Taking on and beating the giants | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

The Comma Club is now open for founding members — a private community for NZ founders building toward a multimillion-dollar exit: https://www.joshcomrie.com/club

Shane Young flew to Sydney six times to get a single purchase order out of Woolworths. On launch day, he walked into the flagship supermarket to find his product had separated in transit and was leaking yellow puddles across the shelf. Four years of work, and he thought it was over in an instant.

It wasn't. This is a special episode of 2 Commas built around one question: what does it take for a small New Zealand business to take on far bigger competitors and win? Three founders answer it from three angles. Shane covers product, and how getting locked out by contract manufacturers forced him to build his own factory and made the business unbeatable. James McGlinn covers strategy, and how Event Finder survived the NZ Government launching a taxpayer-funded competitor by fighting back with a guerrilla Twitter campaign that put the responsible minister on the spot live on Breakfast TV. Cornelius Boertjens covers market, and how raising his prices, building a deliberately annoying presence in Australia, and engineering deal tension between two acquirers turned a niche agency into a Havas exit.

We get into:

• Why Shane's Brisbane disaster became the thing that made his business defensible
• How James won against a competitor with millions in government funding behind it
• Why pricing up got Cornelius more demand, not less
• The modesty penalty that quietly costs NZ founders across the Tasman
• The annoying itch strategy that makes a giant come to you

If you're building something small in a market full of big players, this episode is three different maps for the same territory.