On-line directory takes off

Burnt by the collapse of Sweetwaters in 1999, Daniel Keighley is not looking to make a quick buck, writes Jared Smith.

The great advantage of the internet is when you tap into a small niche market, you can still attract thousands of people.

Taranaki events promoter Daniel Keighley believes this will be the case after two years of market research has resulted in New Zealand Delivers Ltd, a New Plymouth company set up by Mr Keighley and Auckland-based co- director Alan Calderwood.

It runs the nzdelivers.co.nz website, an online directory that was quietly launched in September as a free-search database for all products and services that offer home delivery nationwide.

Mr Keighley had a seven- person team beating the pavement throughout New Zealand to find companies that included home delivery in their services, and he is delighted with the traffic that the site has already attracted.

"It's not been a fast project. It had to be researched really well to make it work, and it had to have a number of really good programmers to put together the website to make it an efficient search system.

"Every conceivable business we could find, obviously, we entered into the database.

"People then started to observe the site when it came live and was easily found on Google, and they started entering their own businesses.

"We're not competing with anybody like the Yellow Pages or any of the other business directories - we're so entirely niche.

"We're for the people of a burgeoning generation of baby boomers who want convenience.

"They want the convenience of having somebody come and clean their home, clean their windows, look after their children, or mow their lawns.

"All of these things are difficult to find. You go and look for a babysitter in the Yellow Pages, and it's not possible, these are things that just don't happen."

Taking note of the success of sites such as Vouchermate, Fatso, and the cultural phenomenon Trade Me, Mr Keighley knew the demand for this type of free information service was there.

"The first few months we had thousands of unique browsers come in looking for products, and that's unusual for a website.

"Last week for example there were 60-odd businesses that added themselves, that's a big deal."

It's a new direction for the man who has worked with music acts worldwide and promoted both South Taranaki District Council events and the Parihaka Peace Festival.

Mr Keighley says this background led him to the idea.

"It started from recording an album in Los Angeles with a member of Ice House, and arriving there and paying $1000 a day for a studio, and finding out that I needed over 100 things that I couldn't find.

"When I did search for them and had them delivered it had taken us three weeks and we'd lost $18,000 in the process.

"I realised then that a directory, a physical directory of delivery services would have been wonderful."

His cautious approach, with careful research, is the result of a painful previous experience.

The promoter of the Sweetwaters 1999 festival - for which he shouldered responsibility for its collapse and ended up with jail time - Mr Keighley remains a picture of optimism.

"I've never been one to leap into things, and in this particular situation [New Zealand Delivers], I made sure that we had an incredibly robust research situation.

"There's no point in spending such a vast amount of time on something and making it mediocre.

"It has to be wonderful, anything I do now has to be, because as you move on in life you've got to do things that are positive, not otherwise."

Mr Keighley has an eye about how it can become profitable. "It's all about volume and low costs." He estimates that nzdelivers.co.nz will not be profitable for about a year.

"The only way it generates income is if somebody decides they want to be at the top of the heap. Lots of people have done that.

"There was a blinds cleaner in Christchurch, and there are probably 17 blinds cleaners in Christchurch, and he decided, just off the bat, that he wanted to be No 1 on the site, and paid his $1 a day for a year, and he's top of the list."

Website advertising plays its role - when using the search engine, a bank advertisement pops up in the corner.

Another advantage of free networking is the deal that the website can offer both the public and businesses. "The majority of the businesses that are now registering with New Zealand Delivers go straight on and give a [customer] discount - 15, 17 or 18 per cent - because it's costing them nothing to advertise on the site, so they're gaining between 10 per cent to 15 per cent anyway . . .

"We're able to tell an individual business that's on there how many people have come to their site, how many people have looked for their keyword, the word that generates all of their business.

"All those things are really important bits of information, because we can tell them when it happened, and they can look and see if it generated a sale or not, or a booking.

"We're of the belief that within six months it will be in common usage in the country, but that doesn't guarantee it will be financially massive instantaneously, it just means people will use it and it will have some function in New Zealanders' lives."

- © Fairfax NZ News