You have taken that idea through to a product or a service.

You are ready for customers.

Now what?

There is always an element of “Built it and they will come” in every startup founders thinking when they come to launch day, 10X if it is an Internet business because every potential customer just needs to click on a link to your site, and “kaching!”.  Of course this is completely delusional thought.  Even just getting a link in front of a potential customer is pretty hard.

Again, same caveat as before, all I can do is share what I did and hope that it was right and is good advice.  If not, well at least I got you to click on the link to my blog post.

Before I even had a working version of Vend I was looking for every piece of exposure I could find, any opportunity to tell the world about what I was doing.  I had a working(ish) prototype on my laptop and I sat and had coffee with anyone who would listen and look at what I was doing.  The list got pretty long.  In a way I was testing the market, making sure what I was building was actually needed and wanted.  Of couse a lot of people thought I was mental, and didn’t think I would even get Vend off the ground, and if I did, it would most likely burn.  My prototype was ugly and I was hopeless at demos.  I really wanted to show off an idea, with broken code and a good story.  I probably wasn’t doing myself any favours with my Adobe Fireworks skills.

But something was working, amongst all the people I spoke to, some were already telling others about this crazy/awesome/ludicrous (pick 2)  idea that I shared with them.  Even if they didn’t like it, they were telling people about me and Vend.  Simple word of mouth was spreading my idea, albeit slowly.  I was already starting to talk to future investors as an outcome which I talk about elsewhere, but how do you get the all important validation from CUSTOMERS, the real people wo will pay you money?

Ben Kepes was one of those early people I barraged over coffee and Skype and any other channel open to me, including airport lounges.  He liked the idea, and suggested I enter for the Cloud Connect Launch Pad, an event in the Valley.  All I needed was a pitch, and a video demo.  Easy, I can use iMovie!  I was working on something at the time to help me with explaining my grand vision, so I did a quick recut (yes, seriously in iMovie) and submitted it to the Cloud Connect LaunchPad just to see what happened.  I don’t know if it was the charm of my kiwi accent narration, or my awesome iMovie edit skills, but VendHQ (as it was back then) was selected as a semi-finalist.  Whoohoo, I had no idea what the Cloud Connect conference was, or where exactly Santa Clara was, but if things went my way I would be there on stage as a finalist pitching my idea.  All I needed was 18 bazillion people to vote for me online.

Webstock was rolling up the following month, and a couple of weeks before the voting ended for the Launch Pad event.  And so I spoke to as many people before, during and after webstock making sure everyone knew Vend was a semi-finalist.  The levels of interest in what I was doing were increased somewhat, what was this Cloud Connect thing and why is Vend a finalist?  My demo video was doing the rounds, where I extolled the virtues of Vend and what it could do.  Part vapourware, part good iMovie edits, but it was working.  I had two retailers introduced to me, as a result.  Someone knew someone opening a store who needed a POS, and so I was introduced via email at Webstock.

These two retailers became my first beta users, and are still big Vend fans.

As part of my video I waxed lyrical about how awesomely Vend integrated with Xero, which it didn’t at the time, but I was working on it!  Tony from the Xero API team got in touch and invited me over to Xero HQ.  We sat around the board room table, and they eyed me up looking very seriously.
“You can’t use our logo and tell people you integrate with Xero when you don’t” he told me sternly.  ”But tell me more about Vend and when can you get the integration ready?” he continued.  They thought Vend would be a smashing add-on.

VC’s were watching the video, and sending me emails to find out more.  Having something that people could watch and see what I was going on about for over a year made opening doors much easier.  Emails, Skypes, and phone calls.

Vend was not picked as a grand finalist, but just being a semi-finalist gave us exposure, our first two customers, and also introductions to a half a dozen VCs as a result of my video doing the circuit.  Well that and id being a smashingly good idea.

At Webstock one of the people I bored to death with Vend Vend Vend was Matt Cooney, Editor at Idealog at the time.  He was used to founders telling them why their next big idea was worthy, hoping for a plug in Idealog in their new future.  Matt was bored, and I wasn’t doing a great job of it.  Possibly the hangover post Webstock closing party was not helping.  But I smiled a lot.  I think that helped.  A year later Matt recounts that hungover pitch, and my face is on the cover of Idealog.

Me banging on my drum constantly got me talking to the majority of my future investors. Sam Morgan, Rowan Simpson, Christoph Janz, Sacha Judd, Lance Wiggs.  Each of them I shared coffee, or lunch, or a bike ride, or a Skype.  It was never the case of me sitting down with them, telling the story of my vision, and them saying “Great, how do I invest?”.  These relationships took several coffees, bike rides, and Skypes.  The more I spoke to them and updated them on the vision and progress, I painted a picture of where we had been and where things were going.  On overage, 6 months from first coffee to them joining the team.  These things take time, so you need to start telling your story as soon as you can.

I also was not shy in approaching people either.  What have you to lose?  New Years in 2010, I was at my summer home at the beach and was following Robert Scoble on twitter.  I tweeted him, on the off chance he might be interested in Vend and doing a post.  A few months later I was in his house at Half Moon Bay California telling the Vend story.  I sold him in 140 characters on Vend enough for him to invite me to his house to do a video.

Then I spoke to NBR, originally about getting Sam on board as an investor, and then to talk about our PayPal partnership..

Then there was the time I presented at Under the Radar.

Then the time I presented at Webstock Mini.

Then there was a geek talk about HTML5 at WDCNZ.

I am terrified of public speaking (can you tell?).  But any chance to tell a story and I was in, even if speaking in front of a room of people smarter than me make me feel physically ill.

Then there was the time I blagged my way into the board rooms of PayPal, Xero, Intuit, Google, Groupon, Square… the list is a long one.  The point is you have to start somewhere, with something that tells your story.  I didn’t even have a product, but I could sell the idea on day one.  And these stories I told, let on to introductions to journalists, investors, partners and perhaps even future investors and acquirers.  But most importantly it led to CUSTOMERS.  My first half a dozen customers came from referrals from people who had heard the Vend story.  They liked it enough to tell someone else.

Have you got your story?  It wont be perfect at first.  You just need a story.  I cringe when I look at all our early pitches and promo videos.  But they did the trick. Your list of intros will eventually get very long too.  But everything starts at the number 1.

Start talking.

“What’s a 1kk challenge Vaughan?” I hear you ask. Well, as you asked…

Every year I do a mad challenge. A few years back it was cycling the length of NZ solo, this year is going dry for a year, a couple of years back it was starting some startup thingy. I have quit watching all televised sports for a year (now into my 6th year), quit all mainstream news media for a year (into year 3 now).   Sometimes it is quitting things, sometimes doing new things.  I try and alternate.  And so next year I am doing a 1kk.

