Sharesies launched its digital investment tool in 2016.
The co-founders of one of New Zealand’s most successful start-ups, Sharesies, reveal how they got their start.
We started Sharesies with one clear goal in mind. We wanted someone with $5 to have the same investment opportunities as someone with $50,000 or $5 million.
We believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to develop their wealth. If the wealthiest people in the world can grow their wealth by investing, why can’t those who still have a bit more room to grow?
That might sound like a pretty simple premise. But even in the relatively recent past, things were quite different.
Most people thought investing was something “other people” did — predominantly rich people who were also male, retired (or nearing it) and living in big cities. That’s what the stats showed, too.
Until recently, almost all share trading was arranged through sharebrokers, and it was hard to get in on the action unless you had enough money to make the minimum trade size and justify the brokerage fees. And to get access to extra support or financial advice you needed to have seriously big sums to invest — at least tens of thousands of dollars, but more likely hundreds of thousands.
Sure, there was property investment. Many people have grown up watching others make lots of money from rental properties, and hoped to be able to do the same. But for some the prospect of owning a home to live in is moving further out of reach, let alone buying property as a rental investment.
We looked at the investment landscape and thought it wasn’t fair. Doesn’t everyone deserve the chance to build their wealth? New technology began to make it all seem possible.
That’s where the Sharesies story begins.
In 2016, Sonya Williams, who has a background in product and marketing at technology firms, started working for a bank.
She thought she was pretty money savvy, but working in the banking industry showed her she had a lot more to learn.
Sonya wanted to invest and continue to grow her wealth, but she wasn’t sure what to do next. She’d been lucky to get into the property market as a homeowner when it was still possible, but prices had shot ahead and the prospect of an investment property was now out of reach.
She started looking for ways to invest but hit dead end after dead end. In many cases, she felt shut down by “anti-marketing” — instead of trying to lure her in, the message was telling her to go away. Investment opportunities were clearly pitched at a different kind of audience.
At the same time there was a lot of chat going on in the media about the “generation wars”, headlines intended to stoke a “Millennials versus Boomers” divide with property at the centre.
Rising house prices were putting pressure on young people, who felt that their parents’ generation had had it easier. For their part, some Baby Boomers were claiming that young people would be better off if they weren’t wasting their money on “luxuries” like takeaway coffee and smashed avocado on toast.
However, it was becoming increasingly obvious that it wasn’t just a matter of cutting out brunches to save a bit more money. You could save half your income for years and still not be able to buy a house. Rents were climbing, and it was becoming harder and harder for anyone to save for a house deposit before house prices jumped out of reach again. It was feeling a bit dire for people who were just starting out.
Sonya started to wonder what an alternative might be. There must be another way for people to grow their wealth, outside of what had worked for earlier generations, she thought.
She recalls one night at home with her partner, Ben Crotty, who is a talented creative, designer and illustrator, talking about whether to go out for dinner. They figured it would cost about $50 and Sonya remembers wishing she could do something else with the money.
What if it were possible to invest money quickly, easily and in a really fun way? Imagine if it were as easy to put your money into an investment that would start to build your wealth as it was to order dinner online, or to pop something into the shopping cart on your favourite website?
Sonya started talking about her idea with people at work, and a colleague, John Scully, introduced her to Leighton Roberts.
Leighton had started an investment club as a teenager with friends and family, and they all steadily deposited $50 a week into a joint bank account. When they had saved a decent amount they started investing. The club started with residential property, because that was what everyone seemed to invest in, then added a sustainable chicken farm, then a commercial property. By the time he met Sonya, Leighton’s group was investing almost exclusively in start-up companies. The amount of money they were putting aside each week hadn’t changed — they were still contributing $50 a week — but they had been able to pull off some pretty significant investments in the decade or so they had been working together.
For Sonya, it was a revelation.
Not only did it prove that other people also wanted to regularly invest small amounts, it showed that even $50 a week could make a big difference.
It’s not about the $50 today — it’s about the future value of that $50 once it is invested. And $50 does not have to stay $50 — if you spend it on something that loses value, it can turn into nothing. But if you invest it, it has the potential to be worth much more.
Leighton’s experience showed that investing small amounts regularly made sense. Alongside this, Leighton and his then fiancee, now wife, Brooke Roberts, were keen to start their own venture, something that had an impact and combined their experience in product management and finance.
