Tell us about Honee.
Honee is an online beauty platform, which we hope will both innovate the beauty sector and help it continue to grow in Australia. It’s a simple concept but addresses a huge gap in the sector – connecting beauty and wellness businesses with customers. It’s an online directory for beauty and wellness treatments with incredibly detailed customer information and the capability for instant bookings.
What inspired you to start Honee?
I was working at Zomato at the time and had just come back to Australia from Singapore and couldn’t easily find anywhere to get my hair cut. As luck would have it I stumbled across a premium Kevin Murphy salon in the basement of our office building which hadn’t come up on my online searching.
The owner of the salon encouraged me to create a way for customers to easily find businesses like his and the idea of Honee was born.
Tell us about your career and background.
I’ve been involved in tech startups since 2003. I was studying at the time and started a web hosting company – as a result of the business commitments I failed my first few semesters of University! So decided to sell the company and went on to achieve a Bachelor of Japanese and International Business in Japan.
From there I continued to work in startups and found myself developing some into a ‘food tech’ business specialist securing senior roles at food and dining platforms such as Delivery Hero where I grew it to 4,400 restaurants in Australia, Quandoo Asia Pacific which I co-founded and ran the Business Development out of Singapore and Zomato, which I launched in Australia following its acquisition of Urbanspoon.
Describe a typical day for you.
Work, work and more work! Each day is different though as sometimes I can be in meetings all day (and night!) and then some days I have none, so can spend time working on the business.
I always start my day reading Google News for updates and arrive in the office at 7.30am to get on top of my emails and figure out my day. Writing a plan for my day is essential. I’ll pick two things that I absolutely have to get done that day – these are my rocks and everything else on my list are the pebbles which are optional items if I get time.
I spend a lot of time meeting clients as I feel it’s important to be out in salons and speaking directly with the business owners. I also speak with investors and advisors regularly, and tend to spend a lot of time in the afternoon working on pitches, practicing speeches, updating marketing material and lots of finance and HR tasks.
Throughout the day I stay in contact with my team through slack, receiving regular updates on the website, clients and sales. We are in constant communication, day and night. Forget work-life balance, it’s work-life integration and I love it!
What advice do you have for those wanting to start a business?
Don’t waste time worrying too much about the exact details of the idea or plan. I’ve always found the end result is never how it was originally imagined.
I also believe if you want to do something just start! No matter how crazy the idea is, most things are scalable and the details will work themselves out along the way.
What’s next for you, and Honee?
We are still growing and will continue to add more Melbourne businesses to our directory, there are usually at least 5-10 new stores opening every week. I am excited to say we will be launching in Sydney in early 2017, I’m there every second week at the moment. Bali and South East Asia will follow within the next two years.
Apart from growing Honee, I am passionate about getting Australia on the startup map. We’re probably the world’s best marketplace entrepreneurs and it’s no surprise we are naturals at this when you look at the duopolies and monopolies that make up our economy. I’ll be in San Francisco in January hoping to make some waves with what we are achieving down under. Australia has so much room for growth and innovation but has struggled in the past with resources and capital. I want to help other startups and see Australia leading the way globally in startup innovation.
