When I enrolled to study at the University of Canterbury, I was ambitious, underprepared and did not have a specific career in mind.
In 2018, after a few years of study and experience leading student initiatives, I was set on starting a company but struggled with where to start. Luckily, I stumbled across the UCE and two incredible mentors in James Carr and Rachel Wright. Participating in UCE programmes taught me fundamental ideas critical to entrepreneurial success that remain a focus in our business today.
My co-founder Lucy Turner, and I joined the 2018/19 Summer Start-up Programme to build an app that helped people manage their voicemail. In August 2019, we released the first cross-platform visual voicemail app in New Zealand. Just three months later we had grown to serve more than 4000 users.
While we were still finding our feet, the UCE remained a pillar of support. In fact, we participated in the Summer Startup Programme for a second time in 2019/20.
Not only was UCE a great place for us to experiment with ideas and seek mentorship but find teammates. Chelsea Aitken was another student entrepreneur whom we met early on and after finishing work on her own company, she joined VXT and remains an essential member of our team today.
A year after launching our first product we were struggling to achieve sustainable growth. Through growth experiments we identified that professional services businesses all over the world struggle with administrative work related to communications, like saving notes after a call with a client. We decided to pivot the business to focus on this problem.
Today, we are backed by the largest venture capital fund in New Zealand, and our business customers across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand use VXT to make more than 60,000 calls per week.
The UCE plays a critical role in allowing students the confidence and security to take risks. Without it VXT likely would not exist.
Check out Luke Campbell, one of our Ones to Watch profiles in our 150th Alumni Showcase here.