The idea is simple, you can run, walk, swim, ride, pogo but you have to do it for 1,000k’s (1k-k).  Or 1,000,000 meters.  Woah, that sounds a lot.

1 million meters

You don’t have to do it all at once, that’s a lot of running or walking and would be MAD, but the aim is that over the course of a year (or a bit longer or shorter) you clock up 1,000k’s.

I am going to run it. The aim is a daily 3km run, or a weekly 20km run. 1,000km is far enough that you would need to keep to a regular commitment to do it, and obviously measure it.  Doing something 3km a day is achievable by almost anyone, and get’s you into a good regular fitness pattern.  Well that’s what I figure anyway.  Ask me again in July if it is a good idea.

You should do it to.  If not only so I have someone who can hold me accountable, but more importantly ’cause I think it would be awesome!  We can become best buddies on RunKeeper.

You may just walk it, that’s a 3km walk a day (2.74km to be precise). Rollerskate? Might be tough. It is a WHOLE YEAR, and trust me, that’s a long time to do something EVERY DAY. But the rewards from doing something like this are huge, HUGE! How great will you feel at the end?  AWESOME, trust me.

I will post how I go here.  If anyone is keen to do something similar let me know.  Think twice about that xmas ham.

The most common question I get asked by other founders and people interested in the startup scene is “How did you go about capital raising, how much did you give away, and were you happy with how things went?”.

To a founder these questions can be as awkward as “What color is your underwear?”, ”What’s your sexual preference?”, and “Have your stopped beating your wife yet”. Personal, kinda none of your business, and sometimes where “Yes and No” are both the wrong answer.

Not to say these things are or should be secrets, but every founder wonders if they went about it the right way, raised the right amount and gave away as little as they could have.

At the end of the day, funding is like oxygen, having a lot of it makes you dizzy and stupid. Have too little, slow, exhausted or dead. The trick is to find that middle position.

Simple right?

No.

It is freaken hard.

You will need to spend all your time in full time capital raising mode, usually at the same time as you are building your product, or trying to find customers. But here is a summary of how I went about the seed capital raise, and my thoughts at the time, where I can remember them.

NOTE: This is not a playbook for how to get funded. This is how I did it, and only the initial round and could be wrong for you, besides my underwear is green, what color is yours?

Before you start:

Before you even start talking to investors, you need to build a good profile and case. They will mostly invest in you, so make sure you talk to people who you can relate to, and you impress them as someone who knows what they are talking about, and can get things done. I was lucky I was involved with Trade Me very briefly, so I could throw that name around a bit (if you have big names, put them in bold and italics). I had just been involved in a failed startup, Vianet, so wanted to add another credential to my CV that showed I could complete something and win. In the US being involved in a failed startup is considered a positive thing to have on your CV. You can learn from the mistakes. However in NZ, this is not the case mostly and tends to work against you “Bro, didn’t you hear he crashed and burned in XYZ!  Flaky!” and that sort of thing.

So I rode the length of NZ solo on a bike (and uphill).

Read my blog about my ride for all the motivations to do it, there were a few. But I wanted to raise some profile for me, and prove I could do what I set out to do. But this created a backstory, and ultimately made it easier for me to raise some capital. Everyone likes a half crazy founder doing amazing physical feats. Having a crazy moustache also helped. More more on this later and in another post. For now…

Angels?

My bike ride raised my profile a lot, and put me in touch with a lot of great people who were huge supporters of mine. Some in tech circles, some in investment circles, some just big fans of facial hair.

After my bike ride, I was still building Vend in my part time, I was running a software consultancy business and in the global financial crisis I had quite a bit of spare time. So that’s why I was building a product in all the downtime hours I was not able to sell to clients. But I still needed to find work to feed the family. The time came when I needed to make the call, do I do this thing and go at it 100% or go do something else. Basically I couldn’t do both. So I went out and looked for some early stage seed capital.

“Angel” is a term that was once used to describe the retired banker who does some small investments from time to time for fun, and to help out entrepreneurs starting out. Now it mostly means “VC” without all the strings (mostly). The professional Angel is the easiest to find as they will have websites with portfolios. I googled and researched the local Angel scene, and found a few that looked like they got involved in early stage technology companies. Well that’s what their websites said. Some even had online forms that you could submit your funding request and business plan through. Awesome. I just complete the form then they wire me some cash! Yesss! One had a very comprehensive form that asked all sorts of the right questions, so I gave that one a go. A few hours later, after many pages of questions on a very flash application form, the whole thing crashed gave me errors and said my application could not be completed.  Their website also said they only take applications that have completed the form.

So I followed up via email instead, and it turned out the machine “ate” my application. Neat. So a exchanged a half dozen emails with this Angel instead. Now, when I say “exchange”, I mean I send an email, wait a week then have to chase up on it as it seems the machine eats emails too. The times I did get a response, sometimes with some questions in it for me to come back on, sometimes months later, I replied the same or next day. Then waited a week, and then two, then a month and then nothing. No reply.

I got to meet with one angel and Vend wasn’t for them, another wasn’t actually an Angel but brokered introductions to Angels (huh?).  But mostly people failing to reply to emails and phone calls. At the time I thought this was normal behaviour, and I was failing an initial screening process, and perhaps they got hundreds of approaches a day.  I had never done this before.  But now, having been through the cycle a few times, up and down Sandhill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley, I know that this was not normal behaviour. My timing could have been wrong. Perhaps I was too early stage. My business plan could have sucked. My bike shenanigans could have been a turn off, thinking I might disappear for another 6 weeks on my bike any second. Perhaps it was the moustache. Things might have changed since the GFC and I hope so. But an email or phone call saying “no thanks” or “we are busy” would have actually been nice.

My advice is to be friendly, firm and direct and set the expectation that you want to hear back from any professional Angel ASAP and then if you don’t get the attention you are after, move on very quickly. Remember, these guys do this for a living, so don’t think you are inconveniencing them by bothering them. They do get busy, and sometimes need a reminder email.  It happens.  But think, would you want an investor on board whom when you needed their help they may or may not reply to your emails? The answer is of course no.

For me at the time I gave up on this path completely disillusioned believing no one is interested in funding NZ technology companies. I was still slowly pushing my product closer to market. The irony being if I had just put my head down and not been distracted with seed funding, I may have got my product to market 3-6 months earlier, and burnt through less of my savings.  Capital raising is always a distraction, as it takes you away from doing other things like building the business.

