“Does anyone know a good sparky?”
If you’re in any of the local Facebook groups, you’ve seen that post. You’ve seen it this week. You’ve probably seen three versions of it, along with a good plumber, a reliable lawnmowing person, someone who can do a bit of concreting, and whether that café at the Heads is open on Mondays.
And every time, the same generous locals pile into the comments with the same handful of names and phone numbers. Then the post scrolls away, and four days later someone asks the exact same question, and everyone does it all again.
That’s a community answering its own question over and over because there’s nowhere to write the answer down.
The people this is actually for
Mangawhai, Mangawhai Heads, Te Arai and Kaiwaka are full of small businesses. Really small. One-person, ute-and-a-trailer, phone-in-the-pocket small. Tradies, bakers, cleaners, massage therapists, mowing, mobile mechanics, people who make things at their kitchen table and sell them at the market.
A lot of them are friends of mine. And here’s the thing that got under my skin: several of them have no findable presence at all. Not a bad website - no website. If you don’t already know their name, you cannot find them.
I know why, too, because I’ve had the conversation. Someone quotes them a few thousand dollars for a website. For a sole trader having a quiet winter, that’s not a marketing expense, that’s a decision about whether to do it or fix the ute. So they don’t. And they’re absolutely right not to, because most of them don’t actually need a website.
They need to be findable. Those are completely different problems, and our industry has spent twenty years happily selling the expensive one to people who needed the cheap one.
So we built the cheap one, and made it free
The Mangawhai Directory is a free local business directory. Over 45 categories, from electrical and plumbing and painting through to cafés, bakeries, beauty, real estate, retail and creative services. There’s a section for community organisations, clubs and churches too, because they’re part of the fabric of the place and just as hard to find.
Listing is free. Not free-for-now, not free-until-we-have-enough-of-you. Free.
I want to be straightforward about why, because “free” from a technology company usually has a catch and you’re right to look for it.
A directory is only worth anything if it’s complete. If you search for a builder and get three results, you don’t think “what a nice small directory” - you think “this is useless” and you go back to Facebook, and you never come back. Completeness is the entire product. And the moment you charge the smallest operator in town to be listed, you have guaranteed you’ll never be complete, because the smallest operator is exactly the person who won’t pay, and they’re also exactly the person the directory most needs to include.
So it’s free to be listed. Businesses who want to support it and stand out a bit can take a featured spot, and that’s what keeps the lights on. That’s the whole model.
The hard part wasn’t the code
I’ll be honest - the software is not the impressive bit here. I’ve built considerably harder things and so has everyone else in this trade.
The hard part was the data. Getting real, current, correct information about hundreds of local businesses means actually going and getting it. Ringing people. Checking a number that turned out to be disconnected two years ago. Working out that the business everyone calls one thing is registered as another. Chasing someone who is genuinely, legitimately too busy on a roof to answer their phone.
There is no clever technical solution to that. There’s just the unglamorous work of doing it, business by business, and then doing it again in six months because things change.
I think that’s worth saying out loud, because a lot of people with an idea assume the build is the mountain. Frequently the build is the foothills. The mountain is the tedious, repetitive, human work of making the thing actually true - and it doesn’t stop at launch, it starts at launch.
What I’ve taken from it
The gap between easy-for-you and hard-for-someone-else
This is the one that’s stuck with me most.
I sat down with a mate one afternoon and got his business findable online. To me it was a mildly pleasant afternoon doing something I could do half asleep. To him it was a thing he’d been putting off for two years because he didn’t know where to start and didn’t want to look stupid asking.
Twenty-odd years of doing this has made a lot of things feel completely ordinary to me. They are not ordinary. The gap between what’s easy for you and what’s hard for someone else is exactly where you can do the most good, and most of us walk past that gap every single day without noticing it’s there.
You don’t need a grand plan to give something back. You need to notice what’s trivial to you and expensive to the people around you, and then just do that thing.
Small towns keep you honest
There’s no hiding behind a brand here. If the directory is rubbish, I will hear about it at the shop, from someone I know, probably while I’m buying milk. If a listing has the wrong phone number on it, that’s not a support ticket - that’s a real person whose real phone isn’t ringing.
That’s a level of accountability you don’t get building software for people you’ll never meet, and I’ve found it genuinely clarifying. It makes you fix things faster. It makes you much more careful about what you promise.
It’s more fun with your friends in it
The thing I did not anticipate at all was how much I’d enjoy it. Client work is great and I’m lucky to do it. But there’s something different about opening a page and seeing your mate’s business sitting there, in a category, with a working phone number, findable by anyone who’s looking - and knowing that took you an afternoon and it might bring them work for years.
That’s a pretty good return on an afternoon.
Launched
The Mangawhai Directory went live in August 2026 and it’s growing every week.
If you run a business anywhere from Kaiwaka to Te Arai, go and get yourself listed - it’s free and it takes a few minutes: mangawhaidirectory.co.nz. If you’re a local looking for someone, have a browse, and if you spot something wrong or missing, tell me. Genuinely. That’s how it gets good.
And if you know someone running a good little business round here who’s not on it yet, do them a favour and send them the link. That’s really all this is - the same neighbourly thing everyone already does in the comments, just written down somewhere it won’t scroll away.