77 questions I can’t stop trying to answer.
77 questions, newest first
Farmlands already has the stores, the accounts and the trust of every lifestyle block in the country, so why is the fertiliser on the shelf somebody else’s brand?
A white-label fertiliser brand for lifestyle blocks, distributed through Farmlands’ store footprint. · goods · White-label fertiliser · Farmlands store footprint
Making chocolate leaves behind a husk that brews into tea, so why would a chocolate company let a free by-product leave the building unbranded?
A Whittaker’s cacao tea, made from the husk that chocolate making leaves behind. · goods · Loose-leaf cacao husk tea · A by-product of chocolate making
Every chip on the shelf is an adult’s chip in a smaller bag, so what would one look like if it had been made for a child from the start?
A child-focused chips brand. · goods · Children’s chips · Snack aisle
When a single buyer can end seven orchards’ contracts in one decision, why should the growers not band together and can the peaches themselves?
A canned peaches brand owned by the growers Wattie’s walked away from. · goods · Canned Golden Queen peaches · Grower-owned
New Zealand’s dairy brands spent decades telling us they were ours, and now they are not, so what is the one claim the brands Fonterra sold can no longer make?
A New Zealand-owned milk brand for the day Fonterra is free to sell to New Zealanders again. · goods · Milk and cheese · New Zealand owned · Launches when the non-compete ends
The government already knows who you are and what you owe it, so why does it only ever write to you after you have missed the deadline?
A nudge-economics research project: messaging people on behalf of local and central government about the processes they are already in. · software · Nudge research · Messaging on behalf of local and central government · Built on the RealMe identity service
What turns your running data into your next run?
A non-social running companion that turns each run into the next one: it plans, learns what you did, and adjusts tomorrow. · software · Cloudflare Worker + KV + GPX · Personal tool, live
Why is moving day the best chance to get a household ready for an emergency?
After every earthquake and every flood on the news, I think: I should sort that. Then I do not. I live in a house on a fault line, in a country that floods, and I still have no kit. Almost everyone I know is the same, and none of us are careless people.
Why are products carefully designed for the moment they enter our lives, but not for the moment we let them go?
There is a box on the floor bound for the charity shop, and I keep not taking it. Each time I pass I lift something out, hold it a moment, and put it back. The box is packed. The decision is made. Some last transaction between me and what is in it refuses to complete.
Why do children’s stories give their heroes magical powers instead of skills the reader could learn?
Two of the biggest stories a child meets run on power the child can never have: a wand that does the choosing, a god for a father. In one of the most common patterns in children’s fiction, the hero’s agency is given, not learned. I keep wondering what that pattern teaches, and what a story would look like without it.
If no news or social media company benefits from telling us we have seen enough, how can we ever feel properly informed?
Late at night the news app is still going and so am I. There is no bottom, no last story, no point where it says that is everything, you are caught up. I stop when I run out of time or willpower, never because I finished, and I close it feeling worse, not better informed.
Why do running apps behave more like social media than personal trainers?
I finish a run and, before I have my breath back, I make a decision about who gets to see it. Public or private. It is a small choice and it takes a second, and I have started to think it changes the run more than anything I did while I was out there.
How can parents protect their children when the whole family network depends on surveillance capitalism?
A child’s first account is a form: a name, a birth year, a box to tick. It costs nothing, which is the part worth sitting with. Free means the bill goes somewhere else, and most of us sign without ever learning what we handed over, or to whom.
The translation was accurate, so why did she still trust a man from her home town instead?
A woman three weeks into the country needs to know whether the clinic will treat her daughter for free. The correct answer sits on an official page, and her phone translates it accurately in a second. She reads it. Then she asks a man from her home town who arrived last year, and does what he says.
How do friendships across cities and countries quietly drift when both people still care?
It has been eight months since I spoke to a friend I think about most weeks. Nothing happened between us. No falling out, no move, no reason I could give him if he asked. I never decided to let it go, and that is the part of it I cannot account for.
If every petrol station sells the same fuel and much the same food, what gives a driver a real reason to choose one?
Two forecourts face each other across a state highway. Same fuel, same price within a cent, same pies under the same lamp. I picked one because it was on my side of the road, which is how everyone picks, and neither of them has ever given me a better reason.
What happens to a store when it has no discernible principle for deciding what not to sell?