Talk to others who have raised from local Angels, there are a lot of them around but they are quite hard to find. You need to be doing dozens of meetings over coffee to find them. Failing that go here and find some Angels and tap into these new Angel networks around the country, but really do try your networks first that way you will have a common connection and applying cold via websites dosent yield good results in my experience.

Friends and Family?

Friends and family is a good alternative to the angel round, money is money right? If it gets you going then it reduces the risk of your failure. However, I really wanted to avoid this path having had good people and friends lose money in other startups I was involved in. I wanted to keep this completely professional. If this was my next big failure then I would still have some friends and family left. Considering my failure to find a good professional Angel and the disappointing market for investment in general, my choices were limited. I tapped deeper into savings, and cleaned that out, and things were getting really tight.

I entered Vend into the Cloud Connect Launch Pad in Santa Clara, and was surprised to be picked as one of the finalists. This gave me some great exposure so early on, and helped validate that what I was doing was interesting to others. People were starting to get interested in what I was doing now.  I was building a profile and validating my idea. A few friends and family were starting to get interested as this seemed to be more than just some side project I was working on.

Two friends I was somewhat hesitant to call on, were Rowan and Sam. Looking back, I think I was perhaps afraid they would say no, after Vianet crashed and burned. I have since discovered this to be typical “kiwi” thinking pattern, “Nahh they wouldn’t want to invest! Besides, the shame if they said no” and just the whole way failure is considered, well a failure. I had caught up with Rowan on my bike ride and at the time told him about my crazy idea for Vend. I think I even had some screen shots in my bag. He helped me with my thinking around my model, and then we rode out of Wellington together over the Akatarawa ranges.

Over a number of months I asked them both for a lot of advice, still hesitant to ask them for cash. I had also gone off the whole investment thing to be honest.  I was just focussing on getting the product to market and taking help where I could find it.

Sam gave me a loaner desk in one of his other companies to get me out of my spare room. I only worked on Vend when I was at that desk and I was spending more time at that desk than anywhere else now.  I had some beta customers using the software.  I was running on the scent of an oily rag, even selling stuff on Trade Me (ironically) for extra cash.  Then one day Rowan popped by, and suggested I need to raise some capital now if I was serious about this thing. We talked some terms, assuming he was interested. A month later both Sam and Rowan had invested $100k. I could start working in the business fulltime, and gave us a budget to promote and hire in some help as I needed it. I publicly launched Vend the next month, and we were off.

In the months preceding the actual raise, I spent a lot of time with them showing them my model, talking about what we would do with the capital, and our go to market strategy. It helped that they knew and liked me. But I still had to do the hard yards proving I had a business. I could have had the exact same conversations with others, but Sam and Rowan were a part of a minority of people who took the time to listen and ask questions. I must include Lance Wiggs here too, who gave me a lot of time, and invested later on down the track.

I went to them both for advice first. I respected their experience and valued the input they could provide me and Vend. I didn’t go to them for money straight up. This is true for a lot of my other current and potential investors. Start the relationship around advice, and guidance. Ask them what you should be doing, not just about funding, but about structuring the business, go to market plan. Get their advice on everything. If they have invested in a number of companies they will have been through first hand some of the challenges you are about to face. Take their advice. Demonstrate you can take advice and act on it. Smart investors will be looking to see if you can take guidance, or do you think you know it all. The latter never ends well, unless you really do, but then why would you be asking for their help? You know it all!

Just a couple of weeks before Sam and Rowan signed the dotted line, I caught up in person with a couple of Angels at a founder + angel meet and greet event.  They were talking at the event about investment and the ups and downs of being an Angel in NZ.  Afterwards I approached one, who had stopped replying to emails, just to say “hi” and let them know about progress. I was pretty excited about Sam and Rowan chipping in, and wanted to say thanks for all their help (which was me being polite because they stopped replying to my emails). I only got as far as introducing myself and Vend then was cut off mid sentence with,

“Oh you, I sent you an email saying we are not interested. You must have missed it. We don’t invest in the retail space.”

I only wanted to say “Hi”. I never got that email, either their or my machine “ate” it.  So I just moved on to the sausage rolls.

Investors get approached a lot, and probably get stalked too so they can get blunt. Next I sat down (cautiously) next to Phil McCaw from Movac (whom I had never spoken to before), to get his opinion on what I was doing. He was engaged, interested in what I was doing. At the end I mentioned Sam and Rowan were looking to back me and asked what his thoughts were on the both of them, from his experiences from the Trade Me days.

“Go for it, you won’t look back.” And so I did, and I haven’t.

Do some due diligence on your investors. They will be doing it on you, and you want to make sure you know who you are getting into bed with. Are they helpful, completely hands off? Hard nosed, or relaxed? Do they reply to emails? I have since chatted to Phil a few times, not asking for funding, and he has given me some pretty great advice. Some investors you will talk to won’t be as helpful so hunt out the ones that are. They don’t need to invest in you to be helpful. The smart ones will see the benefit in helping the ecosystem,and perhaps they might get an opportunity to invest in you later on.

So yes finding angel/seed investment in NZ is hard, and still is hard based on the conversations I have two or three times a month with other founders trying to do the same. But with a number of great success stories starting to emerge now, like:

• www.thehyperfactory.com
• www.eventfinda.com
• www.wildfireapp.com
• www.litmos.com
• aptimize.com
• xero.com
• Some more here
• [your startup here]

…it has to be getting better. Surely? Honestly I don’t know if that is true.

Don’t let a cold response from a potential investor put you off. When you are getting going, a “no” (or worse, no response at all) is devastating. You desperately want to know others see your vision, and that you are not some crazy nut-bag. I almost packed it in when it seemed no investors wanted to talk to me. But I just needed to feel out what and who were the best partners for me. People do actually get funded, even though we are not in Silicon Valley. But it is hard hard work, and it is hard work in the Valley too. Did I mention how it is hard work? It is hard… work.

So here are some tips if they are helpful to you.  Again this is just based on my limited experience:

• Build a profile, and establish a story around you. Investors will invest in you first then your idea second.
• Get enough cash to get you going 100% into the business. Doesn’t have to be a lot. But it starts the investment cycle which is a long one that only ends when you exit or break even. Plan on getting good at raising money.
• This seed backing will make it easier when you come to the next round as you will have some history and a track record, and you will be a little more practised in capital raising.
• Getting backing from successful business people is a bonus, especially if they exited for large amounts of money.
• Friends and family are good too. Spend all your money first before asking them.
• When talking to investors claiming to be professionals (i.e. they do this for a living), if you are not getting a response then drop them a line to say “thanks” and move on quickly. Time to market can make all the difference to your business, and it sucks having to chase people up for a response to an email.
• Talk with a lot of people. A lot.
• Talk with people you like and feel comfortable with. You will hopefully be working with them for a long long time.
• Look for really simple terms. Leave complicate stuff like vesting, liquidation prefs and all the other stuff for much later. You are looking for a small amount of cash to get you going. That is all. You aren’t raising $10M.  Seed funds should come with little to no strings.
• I gave away 30% for this round. Your call on if that is right for you. I am a sole founder, so I was looking at my early stage investors as being part time co-founders, and they have supplied more than just cash, in the form of time and resources. It was a good deal for me. You should reward your early stage investors as they are taking a huge punt on you before anyone else does.

