Darren Winterford is the founder and CEO of EdApp, a mobile focused LMS (learning management system) which allows its users to create learning experiences that can be accessed on mobile devices in bite sized chunks which EdApp calls “microlessons”. Prior to EdApp, Darren founded a digital agency that specialised in building mobile apps for large brands, and it was during his time running the agency that the idea for EdApp emerged. In his conversation with Adam, he discussed how first working to build software products for clients was the perfect learning ground for an aspiring founder, as well as his belief that Australian entrepreneurs would benefit from more networking and community building.
EdApp: https://www.edapp.com/Darren on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenwinterford/
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Adam Spencer: Let me tell you about our partner, Teamified. If you need to build a top-notch team quickly, Teamified is your go-to solution. They not only provide fractional CTOs, they can also do contractors and even remote team members tailored exactly to your needs. And whether you're looking for expertise in the Philippines, India, or Sri Lanka, Teamified has you covered. What's amazing is that Teamified uses a blend of AI and human expertise to cut hiring times by 50%. Their platform handles everything from automated onboarding to day-to-day management and even performance tracking. You can also handle rewards and recognition, buy equipment, and order training all through their platform. Simplify your hiring process and get the best talent fast with Teamified. Check them out now and transform your team. Go to dayone.fm/teamified. That's dayone.fm/t-e-a-m-i-f-i-e-d and get started today. Thank you. Hi, I'm Adam Spencer, founder of the Day One Network, which is bringing the history of the Australian startup ecosystem to you. I believe in founders. It's why I do everything I do at Day One and our media company, W2D1 Media. And that's why the Day One Network exists, to create helpful content for founders. We've got some great shows in development, but a large part of what we do couldn't be done without support from our partners and sponsors. And I couldn't be happier than to be working with NTP, who get community better than any other technology recruitment company out there. A Newcastle company like mine, NTP are invested in seeing the growth of the local tech community in Newcastle, Sydney, and more broadly Australia. So thank you NTP for helping us bring helpful content to founders and the startup community in Australia. Back to the interview. Hi, I'm Adam Spencer, founder of the Day One Network, which is bringing the history of the Australian startup ecosystem to you. I believe in founders. It's why I do everything I do at Day One and our media company, W2D1 Media. And that's why the Day One Network exists, to create helpful content for founders. We've got some great shows in development, but a large part of what we do couldn't be done without support from our partners and sponsors. And I couldn't be happier than to be working with NTP, who get community better than any other technology recruitment company out there. A Newcastle company like mine, NTP are invested in seeing the growth of the local tech community in Newcastle, Sydney, and more broadly Australia. So thank you NTP for helping us bring helpful content to founders and the startup community in Australia. Back to the interview. Thank you. Hi, I'm Adam Spencer and welcome to Day One, the podcast that spotlights Australian startups, founders, and the organizations that empower Australian entrepreneurship. We go back to the beginning to tell the story of Australia's most inspiring founders and how they built their companies. You're listening to a special interview series as part of a documentary W2D1 is producing about the history of the Australian startup ecosystem. On the episode today, we have—
Darren Winterford: Hi, I'm Darren from EdApp. EdApp is effectively a mobile LMS, so a workplace learning solution that talks directly to learners' devices, learners' smartphones.
Speaker C: And just out of curiosity, are you familiar, 'cause I'm from Newcastle, And there's a company up here called Coassemble and they do a lot in the LMS space, I think.
Adam Spencer: Are you familiar with those guys?
Darren Winterford: We are, yeah, definitely.
Speaker C: Are they competition?
Darren Winterford: No, no. So they basically look at, they're pretty much just authoring. That's sort of what they really focus on. Whereas we're a kind of an integrated authoring and delivery platform. And we predominantly specialize, well, the platform platform is primarily aimed at delivery out to mobile devices.
Speaker C: Right.
Darren Winterford: So, deskless workers really.
Speaker C: So, before I ask the question, when did you first get involved in the ecosystem? You had the digital agency.
Darren Winterford: That's right.