The Warehouse Group lost $54.2 million in FY24. Sales fell 6.2%, foot traffic 2.2%, and a bid to take the company private collapsed for lack of support. The easy story is that the everything-store is being eaten by specialists. I walked in trying to finish one sentence, the Warehouse is the place you go for.
Can showing investors exactly what their money is doing every week make them worse investors?
On a red week the notification arrives on a Sunday night: here is what your money did, and the number is smaller than it was. Your thumb hovers over the button that moves it all to cash. The app was built to end the blindness of passive investing. It may have manufactured the panic it set out to prevent.
If we can deliver cut flowers, why is sending a living plant still so difficult?
You can have almost anything at a stranger’s door by tomorrow. A book, a jumper, a bottle of wine, a bunch of flowers that will be finished by the weekend. A living plant, the gift that keeps going for years, is the one thing you cannot simply send. It is a strange hole to find in a country of gardeners.
Why do evidence-based products lose to products that make shoppers feel understood and cared for?
The wellness aisle keeps its wonder and its evidence on separate shelves. The stories sit in beautiful glass on one side; the proof sits on the other in a white tube with a chemical name. The shopper who reaches past the proof is not being fooled, and knowing that is not the same as knowing what to do about it.
Why can ordinary New Zealanders own fractions of companies, collectable sneakers and works of art, but not a working farm?
A teacher in Wellington can buy a fifty-dollar slice of Apple, the company, on her phone in ten seconds. She cannot buy a fifty-dollar slice of an apple orchard three hundred kilometres away, at all. I spent two years and three company names trying to fix that. It did not ship, and the reason it did not is the essay.
Why did premium woollen base layers have to lose their colour before we could take them seriously?
The merino wall in an outdoor shop is black, charcoal, navy, and slate, rack after rack of it. The polypropylene a lot of us grew up wearing on bush walks was loud, stripy, and slightly hideous. Somewhere between the two, the colour went out of the layer you live in, and nobody voted on it.
How does an iconic New Zealand shoemaker adapt to changing tastes without abandoning the local production that made it matter?
Between 90 and 100 pairs of boots come off the benches in a Dunedin workshop on an ordinary day, made by 14 people, in a firm that has been at it since 1879. About 99% of them are sold inside New Zealand. The heritage boot everyone can name is Australian, and it stopped being made at home in 2007.
Why does packaging do so little to explain what should happen to its materials once we are finished with them?
Every package on a New Zealand shelf was designed with care right up to the moment somebody paid for it: type, colour, the exact place a thumb lands. At the end of its short life the design goes quiet. The label that sold it is beautiful. The one that tells you where it goes next is barely there.
Why do systems carry us almost to the useful outcome and then leave the final step for us to finish?
The recycling bin gets me most weeks: an empty container in one hand, turned over twice, no verdict anywhere on it. The strange part is that the answer exists. The rules are national now, written and standardised. Somewhere between the rulebook and my hand, the last step of the delivery never happened.
If Uber can show me exactly where my driver is, why does the train app keep showing me a timetable instead of the train?
The app says the next train is three minutes away. The track is empty in both directions, and it was saying three minutes a while ago too. Every commuter knows the small arbitration that follows, screen against rails, and nobody tells you which of the two accounts of your evening to believe.
How can a sports-alert app wake you for a classic without becoming so afraid of false alarms that it stays quiet?
The best of the sport you follow is played on the other side of the world, which means it is played while you sleep. Stay up and you lose nights to blowouts. Sleep and you wake to find the classic already over. Between those two bad options sits a question about who is allowed to wake you.
If a timely reminder can prevent a missed deadline, what determines whether a public agency sends one?
Two messages about my own paperwork land in the same fortnight. One is a reminder from an office that gains nothing when I act on it. The other is not a reminder at all: it is the fee that arrives after a date I missed, from an office that knew the date all along.
Why do so many tools collect enough data to help with the next step, then stop at showing us what already happened?
Four systems keep a flawless account of my life: every run mapped to the metre, every message logged, every alert counted, every due date known. Not one of them will make the one small call its own record makes obvious. The measuring is immaculate. The deciding is left, politely, to me.
Why can revealing a modest markup make a price feel less fair, and what should the customer compare it with instead?
The most honest label a supermarket could print carries two numbers: what the jar cost the shop, and what the shop added on top. Every instinct says this is the strongest trust move there is, a confession that does your persuading for you. Which makes it worth sitting with the small, unwelcome feeling the label produces instead.
