I pushed a deploy at 2pm on a Wednesday. It was a big one—new payment flow, new onboarding screens, the kind of release you want to watch closely for the first few hours. By the time it was live and stable, it was 5pm in Auckland. Which meant it was midnight in San Francisco, 3am in New York, and 8am in London. The entire English-speaking internet was either asleep or just waking up.
Nobody noticed. Nobody retweeted the launch post. Nobody tried the new flow and sent feedback. The deploy sat there, running perfectly on Cloudflare’s edge network, serving pages to an audience of essentially zero for the next twelve hours.
This is what building in public looks like from New Zealand. You ship into a void and wake up to find out if anything happened while you slept.
The timezone gap
New Zealand is UTC+12. In summer, UTC+13. We are as far from Silicon Valley as it is physically possible to be while still having an internet connection. When YC founders are having their morning standups, I’m in bed. When I’m having my morning coffee, they’re wrapping up for the day.
This sounds like a complaint but it’s actually a superpower, once you learn to use it.
The gap forces you into async-first communication. You can’t rely on real-time Slack conversations with anyone in the Northern Hemisphere. You write things down. You document decisions. You build systems that explain themselves because you literally cannot be awake when someone has a question about your code.
It also means you get a full uninterrupted day before the noise starts. From 7am to 5pm New Zealand time, the tech internet is quiet. No Twitter discourse. No launch drama. No breaking news from TechCrunch. Just you and the work. I get more done before lunch than most founders get done in a day, not because I’m more productive, but because nobody is bothering me.
The flip side is that when you do want attention—when you launch something, when you post something, when you need feedback—you schedule it for your evening, which is their morning. Then you go to bed and check the results at breakfast. It’s a strange rhythm but it works.
Five million people and you can talk to all of them
New Zealand has five million people. That’s roughly the population of Colorado. The entire country is a small market by any global standard.
This is supposed to be a disadvantage. Every startup advisor will tell you to build for the US market, where the TAM is big enough to justify venture capital. And they’re right, if what you want is venture capital.
But if what you want is to build something that actually works for actual people, small markets are extraordinary.
I can talk to my users. Not in the abstract “we do user research” sense. I mean I can physically meet every person who uses my product. In Auckland, which has 1.7 million people, the relevant market for any given product is maybe a few thousand. You can put them all in a spreadsheet. You can call them on the phone. You can run into them at a café on K Road.
When I was building the inspection booking flow for Final, I didn’t run a survey. I drove to three building inspectors’ offices and sat in their waiting rooms. I watched how they handled phone calls. I saw the paper diary one of them still used. That’s not user research you can do when your market is 300 million people spread across a continent.
Small markets reward depth over breadth. You can’t growth-hack your way to success in New Zealand because there aren’t enough people to hack. You have to make something genuinely good, and then those five million people will tell each other about it, because they all know each other. Two degrees of separation, tops.
The loneliness of it
I should be honest about this part. Building in New Zealand is lonely.
There is no founder scene. Not really. There are meetups—I’ve been to them—but they’re mostly people who work at Xero or Datacom talking about “innovation” while eating mini quiches in a co-working space. The actual independent builders, the people who are shipping real products with their own money, are scattered and invisible.
You don’t bump into other founders at coffee shops. There’s no South Park or Mission District where the density of builders is high enough to create collisions. Auckland is a sprawling, car-dependent city where everyone is in their own suburb, in their own house, building their own thing in silence.
The online communities don’t quite fill the gap either. Indie Hackers, Twitter tech, the various Discord servers—they’re all running on Northern Hemisphere time and Northern Hemisphere assumptions. When someone posts “just hit $10k MRR serving the US market,” the implicit advice is: you should also serve the US market. The idea that you might be building something specifically for New Zealand, something that only makes sense here, doesn’t register.
So you learn to be comfortable building alone. You learn that the validation comes from the work, not from the community. You ship a feature, and the only person who knows is you and the three users who notice. That has to be enough.
Why NZ brands punch above their weight
And yet. Despite the isolation, despite the small market, despite the timezone—New Zealand produces an outsized number of brands that the rest of the world actually cares about.
Whittaker’s is the best chocolate in the world and I will not be taking questions. Allbirds went from a Kiwi wool shoe to a billion-dollar company. Xero built an accounting platform that beat MYOB and Intuit in multiple markets. Rocket Lab is literally launching rockets from the Mahia Peninsula. Fisher & Paykel makes appliances that compete with Miele and Bosch.
There’s a pattern here. NZ brands tend to be obsessively well-made. They focus on quality over scale, at least initially. They have a clarity of purpose that comes from not being able to hide behind a massive marketing budget. When your entire domestic market is five million people, you can’t afford to make something mediocre and compensate with distribution. The product has to be genuinely excellent because that’s the only growth strategy available.
This constraint produces a particular kind of founder. Practical. Resourceful. Slightly stubborn. The kind of person who builds their own tools because the off-the-shelf option was designed for a different market. The kind of person who treats $1,000 in monthly revenue as a real milestone, not a rounding error.
Edge of the world shipping cycles
There are practical consequences to being at the bottom of the map.
Physical goods take forever. If you’re building hardware, or anything that involves manufacturing, every iteration has a two-week shipping buffer built in. Samples from Shenzhen take 10 days. Returns take another 10. A cycle that would be three days in the US takes a month here.
This makes you more careful. You can’t iterate your way out of a bad design with rapid prototyping when each prototype takes a month to arrive. You think harder before you commit. You spec more carefully. You get it right the first time because you can’t afford to get it wrong three times.
For software, the shipping distance is zero—that’s the beauty of it. Your code runs on the same Cloudflare edge nodes as everyone else’s. Your API response times are the same. The internet doesn’t know you’re in Auckland. This is why software is the great equaliser for remote founders. The only thing that matters is the code, and code doesn’t have a postage fee.
But even in software, the distance shows up in unexpected places. When a critical dependency pushes a breaking change at 3pm Pacific, it’s 10am the next day before you see it. Your CI pipeline fails overnight and nobody notices until morning. You wake up to Slack messages that are twelve hours stale.
You learn to build resilient systems. You learn to write tests that catch things while you sleep. You learn that monitoring isn’t optional when you’re the only person in your timezone.
Markets that global software ignores
Here’s the thing that makes building for New Zealand genuinely exciting: the gaps are enormous.
Global software companies don’t build for markets of five million people. The economics don’t work for them. So entire sectors of the New Zealand economy run on spreadsheets, paper forms, and phone calls.
Building inspections. Property management for small landlords. Disability support coordination. Aged care logistics. Flatmate finances. Small-batch food and beverage operations. Christmas tree farms. Each of these is a real market with real money flowing through it, and each of them is underserved by software because no one in San Francisco knows they exist.
The building inspection industry in New Zealand does $200 million a year in revenue. The entire booking and reporting process is run on phone calls and PDF templates. Nobody has built a proper platform for it because nobody outside New Zealand knows the market exists, and nobody inside New Zealand has built the software.
That’s the opportunity. Not competing with Stripe or Notion or Linear on their home turf. Building the thing that only makes sense here, that requires local knowledge, that solves a problem you can see because you live next to it.
The NZ-specific products I’m building—Final for building inspections, Houseparty for flatmate finances, Have a Day for disability support—none of these would make sense as YC pitches. The markets are too small. The problems are too local. But they’re real problems for real people, and solving them well is a perfectly good way to build a business.
So that’s what building in public looks like from down here. Quiet. Lonely sometimes. Practically invisible to the global tech conversation. But grounded in real problems, real users, and real markets that nobody else is bothering to serve.
I wouldn’t trade it for a WeWork membership in SoMa.