World-class Wellington: From the dining table to the top table - one firm's extraordinary growth

Monday, 5 July 2021

There's no time to sit down for Claire and James Fuller, who co-founded tech business Hnry and are now about to move into a new central Wellington office.

James Fuller can’t hide the excitement on his face.

The company he co-founded with his wife Claire is expanding and he’s standing in the middle of a colourful but empty central Wellington office that will soon house 30 colleagues, with another 20 expected over the next year.

Just three years ago that office space was the dining table, his only colleague was Claire, and they would whoop and holler if they hit $500 revenue in a month.

“Now we process something like $300 million a year through [company] bank accounts.”

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But before the many millions, the countless interviews for new staff and the inexorable rise of their business, there was just James, Claire, and not enough hours in a day to process the spreadsheets piling up on that dining table.

Theirs was an idea borne of frustration.

James Fuller at the 2020 Gold Awards. Co-founder and wife Claire is second from the left.

Having moved from the United Kingdom with his Kiwi wife, James found himself in the unfamiliar position of working as a self-employed contractor.

“I got a job through a recruiter and they said to me ‘are you going to be a sole-trader, a company, are you going to be GST-registered?’, he says.

The answer put him in charge of his own financial admin, but also having to grapple with “over-complicated accounting software” and “old-school accountant”.

Then came the “big realisation” in the form of an unexpected bill.

“I phoned my accountant and said what’s this ACC bill and they said you’ll have to talk with them about that, we don’t deal with ACC. And I went, ‘what am I paying you for?’”

James thought, “there’s got to be a better way of doing this”.

His wife agreed. So did friends “who came out into self-employment and said well you guys have been contracting for a while - how do you deal with this horrible admin?”.

That job the recruiter helped him secure was as a start-up coach at Wellington’s Creative HQ, where James used his experience in leadership roles within technology and innovation projects in the UK to help others accelerate their ideas.

Now it was time to develop his own.

James Fuller is moving to a new building because Hnry has outgrown its current office. It has plans to grow its staff from 30 at the moment to about 50 over the next six to 12 months.

“By day, I was coaching start-ups how to do it and by night, I’m sitting there literally following the same guidance, going through the same programme.”

And poring over spreadsheets.

Claire Fuller was co-founder of Hnry and is now its chief operating officer.

James and Claire would manually input tax details of family and friends into spreadsheets and templates they had created.

The “bedroom business” built slowly at first, with customer No 6 being the first person who wasn’t a friend or family member.

But the couple realised they were on to something.

“At one point I was making 80 transactions a day, manually, into internet banking,” says James. “That, at the time, felt really overwhelming, but there was a sense that this was exciting, people are really getting behind it.”

So in 2018 he quit his job and for the next six months, used what he had learned from his University of Manchester computer science degree to build the technology and what would later become Hnry, an app and company that supports sole-traders, contractors, self-employed and others struggling with various aspects of financial administration.

Finding early funding was tough and “at one point we got down to $5000 in the bank account and a room full of staff to pay”.

But as the business grew there was support from investors Angel HQ and Icehouse Ventures, some high net worth individuals in the accounting and finance industries, and then from overseas investors, including Equity Venture Partners in Australia, where Hnry has three staff, is hiring five more and eyeing new opportunities for growth.

Three years on, the spreadsheets are gone from the dining table, most of the functions are automated, and James is now chief executive, with Claire the company’s chief operating officer.

Sole-traders sign up to Hnry, which takes over their tax, invoicing and other financial administration. They also get access to specialist accounting and financial advice.

Hnry entered into a partnership with ASB in 2018, providing it with banking infrastructure and accounts.

“We use those to calculate, deduct and pay everyone’s taxes, and we take a one per cent [pay-as-you-go] charge on the taxable income that goes through those accounts, up to $150,000.”

He’s reluctant to talk about Hnry’s revenue, but “over the past 3-4 years, we’ve seen double-digit month-on-month revenue growth.”

That leaves the Hnry chief executive standing in what will soon be his company’s new central Wellington office, and the excitement and joy of great possibility written all over his face.

This is the fifth instalment in a week-long series profiling Wellington companies with global ambitions.