Speaker C: So, you spent a lot of your career working in marketing.
Darren Winterford: Correct.
Speaker C: In the fast-moving consumer goods sector. And then you started the digital agency.
Darren Winterford: Yeah.
Speaker C: Which then kind of presented you with the opportunity to start EdApp. I'm just curious, why did you wanna jump into the world startups? Because it's a very challenging—
Adam Spencer: Sure.
Speaker C: And I'm assuming you had a very successful career and you were making good money. Like what drove you to do that?
Darren Winterford: Sure. Well, I was really interested in global marketing roles and that's what I did predominantly out of the UK. And in those kinds of roles, I got to see the growth of digital. And at one stage we might have had, let's say a dozen, what they might call above the line agencies. Producing material, campaign concepts, you know, promotional ideas. And I saw that shift to digital beginning to appear probably in around 2004, 2005. Then with the advent of the iPhone and Steve Jobs unveiling that, you know, it was gonna be open to third-party developers, I could see that that was going to be an absolutely enormous area and I wanted to be a part of it and I didn't want to do it with an existing brand or an existing company or clients. I wanted to start myself. And so the best way I thought to learn about the space was not to necessarily jump straight into a product-based startup, but instead open a digital agency, hire developers, and build applications and build solutions for top-tier clients that would help, I guess, unveil what the problems were in enterprise and look for the gaps and look for where there wasn't, uh, products off the shelf that could solve large problems, you know, that could be very scalable, it could be global. And that's essentially why I started the agency.
Speaker C: And—
Darren Winterford: Right. Um, it, it became enormously successful. We built some of the first banking apps in Australia. We built relationships with most of the let's say the top 100 companies in Australia. We had, you know, the majority of our customers were ASX listed. But as I used to say to the teams, that wasn't the end goal. We didn't wanna be an agent. We didn't want to be someone that just was a gun for hire. What we were doing was using that as a way to really take to market ideas, see if we could establish product market fit without even developing the product. So essentially we got involved invited into the boardrooms of Australia, listened to their problems, and then went away and thought about, okay, we're developing this custom solution for a particular customer, but what are we seeing that's common? What are we hearing? What are the large problems we can solve? And number 2, what would we be really passionate about? So we looked at probably over the years at Creative License, which started in about '08, probably up until 2013 and '14, we're probably on our 8th idea. And all that was, was isolating engineers to one corner of the room who would work on the current project we were looking at, and everyone else was working for clients, you know, doing that paid work that would help us all be employed and allow us to keep exploring. Yeah. And so really it achieved two things. It achieved We could bootstrap because the agency would pay our bills, albeit, you know, the agency would have to run at zero profit, but that's where the profits went, was into employing engineers that would work on the side, if you like. And the second thing is it showed us where the gaps were. We had time on our side then to think about what we wanted to do. We were able to test, we were able to observe what was going on, who was being successful, what we thought the ingredients for success were. And we knew that we weren't gonna go go into the consumer space. We knew we wanted to go into B2B, and that was the perfect way to get introduced.
Speaker C: Why did you know that you wanted to go into B2B?
Darren Winterford: I'd seen quite a lot of B2C in my time already, and I could see that it was fickle consumers. There was lots of them at the time, I think, apps that were sort of coming and going very, very quickly. Some of the the gaming guys like Firemint, I'm not sure if you remember those types of companies, you know, the makers of Fruit Ninja, people like Halfbrick. And I didn't have access to that kind of talent, so I knew that games wasn't it. And so then looking out into the rest of the consumer space, I wasn't confident that I had the background to be able to execute something that was, you know, going to be not only successful, but also would last a period of time and build into a large profitable business. And I had a lot of background in obviously dealing with international business and I thought solving enterprise problems, if we could also solve some of the world's problems as well at the same time, that would be pretty amazing. And that was one of the reasons why we landed on EdApp eventually.
Speaker C: So were you aware of the startup scene so to speak, back in when you started the agency, the digital agency?
