Who is Graeme Blake?
Graeme Blake, father of 4 daughters, from Aotearoa, New Zealand, home of the Hobbit, the All Blacks and as of last week the Americas Cup.
With a background in design and creative direction Graeme Blake is a partner in digital advertising agency PAN® The Love Agency in New Zealand and founder of tech firm Blutui. Over the past 4 years the agency has been creating Blutui, a web development platform.
What’s the story behind Blutui?
Blutui is a web agency in a box. Built to address the various performance and functional issues of current tech Blutui combines a sophisticated web platform, content management and database management system with agency level controls to enable front end web developers and creative studios build, deploy and manage multiple websites with ease.
What was the most difficult part of your experience in the early beginnings?
Developing through beta and launching to V1.0 took us far longer than we anticipated. We self funded the projects in the early stages and with the help of an angel investor realised our vision of a commercial platform in late 2020. Continuing the project through the early covid lockdown was somewhat challenging but luckily New Zealand has avoided long running covid lockdowns and we’ve been able to maintain our fix and feature release program.
What are you most proud of regarding your business?
Personally I’m incredibly proud of our small team and that we’ve managed to deliver a world class solution to an industry we love and have been part of for such a long time.
What is your vision for the future of Blutui?
We are working hard to make Blutui the benchmark for creative web development in the creative industry. Blutui’s stated purpose is to help the creative industry win with web development, meaning we want it to set the industry apart from the DIY and generalist tools that are fast becoming ‘old tech’. With Blutui there are no constraints to creativity, no legacy code issues that make sites slower and less seo efficient than other tools. Blutui is, in our view, the future of web development for the creative industry.
What’s your advice for the businesses that are trying to adapt to this economic climate?
Research and embrace technologies. It’s not only emerging tech like AR/VR etc that matters its the iterative advances being made in mature areas of technology that can make a huge difference to your businesses work-stream, efficiency, user enjoyment and profitability.
There are so many areas of business operations that have been affected by the recent pandemic that make engagement, story-telling and stakeholder interaction more difficult than before that the businesses who adapt and embrace meaningful technological advancements will endure.
Please name a few technologies which have the greatest impact on your business.
We have 3 separate teams channeling comms incredibly efficiently as a result of embracing Slack for team communication, Slack lets us collaborate in real time highly effectively. Intercom is great for our in-app communication with users and as for languages and infrastructure we’re loving Laravel, Vue, Go Lang, Kubernetes, Tailwind CSS and Lets Encrypt.
When Blutui® launches to the front end web developer market we will be promoting an early adopter program where we reward front end web developers for deploying multiple sites with equity in the form of Blutui B shares. We are partnering another New Zealand based SaaS platform called Orchestra which will assist us in managing this share issue to front end developers around the world.
What books do you have on your nightstand?
I’d love to be able to talk here about some inspirational entrepreneurial author who inspires me but lets be real. My youngest daughter is 5 years old so it’s a mix of famous New Zealand children’s author Linley Dodds ‘Hairy Maclary’ and ‘Corona Diary’ a magnificently illustrated account of the pandemic by UK artist Vic Lee.
Because of the current economic climate our publication has started a series of discussions with professional individuals meant to engage our readers with relevant companies and their representatives in order to discuss their involvement, what challenges they have had in the past and what they are looking forward to in the future. This sequence aims to present a series of experiences, recent developments, changes and downsides in terms of their business areas, as well as their goals, values, career history, the high-impact success outcomes and achievements.
