The quest for love & fulfilment

Rebekah Campbell’s story is both inspirational and captivating. She turned her dreams of building a successful business and marriage into action and has now published her blueprint for life in an entertaining and insightful new book.

Tenacity is Rebekah Campbell’s middle name. Tenacity is reflected in everything she has done in her 43 years and was initially triggered, she believes, during her younger years competing as a long distance runner. 

NZBusiness first met Rebekah in September 2013. She was an entrepreneur on a mission to succeed. Back then she was pushing herself to the limit as founder and CEO of Posse – an online platform that rewards people for sharing recommendations for cafés and shops.

Long before the era of crowdfunding, the Wellingtonian was based out of Sydney, working hard to raise capital for Posse – pitching to investors across Australia and in the hallowed meeting rooms of California’s famous Silicon Valley.

Posse.com wasn’t Rebekah’s first start-up project. Her first venture, Scorpio Music, was a management company behind several major artists. Posse was a spin-off that quickly grew after her second round of capital raising. Launched in March 2013, by the time NZBusiness caught up with her in September merchants already numbered 35,000 around the world, including 7000 stores in New Zealand.

In 2014, Rebekah lead a merger of Posse with Sydney start-up Beat the Q, forming Hey You – an app-based marketplace today used by more than a million Australians to order and pay at cafés and restaurants.

Again, we come back to that ‘T’ word. It took great personal tenacity to progress her business through the endless funding rounds and raise up two apps in a crowded marketplace.

Now you can read the remarkable story of Rebekah’s life in her autobiography 138 Dates – a compelling book that proves that the end result is always worth the effort.

The book describes her relentless pursuit of funding her business – basing herself in New York – and counts down the 138 often highly entertaining dates before she found ‘Mr Right’.

As well as benefiting from its general insights on relationships from a woman’s perspective, readers of 138 Dates also receive an unprecedented insight into the life of this hard-working entrepreneur – into her business world, and her own private quest involving several online dating sites, to track down the man she would marry.

That journey is a fascinating tale of exhaustion, humiliation and heartbreak that ultimately leads to Rod the love of her life, and ultimately a whole new life back in New Zealand as a wife and mother of two young children.

On work and motherhood

After becoming engrossed in the book for a week in May 2021, it was time to catch up with a very different Rebekah Campbell to the one I interviewed in 2013.

My first question was around balancing motherhood with her once hectic work life.

“After Eve, my first child, arrived in 2016 I thought it would be much easier than it was,” Rebekah recalls. “But I found it really exhausting, and I desperately wanted to spend time with her.”

Hey You was heading towards profitability back then, so she appointed a new CEO and stayed involved until March 2017. She then stepped back, remaining on the board for a year, before finally stepping away altogether.

Hey You is now the largest payments app for cafes in Australia. It has been downloaded by more than a million Australians to find cafés, order, pay and get rewards, and is tracking at around 40 thousand transactions per day.

Covid-19 was an unexpected boost to the business too, as many Aussie cafés suddenly saw the need to offer an ordering system under the harsher alert levels.

For Rebekah the Australian Covid lockdowns provided the incentive and time to progress the writing of 138 Dates, and spend more time with her family. “It was such a blessing, because we had both been working long hours, with the kids in day care. I just can’t imagine ever going back to that life now.”

The decision to come back to New Zealand to live in February 2021 was made while Rebekah and Rod were hiking the Abel Tasman track. They had both fallen in love again with the country’s culture, politics and multiculturalism. And with Eve, their daughter, about to start school the timing was perfect.

Passions and lessons

Today, in addition to caring for her children, Rebekah is enjoying being a part-time marketing consultant and plans to run online courses on launching and scaling businesses, capital raising and, no surprises – dating. “Everything I’m passionate about,” she laughs.

So what is her advice for techpreneurs looking to raise funds in 2021?

“It’s all in the planning.

“I raised too much money too early, and I didn’t quite have my business model worked out.

“You need to plan better, build your minimum viable product, then focus on your product and customer before you go and raise capital,” says Rebekah.

“Then approach investors who share your vision, and understand how long it can take to develop a business and produce results.

“Set expectations too – I remember one small investor in my first funding round expecting to meet for coffee every week. Things can quickly become unmanageable.”

A business can be at least a ten-year commitment, so before you start, be really sure that you’re building something that you really care the most about, says Rebekah. “And it’s a problem that you really want to solve.”

Rebekah’s other big piece of advice for fledgling techpreneurs is to value your personal relationships and connections. She hopes that’s a key message people will get from her book.

“When I was younger I don’t think I valued those long-term relationships enough. Now I do.”

Role models

Rebekah is excited to see the number of female techpreneurs now coming to the fore in New Zealand. “They’ve become great role models. A new generation of young women are now thinking about tech or entrepreneurialism as a career, and we’re well on the way to gender equality.”

Her biggest lesson for new techpreneurs is to only pursue what you’re truly passionate about. “So look at yourself first and ask – what do I care about, what am I good at? Really hone in on your skills and passions and pursue them. Because that’s where you’ll have the most success.”

As her book highlights, there is no perfect person, and no perfect business partnership. Sometimes it’s worth sticking it out to make it work, because the cost can be far greater if you go your own separate ways.

I ask Rebekah if she can see another business project in her future.

“I don’t see that in my future right now,” she replies. “I’m so enjoying my writing. I have some idea of what I might do. It will be completely different to what I’ve done in the past. But I do have the next couple of chapters lined up, which should see out my career.”

What she does see in her future is family, writing, communicating and speaking – everything she is totally passionate about. 

To purchase a copy of 138 Dates: The true story of one woman’s search for everything, go to www.allenandunwin.co.nz