I have since moved onto two additional funding rounds totalling over $3M and will cover this stage in another post later on about the A and B (and possibly C, D, E) rounds.  Like I said, you are always in capital raising mode

Good luck! If you have a story I would love to hear it.

I bumped into Dylan Bland the other day.  Always great to catch up with Dylan, as I have always admired the stuff he has done, and the projects he has worked on.  Actually, truth be told, it was more like a few months ago we caught up, I am just embarrassed that it has taken me this long to deliver on a promise I made to him at the time.  When we caught up, I was blowen away when he asked if I blogged and if I didn’t, he suggested I start as a lot of people would probably be interested in my journey at Vend.   I am still at the very beginning of my journey, and so I felt really apprehensive about writing about it as anything to shine a light to, because it could all still crash and burn.  Kiwi modesty and all that.  I was genuinely surprised that he was interested in hearing about it all from me.  And so I promised to him I would start blogging again and sharing some of my learnings around starting up a startup, global expansion, capital raising, team building, branding, whatever.

Months later, I remembered my promise and then sat here wondering what I should write about first.  So I tweeted Dylan and asked him for a topic.  He gave me 7.  Should keep me out of trouble for a while.

So starting at the beginning.  Why I started Vend and why you should do something similar.

It was pretty simple for me, the motivation to do an online startup.  I am a software engineer of 15+ years.  I was doing consultancy and the limit to my earnings was how many hours of my time I could sell, and there was a finite number of them.  I was inspired by companies like Xero, taking really bad software like accounting apps, and making them sexy, on the cloud and a pleasure to use.

The global financial crisis started.  Work dried up, I was living in Kerikeri and having to commute 3 hours to Auckland to find work.  I was spending weeks away from my wife and two daughters having to sleep in my old bedroom at my mothers house while I dug up work in the city.

I have been involved in another online startup, Vianet.travel (now Travelbug.co.nz) as CTO and although it was ultimately acquired by Trade Me, it was a fire sale and the project was a failure on many many levels.  We burned a lot of money, and left a lot of good people without jobs when the cash ran out.  I was strangely fortunate to have sold some shares early on in the piece, at the height of Vianet’s very short lived success.  Not a lot by any means and I couldn’t tell my bank manager where to go. I was not on board when Vianet ultimately crashed and burned, but I saw enough to surely put anyone off doing a startup for life.

My wife Mel observes of me that I strive on stress.  It is the problem solver in me I guess.  Things got pretty stressful at Vianet, but unfortunately it was the sort of stress you had no control over, and sent you off to the doctor to get blood pressure tests for mystery headaches that never went away.  I vowed never to find myself in that position again.

And so why Vaughan, why would you want to do it all again? WHY?

1. The buzz of a startup is an addictive thing.
2. I saw a lot of mistakes made in my 5 years on Vianet, and made quite a few of them myself.  And hopefully those mistakes would be things I wouldn’t be stupid enough to make again.  Or rather I wanted to prove I wouldn’t.
3. Because I want to make money
4.  I was basically unemployable.

But forgetting my personal motivations, there were some other compelling reasons to build a product like Vend.  I saw a lot of industries that still today use really bad software that was probably written in the 90′s in Foxpro.  All of it ugly, hard to use, offline and expensive.  I knew the “cloud” was where things needed to head, and so I looked around for a big vertical that really needed a new product, and would be happy to pay for it.  Retail seemed obvious to me, as I had done quite a few ecommerce projects, and saw a lot of innovation in the online ecommerce space for retail, but I couldn’t find any evidence that this innovation had bleed into the way a bricks and mortar store runs their business.  I knew you could reinvent retail point of sale, inventory management, product management, CRM, reporting (…) under the SaaS (Software as a Service) model.  Let retailers pay a small monthly fee and get great software that has the features once reserved for the WalMarts and their $100,000,000 infrastructure.

There are plenty of industries that still need to move to the cloud, just look around.  Talk to everyone you know, and ask them what software they use in what ever line of work they are in.  Chances are it isn’t cloud based, but sure as hell could be.

So not only did I have a point to prove to myself about doing a startup, but I could see this obvious opportunity ahead.  And I began on the prototype for VendHQ (now just called Vend) using all my down time from consultancy.  I stopped driving 3 hours to look for work, and spent more of my time on building a product.  It didn’t pay very well.  I used up all our savings, and things were really tight. Balancing enough contract work to feed the kids, and still giving me enough time to get a first version of the product ready.

When I was confident I could complete the product and customers would pay for it (you never really are 100% confident people will pay you money for your stuff) I decided to go boots and all in on Vend.  I still knew Sam and Rowan from by brief  dealings with Trade Me back in the day at Vianet.  Well enough to drop them an email and tell them my crazy idea.  I relocated the family from Kerikeri to Auckland.  Sam gave me use of a desk in one of his other companies, and Rowan gave me a lot of time and advice and helped me build the model for how the business will work (the spreadsheet model we put together on day one is still used every day by me, but I will write a post on building your model later).

I listened to all their advice, demonstrated to them that I was listening by taking it onboard doing stuff.  And then when I thought the time was right I asked them if they were interested in helping me bootstrap Vend, investing a little so I could go full time and get some help.  We threw in $100k into a bank account, and so Vend was officially born.  2 years later, we have customers in 100 countries, with tens of thousands of accounts, and have an office in Auckland, San Francisco and one about to open in Melbourne.  We have been cashflow positive, and have been invested in by off shore VCs.  We partnered with PayPal to deliver a world’s first integrated mobile wallet and POS.  And we are still doing awesome stuff.  We are having fun.

Sounds easy huh?

Well I am not telling you about the 6 months of my life prior to asking Sam and Rowan to invest, where I smashed my head against very hard brick walls trying to get money from VCs and angels in NZ.  I am not telling you how I established relationships with investors like Sam and Rowan, and ultimately some VCs.  I am not telling you about a pretty awesome bike ride I did before committing me and my family to the Vend roller coaster.  I am not telling you about how I got the first customer, how I picked the technology we now use and why I backed HTML5.  I am leaving out a hell of a lot of details obviously, because the full story is a really long one.  But one I will chip away at over the next year or so, depending on how much time I get to write.