Can showing customers a fair markup make a fair price feel less fair?
A jar of peanut butter is $3.99 one week and $6.49 the next, and nobody in the whole transaction will say where the $2.50 went. Two companies sell most of the groceries in this country. I kept waiting for someone to print the one number that would settle it. Nobody ever has.
Should an ownership record document everything, or reduce what a family will eventually have to sort through?
A daughter stands in her dead father’s hallway, proving to the power company, again, that he has died. Around her, the boxes: a watch, a guitar, a drawer of cables, no way to tell what any of it is worth. The proof was never kept, and the person who could have kept it is gone.
Why does every shared responsibility eventually become one person’s private burden?
Six friends drive home from a weekend away, and one of them is quiet in the passenger seat, working out who owes what and drafting the small, slightly awful texts that ask five people she loves to send her forty dollars each. Nobody made her the bank. She just has the card saved and a tolerance for asking.
Why has New Zealand made honey famous without making it something people regularly drink?
New Zealand honey is famous in every direction except inward. A New Zealander meets it as a spoonful from a jar, a dose from a chemist, or a line in the export statistics, and almost never as something to simply enjoy. I am inside a small business trying to change that. This is the field report.
Why does New Zealand export exceptional raw materials while leaving others to capture the value created by finished products and brands?
Every dairy in New Zealand keeps a drinks fridge humming by the counter, and nothing in it is built on the honey the country is famous for. The honey earns some of the highest prices on earth, and it leaves as a raw commodity, comes back, if at all, as a jar of medicine or someone else’s brand.
How do you build a service for older people without mistaking their children’s reassurance for the older person’s success?
A woman in Wellington opens an app on a Sunday night and books her father a lunch. He lives four hours away, and since her mother died the calls have become shorter. He says he is fine. She pays, and exhales, and for the first time in a week feels she has done something.
Why do we fund the treatment but not the journey that helps an older person stay connected and well?
For an isolated older person, the money is nearly automatic: the GP visit, the prescription, the physio, the assessment, even part of the taxi fare. What no budget has ever paid for is the thing the taxi is driving toward: the lunch where someone is expecting them. The fragments are fundable. The outcome is not.
When aged-care beds run out, who will coordinate everything our older citizens need to live well at home?
My grandmother did not enter care because anyone had planned for it. She fell. She had lived alone until then, in her home, held together by familiar routines. The questions arrived faster than the answers: was she safe, who could help, what happens next. Every family meets those questions as if they were private. They are about to become national.
Why did we ask households to solve energy hardship, and why were we wrong to do so?
During the first Covid lockdown, close to a thousand of us spent a weekend trying to end energy hardship. Our idea was to let people donate an hour of power to a household that needed it. The reason it could not work taught me more than the idea ever would have.
Why does organising the money in a shared home always seem to become one person’s job?
Every flat I have lived in had one person who chased the rent, remembered the power bill, and knew whether the bond was actually lodged. Everyone else assumed it was sorted. I tried to build that person a better tool, and it took me embarrassingly long to work out what they were really carrying.
When natural fibres exist, why are almost all sleep masks made from synthetic materials?
Every box in the sleep aisle sells a promise about light, or cooling, or contour. Not one of them says what the thing is made of, though it will sit against the thinnest skin on your body for eight hours a night. The high country here grows some of the finest wool in the world. The masks are plastic.
Why do loving, mostly diligent dog owners still overfeed their dogs?
More than one in four New Zealand dogs is already carrying too much weight, and the owners doing it are the careful ones, measuring every meal with the cup that came with the bag. The harm does not show up at dinner. It shows up years later, long after anyone could trace it back to the scoop.
Why has almost every form of dog food improved except the iconic chub roll?
The dog roll has sat in the same New Zealand chiller my whole life: fresh meat in a plastic tube, priced like a staple. Every time dog food goes premium it becomes a heavier bag, a subscription, a freezer box. Never a better roll. I wanted to know what the roll had done wrong.
What do we lose when the record of ownership does not travel with the things we buy?
Eleven months into owning a laptop, the screen failed. It was under warranty and I knew it, and none of that mattered: on the one day it counted, I could not prove the laptop was mine. The receipt was in a dead email account. The tidy lesson it left turned out to be wrong.
If money can move instantly and cheaply, who benefits from keeping it slow and expensive?
