SwipedOn is a small but growing SaaS company, founded by Hadleigh Ford and Ben Scott. Ben tells the SwipedOn story and how Basestation is part of the growth of their startup

Our story started four years ago, when SwipedOn’s founder, Hadleigh Ford, had an idea to create a digital sign in application to solve the problem of accounting for crew working on Superyachts.

Using the Icehouse as a starting platform, Hadleigh created two iPad applications that quickly got App Store traction and created the base income to start growing the business. In 2015, I came on board as Co-Founder and together with Hadleigh started work on a flagship product that aimed to realise the potential this business niche could offer.      

To get our plans achieved, Hadleigh and I had to bootstrap the entire operation, which meant working from home, outsourcing development work and relying on free or cheap ancillary components to run the business – not to mention retain our day jobs.    

At the start of 2016 the business was now gaining enough traction to warrant my full time commitment and I started as Managing Director in January. Soon after a NZ based CTO was appointed (still outsourced) as well as the first Customer Support person.

As Founder / Chairman Hadleigh has remained in his day job, but contributes significant amounts of time outside of that to SwipedOn.    

Living in Auckland, I found that working from home was becoming a little claustrophobic and did not bode well for the business interaction and creativity that was needed to continue to push the business forward.

Plus living in Auckland was proving tough with rents and traffic causing headaches!

We decided to move the business officially to Tauranga.

For the first few weeks I again worked from home, but soon found Basestation and had a great first meeting with Steven.

I soon moved in taking up a permanent desk in the shared open plan zone.    

Basestation has been great for me and for SwipedOn: firstly, it has allowed me to meet so many great people and in a very short time I feel as though I have increased my circle of friends and business associates. And all the residents are welcoming and many of them have helped us out over the last 6 months. Thank you!    

As our team has grown, Basestation has been able to accommodate us: we now have 4 staff working in Basestation and have just agreed to take an office upstairs as part of the expansion. Looking at our growth, we will easily have 10 + people towards the end of this year permanently working out of Basestation.    

For us, the ‘pay as you grow’ model works great – we are not tied into long term contracts and the space is flexible enough to accommodate our expanding team.

Looking at the numbers, they also stack up: expenses such as meeting rooms, kitchen, fruit bowl etc are all part of the contract.    

We can’t speak highly enough of the Basestation founders – they are always positive and make Basestation a great working environment.

SwipedOn loves being part of the permanent resident team and look forward to more fun times on Durham Street!

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Want to know if Basestation meets your startup needs? Be in touch! Tell us a time that suits you to come for a look here

Desk, one-person offices, small team and large team spaces available

And you'll  get to use SwipedOn as you come in too!