Darren Winterford: Yeah, there was a group in this part of Sydney, the Northern Beaches and Manly specifically, and they called themselves Silicon Beach. And their concept, which was a really good one, was that, you know, in the same way that San Francisco, if you like, is just north of, sorry, Silicon Valley is just north of San Francisco, Manly, situated on the northern shore of the harbour, is also very similar and had a sort of similar vibe.
Adam Spencer: Mm-hmm.
Darren Winterford: And the thinking was, well, could we recruit developers, product managers, designers to come and live on a beach, you know, lifestyle and build an ecosystem just north of Sydney? Now, it seemed to have quite a lot of legs and there is a few tech companies have come out of Manly and remained there and grown overseas, but their base still be in Manly. But really, we were just in those days and continually so starved for talent that it would break your heart when you would find a great candidate, particularly an engineering candidate, get all the way through the process, really have a fantastic feeling that this person is gonna be a great team member and can really add value for someone like Atlassian or someone that's only one stop from Wynyard or one stop from Central Station. Snap. Them up. And the reason was, it was the majority of the developers, you know, moving into Sydney, if they were international or if they were students, they did live in that inner city area and trying to convince them to come to Manly where rents were slightly more expensive and, you know, a bit further away from the city, it was just too challenging. And so ultimately that group, Silicon Beach, whilst it made some good progress, it never really progressed into becoming one of the premier startup groups of the city.
Speaker C: Roughly what year was that?
Darren Winterford: So this would've been from around, you know, 2010 up to probably 2015.
Speaker C: Right. Was there anything else that was visible to you in terms of, 'cause I think I mentioned 2012 seems to be about the year that things really started to ramp up.
Darren Winterford: Yeah, we were aware of the various startup hubs and I think we saw the emergence of, of groups like, you know, BlueChilli comes to mind and some of the sort of startup lab offerings.
Speaker C: Mm-hmm.
Darren Winterford: It was really pre-coworking space, that was much later. And the ideas of, I guess, I think bringing entrepreneurs together to work in the same premises were probably a little bit later, at least they were certainly in Manly. But, you know, we certainly saw the growth of the angel investors, there were, Yeah, the kind of groups that I mentioned like Silicon Beach that, you know, the meetup scene had started and people had begun sharing ideas. So that was about the extent that we saw in, you know, this part of Northern Sydney.
Speaker C: 2000 and— so, edApp started 2015.
Darren Winterford: It did, yeah. So it began as a product called Campus and we really saw In around 2013, '14, we began to notice that education, frankly, adult education was broken. And we could see that in the way that salespeople actually is where we first saw it, the way that salespeople were being trained. And that began to open our eyes up to education in general when we began to see how few adults post secondary high school or university actually go on to complete any other training at all in their lives. We were shocked. And that's where we began the idea of putting out a training platform designed specifically for mobile that took advantage of micro moments of a day and not relying on, you know, 90 or 60-minute block, but something that could be achieved in just a few minutes with at much higher frequency. Mm-hmm. We began to see that that could really have application in business around the time that the bring your own device movement really started to take on and you saw more and more organizations being happy for people to use their own devices at work. And we simply tested the idea with an existing client who did have a very large remote sales team. And as I say, it was simply a matter of building a relationship with that particular client, taking them on a bit of a journey our journey and saying, look, you know, would your salespeople be interested in testing something for us? And once we started hearing back from, you know, people that weren't looking to buy, people that were actually contracting us for something completely different, once we heard them saying, look, our sales team wanna talk to you, they actually think this is pretty good and they've asked about how much it costs, et cetera, then we started to realize that we had a potential winner here.
Speaker C: So around the 2015 time when you guys started, How easy or hard was it to get the funding that you needed to launch EdApp?