I asked Dylan for advice on what I should write about, because I am so wrapped up in doing Vend, it is not obvious to me what anyone would be interested in hearing about.  He gave me some awesome suggestions.  So let me know if you have a suggestion too.  Hopefully I have some useful advice for you.  Worst case this is just some big rant that only I read, but it will probably give me some laughs in 5 years time when I sit in Hawaii drinking mojitos, <touches wood> (do read Rowan’s blog too, he is much smarter than I am).

So here are some posts I will write in no particular order (or guarantee I will actually get to write them)

• Raising cash
• Your integrated model – how does your business work
• Generating buzz and profile
• Building a minimum viable product
• Company culture – the family team
• Bootstrapping vs going BIG
• Going to “The Valley”
• Brand and the personality of your product/company

Ahh crap, that’s a lot to write.  Better add “Time management and work life balance” to the list.

Firstly, I have 2 Apple IDs.

A NZ App store Apple ID, registered to my NZ Visa.  This lets me access a subset of music, video and apps on the App Store.  There is some NZ only content that I can only access with this ID, but that is by far the minority.

A US App store Apple ID, setup to use vouchers that I buy when in the US.  This lets me buy and rent ANYTHING from the US iTunes stores.

And so when I buy apps, I use my NZ ID as this is linked to my credit card, and I can buy freely without having to worry about how much credit I have on my iTunes account, and if I am going to run out of credit before I next go back to the US.

(wait for it)

When I rent movies and TV shows, I have to sign out and sign in to my US account and use this, because in NZ we haven’t been graced the privilege to  PAY the media co’s our precious money to WATCH THIER STUFF.  I knew it would get ranty.  I will try and hold this in for a bit, so I can first actually give you my solution.  Then we can talk about HOW STUPID THIS ALL IS.

So I have been living with two Apple IDs for ages, and at home we have no less than 9 Apple devices, a mix of laptops, iPads, iPods, Apple TVs and iPhones.  Yes I pay my Apple tax.  But to get my iTunes music (mostly BOUGHT from iTunes, the rest ripped from CD) to be shared across all devices and on my wife’s devices and use all the other apple services that all need to be linked to an Apple ID, it became clear that switching Apple IDs constantly was no longer going to work.  Why?  Because:

• I FaceTime my kids and wife.  So I need to link my FaceTime to an Apple ID.
• I buy stuff on the app store
• I buy music and video on iTunes
• I subscribe to iTunes Match to sync all my stuff to my Apple TV and my Wife’s devices, so we don’t have to buy the same albums twice
• I use iMessage
• I use Home Sharing
• I sync my iPhone wirelessly
• And all the other things I am going to do with my Apple ID in the near future.

Managing all these services across multiple IDs is a NIGHTMARE.

So here is what I did.
NOTE: this will only work in NZ.  If you are trying to do a similar thing in another market you will need to swap our the step on linking a credit card for a voucher as described here.

1. First, register as an Air NZ Airpoints customer.  It’s a pain, and probably costs you money, so only really both with this whole thing if you fly Air NZ and want the air points.
   https://www.onesmart.co.nz/  or http://www.airnewzealand.co.nz/joinairpoints
   You will get a OneSmart card posted to you that is a credit card that can store multiple wallets in different currencies. If  you are already an Airpoints customer, you will have been posted one of these already just before Christmas if you didn’t throw it in the trash.
   It is actually a smart little card, and if I could link it to my BNZ EFTPOS chequing account it would be infinitely better reducing the cards in my wallet to two.  My OneSmart and my drivers license.
   You are welcome Air New Zealand.
2. Next link your OneSmart card to your internet banking and transfer some money onto it.  The instructions are on the OneSmart site.  It’s really easy.
3. Then convert that cash you just transferred into a US wallet when it clears.  Follow your nose on the AirNZ OneSmart site.
4. Then create a US Apple ID (you can do this in any of the Apple App Stores or on iTunes), load your OneSmart card number as your credit card.  It is a MasterCard!
   NOTE: You will need to wait until the money you have transferred to the US wallet clears, as Apple with try  to do an auth of $1 on the card to make sure it is valid and has money on it.
5. You will need to pick a US address also.  Just make one up or look up a hotel in your favorite us CIty.  I have an office in San Francisco, and I practically live there so I used that.
6. Once you have created your new Apple ID, change all your devices to use it.  So the app stores, iTunes, Home Sharing, the lot.  Much simpler.
7. Start buying stuff on iTunes and the App Store. All your apps, music and video magically syncs across all your devices.  Heavenly.  You US wallet will be debited.

Thats it.  You will need to keep your OneSmart US wallet topped up regularly, and there is a $1 fee each time, plus the currency conversion is not the greatest but OK.  Remember that the currency conversion happens when you transfer money to the US wallet, not as you spend it, so if there is a favorable exchange rate, load up the card!  So not as convenient as using your NZ credit card to BUY STUFF.  But almost as good.

If you have a whole lot of purchases on your old NZ Apple ID, there is no way you can transfer these to the US ID or to merge two Apple IDs.  So for any app updates, you will need to switch over to the NZ Apple ID to do this on the App Store.  Still a pain, but I can live with this.

And so finally, why the HELL do I have to do this, probably breaking copyright law to illegally purchase software, music and video along the way?  This is just plane crazy, and it shouldn’t be this hard to give money to people.

CRAZY!

Taking a deep breath… perhaps I can download a movie to calm me down… and I will give some more money to THOSE MUPPETS IN HOLLYWOOD!  Not the Jim Henson-Disney kind either.

To move her over she went to our local Telecom store, in Botany Town Centre, to get help with the move, and to make sure her phone would work as well as get the SIM, and see what discounts she could get as she was coming to Telecom with her own phone.  To make sure her phone would work, the guy in the store told her to put a Telecom SIM in the phone to be 100% sure, but told Mel her Galaxy should work.  So we grabbed a SIM, popped it in, and voila full bars and XT awesomeness.  I had also checked on Telecom’s website to make 100% sure her Galaxy would support the XT network as it is very different to Vodafone’s.  You can do this simply here by entering your IMEI number from under the battery in the phone.  This will tell you if your model of phone will work on XT.

http://www.telecom.co.nz/mobile/mobile/ournetwork/phonecompatibility

And great news the model of the Galaxy Mel has is supported and works on all the right frequencies, but the website does also suggest popping in a SIM to be super sure.  We did that, full bars, choice!  So Mel moved across.  She was given a credit on her account in exchange for a 12 month contract.  No sweat, there was no way we would go back to Vodafone now.

