Collabs.

New Zealand has a rich creator ecosystem, content creators, photographers and videographers, and no shortage of brands who want authentic local content. The problem is that the matching between them is broken. The big international platforms are built for the US market and do not serve NZ well, and the default alternative, sliding into Instagram DMs, is not a system. It is guesswork.

Collabs is a clean, fast, NZ-focused marketplace where the two sides actually find each other. Creators set up a profile. Brands post a collab. It is free for creators to list and free for brands to browse, because the only thing that matters early on is real activity, so I kept every ounce of friction out of the way.

The best collabs do not feel like ads. They happen when the right brand finds the right creator and the content speaks for itself, so the whole product is built around fit rather than volume. A featured creator slider with admin curation surfaces good people, and a blog system does the slow work of SEO so the marketplace can be found by the people searching for exactly this.

The challenge with any two-sided marketplace is liquidity, getting enough of both sides on at once that neither shows up to an empty room. Keeping it free and local is the deliberate answer to that. The product is positioned as the antidote to the international platforms: not a global tool that treats NZ as an afterthought, but one built around the way NZ creators and brands actually work. It was migrated off cPanel onto Forge and given a conversion pass, and it is live with creator and brand activity growing.