Darren Winterford: Yeah, so I knew that I wanted to, and look, potentially maybe it was incorrect thinking, but I thought that I had access to a fantastic, let's call it user base in existing customers. I had a revenue stream coming in from the agency I had access to fantastic developers. We knew what great product looked like 'cause we'd built so many. At that time, I really felt like I wasn't going to go down the traditional VC route. I didn't want the pressure that sometimes comes from some of those relationships. Of course, not all the time, but I really wanted to be in control and not have to make any decisions based on finance. And so we were very lucky that the agency continued to do well, which as I say enabled us to pay developers in lieu of making profit. And so my view was always that I would bootstrap until I had some critical mass and was then in a much better position, you know, to go and raise money. And I knew then that raising money wouldn't be difficult if we had an audience, if we had— Yeah. Evidence of very little churn and what we were able to achieve from a small office in Manly versus what would happen if we were truly to take it global. And that is exactly what happened. We did find that we attracted attention. The more and more clients we had to sign up and the more signs of growth we had, then really that put me in a much better position to be able to talk to various parties that were interested in funding or indeed acquiring EdApp.
Speaker C: When you started EdApp, did you always know that you wanted to exit? Was that always the plan for you?
Darren Winterford: I don't think so. It was mainly, you know, I was working in a very large corporate in around 2007, you know, FTSE 100 company. I knew that I didn't want to, you know, have to wait for my boss or my boss's boss to give me a promotion to, you know, be able to move. On this sort of upward trajectory. I knew I didn't wanna be a part of the very typical corporate journey. And so I wasn't seeing starting a product as the potential for an exit. I was really seeing it, to be honest, as a career choice and as a way to, I guess I would probably honestly say as a lifestyle so that I could be in charge and direct a product and hopefully have real impact and being able to be in control of where that impact would be. So I really didn't wanna stay in the very large global, at that time I was in FMCG and I didn't want to, I don't know, be at the behest of the winds of the company. I wanted to be in control and I thought we could really make a difference and it was an exciting area as it still is. But I mean, in 2007 when, around that time when Steve Jobs started talking about the SDK, obviously I think that was a time of enormous excitement. And I could see that smartphone penetration was still so small in enterprise and knew that we could ride that wave. So I wasn't thinking exit, I was thinking, yeah, it was a passion. It was something that I wanted to do personally. And of course, I knew that we would be successful even within the agency. It was something that, you know, we could, I knew I could build a very successful business doing it. Yeah. But I guess we weren't thinking exit at the beginning.
Speaker C: How did you know you could build a really successful, and actually first, by the way, congratulations on the sale. Like to build a company and sell in 5 years for $40 million, was it?
Darren Winterford: That's it, yeah.
Speaker C: That's awesome. Congratulations.
Darren Winterford: Thank you.
Speaker C: What gave you that level of confidence to know you could build a successful business?
Darren Winterford: I think I'd seen working both here in Australia and then abroad for, close to 7 years. I think it was a fantastic school in business, and I do recommend that, you know, when I'm talking to, you know, university grads, that look, jumping straight out into a startup and into a small team is enormously useful and can be enormously inspiring, and you will be able to often skip, if you like, some of the elements of corporate life that people don't enjoy.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Darren Winterford: But I was extremely lucky in that I got to a global position very, very quickly and was able to achieve, I guess, a real overview of international business. And I was able to jump from category to category and see the real drivers for various products and various categories around the world. It did allow you a sense of optimism that you could see what really worked and you could see what you could really improve. And, you know, even in those days, I think the needs of enterprise in this space was so clear that I was very, very confident that we would be able to build a business around it. That was sort of never in dispute. I remember I was, the first thing we did when we came back to Australia was actually sailed up to the Whitsundays and and lived on a boat up there for 6 months with our 18-month-old. And that's really where the business was born. And I remember just flying back to Sydney for, I think it was a wedding. And, you know, I think I went out to a Super Rugby game and an ex-colleague had learned that I had jumped out into the digital space and was almost briefing me, you know, in the stands on a Saturday afternoon. So it was never in doubt that that what we were doing was in demand and that was going to be profitable and therefore, you know, going to enable us to look at a longer-term project while we were doing it, which was the key.
Speaker C: Fast-forwarding to modern day, drawing on your vast experience in the space, what do you think some of the biggest gaps are that exist in the ecosystem elder community today?