So that was a few months ago.  Since then she has had a few strange areas of patchiness on the network where my phone would work and her’s wouldn’t.  I put that down to different aerials as hers was a Galaxy and mine an iPhone. Not all phones are equal.

So roll forward to today, well 3 days ago to be precise, when we rock out of town on holiday.  We are sitting in Warkworth, one of the many places that kiwis live and play, and Mel asks me to look at her phone as she is getting bars but can’t make calls.  Her phone says “Emergency calls only”.  I fiddle, and find her phone can’t see the Telecom network at all, only Vodafone’s.  Odd.  I do some digging online while lounging around at the beach (on my XT phone) and learn that Telecom has two frequencies on their network. 2100mhz for high density areas like Auckland and a nationwide 850mhz network to cover everywhere else.  Who knew? Mel’s particular Galaxy it seems can not connect to the 850mhz network, so Telecom is invisible to the phone when out of Auckland.  And so I fiddled a bit more, and did some research on Geekzone and found that Mel’s phone just wont support the Telecom 850mhz network, which is the everywhere network, so without this the phone is only good for in the major centers.  Unless we hack the phone, root it and upgrade the firmware or mod it which we weren’t going to do as this voids all sorts of warrantees for sure.  Also Telecom wont support us if we did this.

And so feeling slightly jipped and confused, I got Mel to ring Telecom to make sure this was the case.  The guy in the Telecom store who signed her up told her that her phone would be fine.  We followed the instructions that Telecom gave us, and the tests all told us her phone would work, which was obvious as the SIM she put in the phone worked!  Full bars, great coverage… until we left the city.

First person we speak to tries to help with some basic tests but still the same issue.  I knew the problem was that the phone could not see the 850mhz network, so turning it off and on didn’t seem to make any difference.  So Mel was escalated to 2nd tier support, and did some more tests and fiddling, and then they agree that it seems more complex, so Mel was put through to 3rd tier.  We were relaxing at a bach and not too stressed at this stage as we were at 3rd tier support.  They would be able to sort it or confirm if her phone just wont work.  They hung up on us.  So we ring back and ask to be put through to the 3rd tier support guys.  We get put through to a dead line, just silence.  Mel was going to hang up thinking she was disconnected again, but I told her to wait, incase it was just the hold music not working.  Sure enough, after 20 or so minutes the hold music starts.  Lucky she held on, and the hold music wasn’t that bad.  We had Greg Johnson and Chris Knox to keep us company, which was good because we were on hold for another 2 and a half hours.  The lady in the call centre who put us through came back to us every 15 minutes asking if we were happy to hold, we were, but eventually after the first hour she stopped asking us.  So we waited and waited, read books, and waited some more.  It was 9pm and we figured they were not going to come back to us at this stage so we hung up on them – Telecom’s website says technical support closes at 9pm.  We would try them again in the morning.

Next day, we ring nice and early so we can get on with our day, and try desperately to get back the the 3rd tier support guys.  Hopefully today they would answer their phone.  Every time we rang 123 we get someone else who has a different idea about our situation.  We had a fair few of them as it seems that even though Telecom is a telecommunications company they can’t actually work their phones themselves or their hold music so being hung up on was a frequent occurrence.

We finally talk to one person who seems to know a thing or two and suspects the same thing we do, that the Galaxy wont work out of major centres.  Apparently the Galaxy S’s they sell have had modifications so they run on both Telecom networks and because we didn’t buy the phone from Telecom ours hasn’t had the necessary tweaks.  They couldn’t confirm this officially, but told us it was up to us to make sure the phone worked before we signed.  What!?  We did.  We went into a Telecom store, spoke to a Telecom sales person, followed Telecom’s advice and the phone worked!  We were unaware that Telecom ran two networks and that all we were testing was that the phone would work in the city.  There was very little she would or could do, other than suggest we buy a new Telecom handset that would work on both networks, cancel our contract and pay the $280 release fee, or take the phone back to Noel Leeming as they sold us the wrong phone.  No they didn’t, we bought the phone before we were on Telecom.  Pay a release fee?  Seriously?  Telecom signed us up to that contract under good faith that our phone would work.  But according to Telecom, it wasn’t Telecom’s fault, and if it wasn’t Noel Leeming’s fault, then it was our fault for not testing the phone out of town.  WTF!  Really?

And so they refused to do anything, other than suggest we go back to the Botany Telecom store and take it up with them.  We are out of town on holiday, so that was unlikely.   So after some needling we get them to conference us into a call to the Botany store, so they can tell them what the issue is and get them to help us.  We get cut off.  There seems to be a theme here.

So we find the number for the Botany store and ring them direct.  We repeat the whole story once more for good measure, and get once again what seems to be a standard response, being that it was up to us to make sure the phone worked and it wasn’t their fault.  But didn’t they tell us the phone would be fine!  Yes, but we should have somehow known that it was fine only on Telecom’s around town network.  WTF Telecom?  Are you serious?

More heated discussion, as you can imagine we are getting slightly pissed about the phone experience, if it is not the waiting on hold, getting cut off, having the buck passed, it is being told constantly that it is our fault.  So they suggest we go to the closest Telecom store to us, being Silverdale which is still 30 mins drive from us but we can give them the phone, and they would do some tests on the phone and check the settings to see if they can get the phone to work.  They told us that we could get the Silverdale store to ring them if necessary and they would explain the situation and see if we can get this resolved once and for all.  They can put in a new SIM and see if it is a problem with the SIM.  Okay, not sure what that will do, but Yay!  Some action.

We go to the Silverdale Telecom store, feeling positive that we would get some resolution finally.  Hopefully they can tweak the phone, or cancel the contract for us.  We are desperate to get on with our holiday and put of a trip for the kids to Waiwera hot pools so we can get this sorted.  We really just want a working phone at this stage, and if it means we have to go back to Vodafone then so be it.  We just need the phone to work for us out of town.  Two minutes in talking to the Telecom person about our problem at the store and then she launches into a defensive rant about how this happens a lot and we needed to be sure our phone worked before signing up.  It is almost like she got this a lot, being in Silverdale where you need the 850mhz network.

Look here you morons, we did check, we did everything you asked us to.  Then she types in the phone’s IMEI into her computer and then tells us the “system” tells her the phone may work some places but won’t work out of town.  WTF!?  Really, that’s not what the Telecom website told us, so I walk around the back of her desk and look her screen, and she is using the same fucken screen from the Telecom website I used, and it didn’t say “won’t work” at all, it said the same fucken thing it told us!

This device should work on the XT Mobile Network.

