working together to create something cool for a particular audience.” Post-College, their stellar success reflects their early drive. “In 2008, we started a software development business called Smudge. We like to say that we sit at the intersection of design, business consultancy, and software engineering. We were fortunate to be in the right place at the right time with our
business. In our case, that time was 2008, which is when Apple launched the App Store. We were one of the first New Zealand developers to have an app featured on the store. “To begin with, we were building a new app almost every day, playing with different ideas, monitoring trends, throwing apps on the store and seeing if anyone downloaded them. One of those apps was called Sound Grenade,
which reached the top spot on the US App Store in January 2009. We then realised that we could make money from app development. “We built a team and Smudge started solving more complex problems for different audiences. The lens on our work is: Will this solution make people’s lives easier? If the answer is ‘yes’, we keep going.” Both acknowledge it “hasn’t always been plain sailing”, and
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