Audacious business idea 'sorted' at 4am

Photo: Peter McIntosh.
Photo: Peter McIntosh.
This year’s winning Audacious business challenge idea was hatched at 4am when Sam Beattie could not sleep.

Mr Beattie and fellow University of Otago student Henry Fitz-Gerald are behind Sorted Jobs Ltd, a digital marketplace that allows users to post fixed-price jobs for other users to complete.

Mr Beattie won round one of this year’s competition with a pre-made cocktail idea but switched to Sorted for round two.

He had done some work on the garden of a flatmate’s father over the summer holidays in a one-off job and friends commented on how they would be interested in similar work.

It got him thinking that there were people with jobs that needed doing, and others, such as students, with "heaps of spare time", who needed access to the jobs.

He wanted to create a platform linking the two.

Lawns that needed mowing, fences requiring painting or garages needing cleaning were all examples of one-off jobs that did not require highly skilled workers but simply took time and effort.

Mr Beattie, who has a commerce degree majoring in management with a minor in Spanish, is studying for honours in management.

He first entered Audacious in 2013 during his first year at university and he entered last year with two ideas.He knew that he and Mr Fitz-Gerald worked well together and would make a good team.

Mr Fitz-Gerald was studying law, science and economics, which complemented his own skill set.

"We had a diverse range of skill sets we needed to ... win Audacious and progress the idea further," he said.

They were "absolutely" going to develop it further, although, at the moment, they were trying to balance that with the likes of exams.

The "fantastic" prize package was going to be very useful.

The pair won seed/investment funding of $5000, a Firebrand website to the value of $3500, five hours of consulting time from Glow PR and Marketing and a prize from Vodafone.

Entering the competition was definitely worthwhile and he was impressed with the "amazing" ideas put forward, Mr Beattie said.

Ruth Burdekin, from Blonde With 2 Legs, was second with a project aimed to put health and safety plans and checklists online to make life easier while keeping people safe and increasing productivity.

Third placegetters were Ethan Fisher, Ben Auton and Grant Bracey-Brown with Chur, a mobile application for improving user experience at skifields, music festivals and events.

The app was a platform on which a custom version for  individual mountains or events could be built.

Core functionality and features included dynamic mapping, group communication and a social feed.

For the first time, University of Otago senior lecturer Dr Jodyanne Kirkwood made the programme a requirement for her entrepreneurship class.

That boosted the numbers in the competition and 34 teams entered for semester two.

The 77 students in the class worked in 14 groups.

It worked well.

Five of the teams ended up in the top 10 and some of the students described it as the best assignment they had done at university, Dr Kirkwood said.

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