To confirm your device will work on the XT Mobile Network, please visit a Telecom store or dealer to try your device with a Telecom SIM.

She then refuses to put a new SIM in as she tells us she KNOWS that this phone won’t work because it is not the Telecom model.  Only the phone bought from Telecom will work. How come she knows this and no one else in Telecom does!?  We ask her to talk to the Botany store as they sent us here and they promised us that it would be sorted here.  She refused to call them explaining that they are not an actual Telecom store, but are a Leading Edge Communications store. Therefore she wasn’t going to help as it was not their problem.  After some more argument, she finally agrees to call the Botany store but assured us again that she can’t help because they aren’t actually Telecom.  They just have a store that is 100% wall to wall branded as Telecom, sell only Telecom phones, wear telecom shirts, but they are not Telecom.

“Yes, ahuh,  yeah they have a Galaxy that won’t work on Telecom, yes, I know, yes they should have checked first, ok I will tell them”.

Then she explains that Botany told her that, yes, the Galaxy wont work and we should have tested it before we signed up, and it is really our problem.  They also said that this couldn’t be resolved in store and we would have to ring 123 or come into the Botany shop.  Why on Earth would we have taken a couple of hours out of our holiday to go to a Telecom shop if we were not directed to do so.  WHAT THE FUCK?

So at this stage, we have been on the phone for 6-7 hours, driven to a Telecom store under the advice of Telecom, to be told they flatly wont help us as they aren’t Telecom.  And then the original Telecom store who sold us the contract, who sent us there, confirming that yes it was our problem all along and they weren’t going to help either.  So we have royally been given the run around over three precious days on holiday.  No one wants to help us.  Not the call centre, not the technical support team, not the local Telecom store and not the original store that sold us the contract and who told us the phone will be fine.

At the same time as Mel is dealing with all this, I tweet @telecomnz on Twitter for help.  All the other channels are failing us, so perhaps they can help.  Richard who is the community manager on the Twitter team offers to put us in touch with the Customer Resolution team.  Great, I love the sound of that team, they surely can resolve our issue.  We just want to know if the phone can work, how to make it work or to release us from our contract.  Help at last!  Rachael from the Customer Resolution team gives us a call, after we pass on all the details of our problem in an email.  She is helpful and sincere.  She offered us $100 off a new smartphone.  Nice offer, but it would still cost us $700 to get a new phone when we had not long ago spent that much on this phone.  She told us we could sell our one on Trade Me.  No thanks, that was going to be a big hassle and we didn’t want to shell out some cash at this time of year.  It was late in the day, and she promised to call us back in the morning with a better resolution. Great.

Next day, Rachael calls back as she promised.  Firstly she suggests we lied about trying a SIM in the phone first.  They looked into the logs on our phone on the network and can’t see any other SIM ever being used in the phone.  So if we didn’t test it then it is our fault.  WHAT?  We can’t remember what SIM we tested it in, perhaps it was the same fucken SIM that is STILL IN THE PHONE and THAT WORKED AS WE WALKED OUT OF THE STORE?  She then suggests it is just patchy network reception and we are at the beach after all.  She says this as she talks to Mel on MY Telecom phone.  Mel’s phone is dead as a doornail anywhere north of Albany.  It is not just the corner of the Bach she is standing in, it is the WHOLE NETWORK.

She also suggests we go back to Botany and take it up with them, and perhaps the guy there can fiddle with the phone and might be able to get it to work.  No, we are on holiday and we need a phone to work, we are not going to drive for more than an hour back into Auckland to Botany, on the faint hope that they can fiddle with the phone and get it to work, when it seems clear to us that the phone will never work.  And how would they guy in the Botany store know he has got it working on the 850mhz network when he is in Auckland on the 2100mhz network?  After 3 days of headache and going in circles it seems simple to us that perhaps the best option is to release us from the contract and we can go back to Vodafone.  Not ideal for us, but it makes the most sense.  There will be a Vodafone store on our travels on holiday somewhere.  No, Telecom won’t release us from the contract.  Full-stop.  Rachael then cites the terms and conditions of the contract and states that it is up to us to make sure our phone works on their network and that they don’t guarantee their network will work well everywhere – and that the area where we are holidaying is listed as an area of fair coverage, she doesn’t seem interested that the phone couldn’t pick up the network in Warkworth or Silverdale or ANYWHERE NORTH OF AUCKLAND either.  So there is nothing she can do.  We tell her we will cancel and move back to Vodafone, and she confirms we will be charged $280 early termination on our bill.  We confirm that if they do we will take this up with small claims, the ombudsman, FairGo, whomever, and tell anyone else considering to move to Telecom, not to do so.  Not because their network may or may not work for them, it probably will, it is a great network, I love it to bits.  But because they royally fuck their customers over when things go wrong, and can’t seem to be able to put things right.  Waiving the $280 seems like a small price to pay to get a customer, who uses Telecom for 7 other connections, back on side.  Instead, it seems that no matter what, the customer is always WRONG.

• Telecom actively courts moving your phone over to Telecom.  Here is their latest offer for smartphones.  The Samsung Galaxy is a smartphone.
  http://www.telecom.co.nz/simoffer
• When moving your phone over, Telecom’s advice is to use their online form to check your phones IMEI to see if it is compatible.  Even their own internal staff use this form.  The form said the phone should work, but check with a XT SIM in it to be sure.
• We put in a XT SIM and it worked, which was obvious as we signed up the contract and have been using the phone in Auckland for five months without a problem.
• The fact that the phone doesn’t work on the 850mhz network outside of the main centres is as far as Telecom is concerned the customers problem as customers really should have tested this themselves before signing.
• How is the average consumer
  1. expected to be aware that there are two networks (when most of the Telecom staff we spoke to weren’t themselves aware)
  2. adequately be able to test their phone on both networks?  How would a consumer know if they are on the 2100mhz or the 850mhz network at any particular time.  It seems that this is in fact impossible for the average consumer to do.
• It seems that a lot of the people we spoke to within Telecom actually knew all along our particular model of Samsung Galaxy wouldn’t work but didn’t make this information available to us upfront, instead confessed this to us as we were being buck-passed on to someone else.
• Telecom value the $280 contract early termination fee over 6 of their staff members’ time, including 7 hours on the phone over 3 days, as well as valuing the $280 more than the three days of their customers precious lost time when they are on holiday.

And as no consolation whatsoever the final message I get from Telecom after I let them know I am cancelling our account is from Richard on Twitter who seemed to be the only person within Telecom actually wanting to help.

Below average advice seems to be the standard for Telecom at the moment.  They appear as an organisation full of finger pointers and buck passers. Yes, Mel is pleased not to be having any more unhappy Telecom experiences.