Darren Winterford: I think in terms of gap, I think one of our problems, one of our issues, I think, is as entrepreneurs, is actually that we just don't network enough. And we, I think it could be some of our Britishness sometimes for some of us, that we're definitely not as outgoing, as dependent on network as our American counterparts. In my experience, American startups talk earlier, they talk more, they are more willing to share. I think they help each other out an awful lot. They're happy to give introductions. I think sometimes in the Australian startup scene, again, it comes back from some of that playing cards close to your chest until you think you've got this perfect product and then laying it out. There is not enough, I don't think, impetus on on helping and on that networking element. I do think it's a little bit still, you know, everyone versus everyone, whereas that's certainly not the case in the US. I think that's one thing that without talking about government legislation and some other things we could talk about, government policy and the like, I do think we have to sort of go back to evaluate how early we share. And, you know, when was the last, you know, 3 other entrepreneurs you spoke to, maybe not in your space, but, you know, even in the last 12 months that you lent assistance to? And at a very early stage in the co-working spaces, yes, there's, there is some, there is some discussion and there is some level of networking, but I still think our default in Australia is one of, let's say, privacy and harsh versus, you know, shouting from the rooftops and letting everyone know what you're up to and being open to take advice from others and indeed give it.
Speaker C: Speaking of, you know, talking about advice, what one piece of advice would you give a brand new founder?
Darren Winterford: I think related to that, my advice would be to talk to as many people as you can to not be too reserved. Don't fall into the trap of wanting to, if you like, oh, we're still in stealth mode. It's really not helpful. You will find you will gain much more from as many networking opportunities as you can. It's very, very hard to execute an idea. There's lots of ideas, but executing on them is the—
Adam Spencer: Yeah.
Darren Winterford: Is the crucial thing. So don't be too concerned about sharing, you know, what you're up to. I would also encourage them to, you know, begin with the end in mind. So if you're, I talk to a lot of startup founders that think, okay, well, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to get my business to this stage and then I'm gonna go and talk to a VC. Well, I think what they should be doing is actually talking to the VC now and saying to the VC, the angel or whoever it is, our goal is to achieve X. Would that be enough for us to then have a conversation about taking it further? Or what would we need to do to achieve, to take it further? And I think that's something that doesn't happen enough where people actually say, well, okay, what is the actual goal? It's not just, I'm going to launch, I will see what happens, and then I will go and try and talk to some people that can maybe take me on the rest of the journey. I think you can do all of that even before, you know, you press enter on the last line of code. I think— Yeah. You can have those conversations much, much earlier. And I think it's something sometimes entrepreneurs in this ecosystem are a little bit reluctant to do.
Speaker C: With the last couple of minutes that we have here, and I wish I'd scheduled more time with you 'cause I would've loved, I do wanna go into that EdApp story more. This last question, I just wanna get your, give you a couple of minutes to just talk about something that's on your mind, keeping in mind that we're trying to create a documentary here that chronicles the history of the Australian startup ecosystem and we want founders, we want people from all corners of the ecosystem to hear this story. What would you want to tell them?
Darren Winterford: I think that there is an emerging idea that I think has, is not often spoken about, which is that potentially the ability for the Australian startup scene and those that are quite successful in the startup scene could actually dramatically help out some of the rest of the scene with direct investment. And I think EdApp is a great example of that, where SafetyCulture, arguably, you know, a top 5 Australian startup, has actually made the, not only 2 rounds of funding with EdApp, but actually made a full acquisition. And I do feel like the VC route is not always, you know, the only route that should be considered. And I do think we have a number of very large successful scale-ups now in Australia that could also be seen as potential partners in growth, whether that be an investor or in a final acquisition.
Speaker C: Thank you so much for your time, David. Just a quick follow-up to that, that just for pure research purposes, can you list off some of those large scale-ups that come to mind?
