Part of MBIE's Digital Boost programme
The Right Tool
Part of MBIE's Digital Boost programme
The Right Tool
Right tools for you — the software marketplace for Kiwi businesses, built as part of MBIE's Digital Boost programme and acquired by TUANZ in 2022.
The Right Tool was created to help Kiwi businesses cut through the noise of an increasingly crowded software landscape — a marketplace of business apps, cloud experts and tailored recommendations, built for founders Denym Bird and Alex Hamilton as part of MBIE's Digital Boost programme. Wild led it end to end: product planning, UX and UI, and full-stack engineering across three codebases.
business owners MBIE put the platform in front of
codebases we built and ran: React frontend, TypeScript admin, Django API
critical findings in the government-commissioned penetration test
years from first commit to acquisition
The engagement started in November 2020, and the pace set the tone: the MVP was demoed to MBIE within a month — their feedback was how impressed they were with how quickly things were coming together — and the platform launched publicly that February. Listings could be claimed and reviewed, industries filtered, and a Typeform-powered Free Tool Finder matched businesses to software.
In March 2021, MBIE pushed The Right Tool to roughly 800,000 business owners through its national business database. The platform held. The same month it passed a government-commissioned penetration test by Aura Infosec with nothing critical — the handful of high-priority items were fixed within days. Analytics events fed a dashboard MBIE used to track the programme's impact.
Six months after launch we shipped a full redesign — new design system, structured SEO with sitemaps and schema, featured advisors, and an admin panel the founders ran themselves. Reviews, listings and the industry taxonomy all stayed live through the cutover.
Incredible work Elliot and co.
In 2022 The Right Tool was acquired by TUANZ to link it more deeply into the Digital Boost programme — and Wild was the technical side of the sale: the buyer's due-diligence review ran on our repos, and we managed the full handover of code, hosting, DNS and data to the new owners. Built well enough to be bought.