To celebrate the reaching $30,000 stretch goal for ‘The Residents: Made in Wellington’, the book that I’ve written and crowdfunded with all of you on Pledge Me, I wanted to sit down with Pledge Me founder Anna Guenther.
A local heroine and champion for the power of people coming together, Anna was more than happy to explain how she came to Wellington and why we need to support our small businesses if we want to see them survive post-COVID.
Pledge Me founder Anna Guenther was born in Concord, Massachusetts, but moved to New Zealand when she was a teenager. “I always joke that the reason I have such revolutionary thoughts is because I was born where the American Revolution was born” Anna says.
Anna’s father was a computer engineer and her mum was a stay-at-home Mum. “Growing up I was way more into English than technology though, so it’s strange I started a tech company. I was deputy head librarian at school. I really liked getting access to books early. At high school, I did an exchange to Germany. I was an independent soul” Anna says.
After Anna’s family moved to Dunedin, she attended St Hilda’s. “I wasn’t cool. But I made friends with everyone. It was a definite shift, and I went from a progressive American life learning about many cultures and religions, to an Anglican all girls school. I was like ‘What? I have to wear a tie??’” says Anna.
When school ended, Anna first went to Otago University. “I ended up studying English literature but then moved back to the USA for a while after I finished” Anna says. “On my way back, a friend showed me Wellington. It was one of those perfect weekends, with no wind, and I was like ‘Oh man!’ I decided to settle here.
Anna scored a flat at the top of Cuba Street, and frequented places like the legendary bar, Mighty Mighty. “It was a good time to be in your early twenties, having a government job and out drinking in Wellington” Anna laughs.
Due to having previously worked in grants administration, Anna started working at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise when she returned from the USA. “I like to think it was because I was young and cheap, but I got to do lots of overseas trips with them.”
Coming from the grants world, Anna felt it was ‘dumb’ that someone else would decide whether or not a project was worthy, who didn’t have any context, and whether it could continue based on funding. “I had been inspired by what I saw overseas and so I decided to do a Masters in Entrepreneurship at Otago University on crowdfunding whilst working full time. PledgeMe came from that” says Anna.
While starting up PledgeMe, Anna was fortunate enough to meet someone who was working on the tech behind the scenes for a crowdfunding platform. While the partnership didn’t last, it was enough to get her business going. Since, she’s done several fundraising rounds, including a few equity funding rounds on PledgeMe.
Despite her Dunedin roots, Anna loves Wellington and feels deeply connected to the city. “I love that I see politicians acting really normally around town, and coming up and chatting to people and drinking at bars” says Anna. “It is so different to how it would be in the US.”
Anna believes in thinking about the audience you want to reach if you are looking for a crowdfunding platform, and values. She believes that PledgeMe is the natural choice for crowdfunding if you have a project which is based locally. “If you want to approach an American audience, or an international audience, Kickstarter makes more sense because the brand is known internationally. But if you want to do something locally, PledgeMe is the best. To me, it makes sense to support local, buy local, use local - do everything you can in your community. Coming out of COVID, we are asking how we can make businesses more sustainable - and the answer is to choose to support local. If we don’t, we’re not going to have jobs coming out of this if we keep outsourcing the work and making decisions purely based on cost.”
So how can people support local? How can we continue to keep our unique Wellington identity as ‘more than a government town’? Anna thinks that we need to remember: love old, support new. “For me, I think about the organisations I know and love and that I want to see survive. I love supporting new ventures; when PledgeMe was new, my friends had to stage an intervention to take my credit card details off me because I was pledging to everything. I had memorised them so it didn’t work. But that’s how into it I was. Continuing to support things you love” says Anna.
Anna loves ‘The Residents: Made in Wellington’ because it shares the stories of local people and places. “Wellington is unique and we need stories of our people to keep a community feeling” she says. “People need to realise that the future is in our own hands. We build the communities we want to see. Money isn’t the only way to support. Getting it out there and telling people why you love it does amazing good for everyone”