: I mean, I guess that's why I see in the messaging of fail fast, it's sort of true, but it's also like, hey, a lot of the solutions would've probably lasted if people just kept at it a bit longer. Sometimes depending on what it is, sometimes it's just about staying in longer.

16:49 Adam Spencer: Thank you for listening to the story of Social Pinpoint. I hope you enjoyed it. Everything that was mentioned in the episode today is on the show notes page on welcometodayone.com. These incredible founder stories are made possible by our supporters. We can't do it without them, and I'm just incredibly grateful for their commitment to our local startup community and in helping us spotlight these amazing founders who inspire me and I hope who inspire you too. Next time on Welcome to Day One, Mike McKinnon from DECI.

17:23 Speaker E: I wouldn't say I was necessarily interested in business. I definitely was interested in creating and building things, I suppose, designing things. That sort of evolved then into, well, let's create or design something that's useful for people, and then at some point I guess there's a realization there where you go, okay, well maybe this is something I can do for a living. Hi, my name is Mike. I'm the founder and CEO of DEKI.

17:51 Adam Spencer: The City of Newcastle's Nui Hub is our major sponsor, and I'd just like to take a second to express my gratitude for their support. Nui Hub is a great new initiative from the team at the City of Newcastle. It's an online community to keep up to date with what's happening in our region from an innovation perspective. And a hub of great resources. I encourage you to check it out and sign up to be a free member. You can learn more by clicking the link in today's episode notes at WelcomeTodayOne.com or by going to NewyHub.com. That's N-E-W-I-H-U-B.com. This episode was produced by me, Adam Spencer, with audio editing by Natalie Holland. Information about everything mentioned in this episode can be found on the show notes page at WelcomeTodayOne.com. Music by Lee Rosavere, full attribution on the Welcome to A1 website. If you'd like to support this show, please consider leaving us a review or supporting us on Patreon. I'm Adam Spencer. Thanks for listening.

18:58 Colin Goudie: Thank you.