A photo reaches my brother from a moving train before my phone is back in my pocket. The twenty dollars I owe him is free to send too, and it still cannot change hands in the moment. I was the first hire at a company built to close that gap. The hard part was not the one I expected.
Why do serious buyers inspect the same house over and over when the house only needs looking at once?
Six people stand in the same hallway on a Saturday, and each goes home and pays for the same report about the same roof. The waste is obvious. The reason it persists is not.
Why does staying close to the people you love mean handing a platform your family to sell?
Private family social media: end-to-end encrypted, no ads, no algorithms. · software · Vite + React + Cloudflare Workers · In development
The nurseries already own the growers, the supply chain, and the expertise, so why can’t a plant arrive at your door alive, like a gift?
A doorstep plant brand concept: The Sill’s packaging logic, Kings’ warmth. · goods · 2026
Why does every buyer of the same house pay again for a report that already exists?
Building-inspection marketplace for New Zealand: homebuyers and independent inspectors, in one place. · software · Vite + React + CF Workers/D1/R2 + Stripe · In development
When the support workers and the outings already exist, why does getting out of the house stay a logistics problem every family solves alone?
Getting older New Zealanders out to events and outings, easy to find, book, and share. · software · Next.js 15 + Tailwind v4 + Supabase + Expo · In development
Why does every shared flat draft one person to chase the money?
Flatmate finance on open banking: rent splits, bills, and bond, sorted. · software · 2026
Why does money between friends still route through card networks, when a message reaches them instantly and for free?
Peer-to-peer payments on open banking. Pay and get paid, no card networks. · software · React + Akahu open banking · In development
Why do we lose track of what we own, and only learn what it is worth once it is gone?
Log what you own, protect what matters. · software · Next.js 14 + Worker design system · In development
Why does a country built on a fault line leave every household to prepare for disaster alone?
Emergency-preparedness kits for New Zealand households. · goods · Next.js 15 + Tailwind v4 + Supabase + Stripe · Awaiting launch
When the map to a new country already exists, why does every newcomer have to redraw it alone, in a language that isn’t theirs?
A settlement guide for refugees arriving in Aotearoa, in 25 languages. · software · Next.js 15 + Supabase + Claude API · Seeking charity partner
Why do the people who love us end a call so warmly, and every product end it so coldly?
An active build. More to show soon. · brand · 2026
An eyemask rests against your skin for eight hours a night, so why is it usually made of whatever’s cheapest?
A merino eyemask designed for real sleep. · goods · Static HTML + Cloudflare Pages/D1 · Live waitlist
Why does buying a Christmas tree still mean phone calls, a scramble for parking, and hoping your size hasn’t sold out?
Seasonal Christmas-tree ordering for a Christchurch grower. Shipped. · brand · Astro 5 + Cloudflare Pages/D1 + Klaviyo · Built, DNS cutover pending
When did tasting like the actual fruit become the exception?
Real-fruit ice cream from a New Zealand institution. · goods · 2026
Why does so much parking sit empty while the fleets that need it hunt for space alone?
Fleet-parking platform: a full-stack showcase, end to end. · software · 2026
Why does dog food sell trust on the label while hiding what goes in the bowl?
Pawtions: real dog food made from real ingredients. · goods · 2026
Why does a market with a dozen power retailers leave every household to work out the cheapest plan alone?
Switching New Zealand’s power, reimagined. · software · 2026
When land costs more than farming it can ever repay, why must a farm still be owned whole, by whoever can already afford it alone?
Tokenised equity for New Zealand farms. Ag-tech, ownership rethought. · software · Research + pitch decks · Showcase
Why does the country that grows the world’s best merino struggle to make anything from it?
A merino base layer, done properly. Premium New Zealand wool. · goods · Hono + D1 + Cloudflare Workers · Brand complete
What does a fictional world become when its people have faces before they have stories?
A book and a world, still being built. · goods · 2026
Two chains split a whole country’s groceries and neither has to compete on price. What would a challenger built from scratch have to do differently?
A strategy for New Zealand’s discount supermarkets. · brand · 2026
Why does money sit where it earns least, when the account data to move it somewhere better already exists?
Savings, optimised through open banking. · software · 2026
What if the most immediate barrier to ageing well is simply being able to get from A to B?
A woman in my neighbourhood hasn’t left her house in three weeks. She isn’t sick, and it isn’t that she doesn’t want to. Something far more ordinary is keeping her inside, and nearly everything we do about loneliness is aimed at a different problem than hers.