Darren Winterford: So I don't think there's any doubt that Atlassian has been acquiring companies as a way to grow, and you can look at the acquisition of Trello there as an example. Obviously, we've got Canva, who have made a number of acquisitions. SafetyCulture, as I mentioned. There would be 3 straight away that I would think about that the opportunity for a small startup to be acquired and to produce a product that also talks to their audiences, I think is a fantastic opportunity.
Speaker C: Yeah. Thank you so much for your time today, Darren.
Darren Winterford: No worries.
Speaker C: Yeah, I'd love to at some point in the future do a story on EDDApp for Welcome to Day One, which is, I've been doing Welcome to Day One since the end of 2018, just doing founder stories and startup stories. But this documentary is taking up all of my time.
Darren Winterford: Wow.
Speaker C: So yeah, the founder stories have taken a bit of a backseat at the moment.
Darren Winterford: Sure. But yeah, no, it's a great story. Even this morning on standup, I took my team through 3 use cases that came in over the weekend where people are using our products. You know, someone's, someone's using our product to educate on female genital mutilation in North Africa, and so far they've only been on the platform a month and they've educated thousands of people, and thousands of people, and mainly women in remote areas throughout Africa.
Speaker C: That's awesome.
Darren Winterford: It's just fascinating. They're trying to break down, you know, some religious norms and some things there. We had Someone yesterday, the UN is a big client of ours, UNITAR.
Adam Spencer: Yeah.
Darren Winterford: And they've released a new course on HIV awareness, which is being rolled out to hospitals. It's incredible the amount of, there's another small company that's a consultant and she started a very popular series on parenting. And rather than releasing it as a book, she's released them as micro lessons on our platform that then, you know, ping your smartphone once a day and you sort of can refresh yourself on dealing with your difficult child or whatever it is. And yeah, I was actually saying it to our engineering team, just the importance about what they're building. Yes, you know, there's lots of enterprise using our product, but there's an awful lot of people using it for good across the world. So yeah, it's really good.
Speaker C: I saw the stat, 50,000, I don't know how outdated that stat was, but 50,000 lessons a day.
Darren Winterford: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker C: That's amazing.
Darren Winterford: It's getting pretty amazing. And the growth is just, I mean, obviously COVID's been a huge accelerator for us. But yeah, it's amazing. And just as you grow, you know, people talk about the hockey stick, but it's just, it's now, we, you know, there was a day, I guess, what, in 2018, I probably knew all our customers' first names. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And now you're at a stage where, you know, I wake up and one of our team in New York has said, oh, this has just been, this has just launched and this is what they're using the platform for. It's teaching math in an underprivileged school. It's someone I talked to last week. She's in the Dominican Republic and she's using EdApp out in sugarcane plantations to talk to Haitian people that think basically that they belong to the plantation owner. So they're actually going out with an anti-slavery message because the perception from the Haitian is is that this Dominican landowner owns them and because they house them and all that sort of thing and they brought them across from Haiti, that they belong to this Dominican Republic plantation owner.
Speaker C: That's happening today?
Darren Winterford: That is happening right now.
Speaker C: Wow.
Darren Winterford: And they just don't understand human rights. They're very poorly educated and they get promised land in the, sorry, they get promised work in the Dominican Republic work and off they come and they, because they're boarded and given food, you know, 3 times a day and they work in the sugarcane fields, their assumption is that yeah, they belong to that plantation.
Speaker C: Wow.
Darren Winterford: Isn't it amazing? There are girls, you know, again with absolutely no understanding of, you know, even the age in which they should be reproducing in the same area again, the Dominican Republic, they're having to educate young girls on sexual health and their rights as a young female. It's just remarkable, but we can get to them. You know, they used to not be able to get to these people at scale.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Darren Winterford: And now they're able to go out into the field. There are these, you know, cheaper Android devices everywhere, and we have an offline mode so that doesn't use a lot of data, and these field workers can go out and actually do it at scale. So yeah. It's really amazing.
Adam Spencer: I hope you enjoyed that interview. More interviews are on the way. Follow the podcast wherever you're listening right now. Stay tuned for more interviews with many, many more amazing people from the Australian startup ecosystem. Thanks for listening. And see you next time.