My guess is Telecom get this a lot, but instead choose to baffle customers with confusing information, and frustrate them into buying Telecom phones.  When what they really should do is make sure their customers phone work on their network before signing them up.

Boooo Telecom. You are still the shallow greedy telco that intentionally confuses consumers to your own benefit. Grow a soul.

My mother, my mum, the inspiration for my NZ long bike ride in 2009, passed away in October.  It was unexpected and heartbreaking.  I spent half the year sitting beside her in hospitals, unbeknownst to me at the time, watching her slip away.  The doctors all told us she would be home by Xmas.

Mum was one of these special people who touched so many.  At her funeral people were spilling out the door.  We underestimated just how many people needed to say goodbye to someone very special to them too.

So I had an idea last night looking through old photos, as I am so busy with life and work at the moment, and I am pretty poor at blogging these days, that I should at least take the time now and then to post a happy photo of something from the last few years to share it, and hopefully make someone else happy. That’s the sort of thing that Mum would have liked.

And so, upon reflection about Mum’s passing, and as I started writing this post , I looked at life and the things I might not be so proud of, or might not have made Mum so proud. The one thing that pained Mum, every single time I would walk into her kitchen she would say “When are you going to stop working so hard, you are going to kill yourself you know, you should slow down and enjoy like, smell the flowers…” and so on usually for the next five minutes, and I would nod and say “soon, soon Mum soon”.

Working hard is just what I do for some reason, I can’t help it, and right up until a few minutes ago, as my fingers started tapping the keyboard, as I thought about this post and if I could spare 10 minutes to write this now,  I could hear Mum’s words and see her disappointed glances in her kitchen (which would quickly turn into warm smiles) and I berated myself yet again that I never took the time to slow down for Mum. I should have been more like her, kind giving and always doing things for others as she always did.  But then I realised something. I work hard because that’s exactly what she did.

Mum was a solo parent, raising three boys, in a wheelchair.  She did everything for us, she never stopped.  We were always broke, Mum didn’t have ACC to fall back on, we had to get by on an invalids benefit and she fought for every cent of it to get us kids fed, through school and where possible making sure we never went without. She had super human strength, and she never let her wheelchair stop her.

In the 80′s Mum took out a series of bank loans to buy us a computer. Actually not just one but a Spectrum, a Sega, then a C64, followed by a series of PCs, unheard of at the time, and her friends and neighbours thought she was mad.  Why was this woman on benefit buying crazy expensive computers?  Well us boys lived on them, when we weren’t climbing trees, playing with fireworks, and getting into trouble with the law (ssshh) we were punching in hex games from a magazine, and saving them to cassette.  We were writing programs, dialing up BBS sites till 3am on our 2400 baud modem.  We were dreaming of the possibilities  of what we could do.  We were learning a trade that would see us set up well for the next century.  She worked hard to pay those loans back and to make sure we didn’t miss out.

I don’t slow down because she didn’t. I always push myself because I wanted to make her proud and to show her all her hard work and her investment in us was not wasted. She was proud. You don’t usually learn how proud your parents are until you lose them, going through all her boxes, full of things from your past that she kept as momentos, from report cards, to newspaper clippings, to a lock of hair. She was so proud, she just wanted me to be happy more than anything else.

Even though Mum worked so hard raising us boys, and making sure we had everything, what Mum could do was take the time to smell the roses too. She was always one for a laugh, a glass of wine and lending a hand. I have only just realised that Mum wasn’t telling me to stop.  She was telling me to slow down now and then.

I am not superstitious or overly spiritual but I think Mum is still there somewhere not necessarily ”out there” but more “inside”. I am my mother’s son, and I will work hard to make sure the people I love don’t miss out.  But my girls will be their father’s daughters, and as Mum showed me how to work hard, but find the time to slow down now and then, I need to start learning how I can do the same for my girls, show them how to live a good and happy life.  Work hard for the things and people you love, but find the time to sit back now and then and take it easy.  When they walk into my kitchen in 20 years time, I don’t want to feel like too much of a hypocrite when I berate them for not smelling the roses.

And so, here it is.  One of many happy photos to remind me to smell some roses now and then.

The girls hanging out at Granny's

The problem is this.

You have a widget that you want other people to be able to embed in the pages of their website, and you want to use an iframe to do this.  However the content of the iframe widget is dynamic, and the size of it can vary, depending on the content.  You want the iframe/widget to resize itself to suit the content.

Problem. There is NO way to resize an iframe of your content embedded on someone else’s page from WITHIN the iframe content itself.  No amount of JavaScript or clever twiddling in the page served up in the iframe will allow you to do this.  By design browsers wont let content from another domain affect the parent container.  It is far too insecure, this referred to as same origin policy.  If you are serving up content in the iframe from the same domain as the parent page, then you can just use JavaScript to do this.

Only the parent container can resize the iframe.  So seeing as the parent container is someone else’s page that you have no control over, how do you make it aware of the content in the iframe and tell it how to resize the iframe?

Solution.  You can do this simply by serving up a dynamic style sheet with the iframe code used to embed your widget.  This style sheet (CSS) served up by the same server as the widget content, and it knows what the dynamic content is in the iframe and can figure out how big the iframe needs to be.  This CSS file therefore needs to be a dynamically generated file, as it will need to do some server side calculations to figure out what the dimensions are.

Here is an example of the widget code you would supply.

<link href=”http://your.site/path/to/css.php?content_id=1234&dom_id=iframe_widget” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />
<iframe id=”iframe_widget” src=”http://your.site/path/to/content.php?content_id=1234″ frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” scrolling=”no”></iframe>

The style sheet will need to use some server side code to output the correct dimensions for the iframe element style.  Here is an example for dynamically generating this style.

<?php

$domId = $_GET["dom_id"];  //This is the dom element ID of the iframe to generate the style for
$content_id = $_GET["content_id"]; //This the unique identifier for the content being generated by the widget/iframe

/**

Using the $content_id, do some magic here to determine what the content is (customer details, list of products, photos etc), and calculate the height etc.  This is simple for things like a list of items where the height of the elements is fixed, but the number is variable.  If the widget is a combination of things that are dependent on font size, width of elements, white-space wrapping etc, it can get a little tricky, but in the end it is all just math.

**/

$elementHeight = $x * $y + 100;  //This is just an example.

?>

/* STYLE SHEET STARTS HERE */

#<?php echo $domId;?>
{
height: <?php echo $elementHeight;?>px;
overflow: hidden;
scroll: none;
}

That’s it.  Nice and simple-ish.  Only tricky if the content of the iframe wildly varies.

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