They were keen to get started.
It didn’t take long to pull the Sharesies founding team together. Brooke, Leighton, Sonya and Ben were joined by Richard Clark and Martyn Smith, who had been running a technology consulting firm together and had been chatting with Brooke and Leighton about starting a business.
Brooke remembers being captivated by the idea.
She had run businesses when she was in high school, and was involved in a start-up social enterprise. She was already exploring starting a fintech business, too. Sonya’s idea seemed a great fit and the group — now the Sharesies co-founders and executive team — thought the time was right. Together, they had most of the key skills they’d need to turn this idea into a business.
Brooke also had experience in the financial services and technology sectors, and could see how inaccessible that world was to many people. She agreed that whether you have $5 or $5m, you should have the same opportunities to make money.
Brooke remembers the exciting early days of bringing the team together: “We are the sort of people who like to solve problems and we could all see that a lack of investment opportunities was a real problem for younger people in particular. There was a real opportunity to make a big difference in Aotearoa New Zealand and around the world.
“It was exciting to see everyone in the room getting hyped about the prospect. But anyone who has had anything to do with a start-up business will know that it’s not enough to think you’ve got a good idea and psych each other up to ever-increasing levels of excitement. Other people have to be into it, too.
“The difference between a cool idea and a really viable business is that other people have the problem and you build the right solution to fix it for them.
“That’s why we took it out to testing, asking other people what they thought.”
Before officially launching anything, we (Sonya, Brooke and Leighton) went through a customer validation process, taking around six months to talk to anyone we could find, whenever and wherever we could.
We surveyed groups of people about their views on money, what they thought about investing, whether they wanted to invest, how they perceived investment markets and their financial plans, as well as broader questions about their lives and their goals for the future.
We continuously refined our idea, and tested it every couple of weeks by talking to different people.
Through that process, we discovered that most people had a really negative relationship with money, even though it was a big part of their lives. Money and health are two things in life that really stay at the front of your mind when they’re not going well. Most people were members of KiwiSaver (New Zealand’s superannuation savings scheme) but they didn’t really think of that as an investment.
Almost all the people we spoke with said they wanted to be investors — being an investor meant you were savvy with money and were trying to get ahead, they reckoned — but they just weren’t doing it.
Why not? Three main reasons emerged.
They were priced out. This means they did not have the minimum investment required to get started.
They were jargoned out. Financial services and investment markets are great at using technical language that can be hard to understand. Technical language can put people off and make them think they have too much to learn before they can even start.
They were branded out. This means they did not feel the investments available met their needs as an investor. This made sense because most investments being offered at the time were pitched at people approaching retirement.
We also discovered there was a stigma about investing. At the time, only about 20 per cent of New Zealanders owned shares, and most of them were older men living in Auckland. The story wasn’t much better in Australia.
There was an obvious undercurrent of a desire to invest being blocked by a lack of opportunities to do so. This gave us the motivation and confidence we needed to commit to making Sharesies happen. Everyone deserves the opportunity to grow their wealth. That belief was our starting point and, while we all thought it should be true, there was some work to do to make it a reality.
We decided to create an online platform where you could invest whatever amount you chose, big or small, and we wanted it to be fun, informative and easy to use.
But our bigger dream was to create a financially empowered generation. We imagined a future where there was an even playing field, where no one had the upper hand over anyone else just because they understood the mysterious world of investing and other people didn’t. We didn’t want some people to be stuck slogging away getting small returns from money saved in a bank account while others were cashing in on high-returning and high-risk assets like shares or properties.
We wanted to create a future where people approached financial decisions with hopefulness and optimism, not negativity. We wanted money to be seen as the means, not the end.
What does this mean? Well, while money plays a big part in how people live their lives and the dreams they can achieve, the bigger prize is the self-actualisation — in other words, the personal fulfillment and reaching of potential — that can happen when people feel in control of their decisions.
How empowered would you feel if you didn’t have to worry about money? If all your financial planning was a positive experience?
We wanted to give people a tool to help them to live the life they want. We hoped to make it easy to do the right thing in a system that can sometimes feel like it’s designed to trip you up. We wanted everyone’s money to be in the best possible place to achieve their financial goals.
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