Chris Hexton and the value of starting over

Chris Hexton went to San Francisco with an invoicing product. He came back with a reason to stop building it. For a young founder, that is an awkward souvenir. Investors had been lukewarm. The product had users, but little affection. There was enough activity to keep working and too little conviction to make the work feel worthwhile. Hexton and his co-founder, James Lamont, chose to begin again.

They had entered Startmate in 2012 with invc.me, software intended to make invoicing easier for freelancers working with clients around the world. The idea grew out of their own small consulting business. During the accelerator's first three months, it attracted hundreds of users. That might have been sufficient material for a presentation. It was less persuasive as a reason to spend years on the company.

The decision matters because Vero's history can look deceptively tidy when compressed into a founding date, an investor and a product description. The beginning was an abandoned idea. Hexton and Lamont had to separate the pleasure of having made something from the evidence that anyone wanted it enough. An invoice is a request to be paid. Their next business would take that request rather more seriously.

They looked at problems they had encountered while building invc.me and working for clients. One kept returning: software businesses needed a manageable way to send messages prompted by what a customer actually did. A welcome after a signup. A useful explanation during a trial. A timely reminder. The opportunity was sitting in the ordinary exchanges between a product and the person using it.

An accountant with a programming habit

Before all this, Hexton worked at PwC. He entered through a cadetship after school, combining work with evening study before returning to university full time. His LinkedIn profile lists the University of Technology Sydney from 2006 to 2009. In describing his departure from PwC, he has been careful to say that he liked the firm. He simply could not see himself spending his whole career there.

Programming offered another direction. Hexton had tinkered with code as a teenager; he and Lamont had known each other since childhood and coded together during their university years. Lamont had studied software engineering. Hexton brought a hobby programmer's interest and a wish to get better. Their consulting business, Semblance, gave them a practical answer to the question of what to do next: build things for other people.

A mentor with a web consultancy connected them to early subcontracting work. One job supplied a portfolio for the next. There is something pleasantly unceremonious about this route into entrepreneurship. No grand revelation was required before the first customer. Someone needed work done; two people were available to do it. Along the way, those customers supplied a closer view of the problems that software could solve.

Vero emerged in the space between basic email tools and complicated enterprise systems. Hexton's early ambition was concrete: make it easier for a software team to respond to its users. The message should follow the customer's experience. That premise would leave room for a surprisingly long series of decisions about engineering, marketing, data and money.

Two people, one room, then the readers

The first email passed through Vero in June 2012. Hexton's later recollection described a basic system held together with manual scripts. From that June until January 2013, the company was Hexton and Lamont in a room. The romance of a startup can survive almost anything except a sufficiently detailed look at its first version. Manual scripts are an excellent corrective.

By March 2015, Hexton could report more than 420 customers, more than five billion rows of stored customer data and 85,000 monthly blog readers. The team had become eight people spread around the world. Those are historical snapshots, taken while Vero was still growing without institutional investment. The readers belong in the picture alongside the customers: writing was part of how the business reached people.

Hexton published practical advice about lifecycle messages, abandoned shopping carts and turning blog subscribers into customers. His writing often dealt with the unglamorous details that determine whether a campaign is useful: timing, segmentation, the destination after a click. He was selling software partly by teaching people how to think about the work they would do with it.

In a 2014 explanation of Vero's own marketing, consistency came first. The team posted weekly, spoke to customers at least every two weeks and reviewed campaigns before automating the ones that worked. Planning mattered because a small team could not improvise an entire publishing and email operation every morning. The modest routine was the mechanism.

There were less polished moments too. In November 2014, Hexton and colleague Jimmy Daly recorded an email-marketing Q&A in a conference room at Segment's San Francisco office. They had neglected to bring audio-recording equipment. Daly acknowledged the poor sound quality; the questions had still been good. A company teaching better communication had produced a recording that needed an apology for the audio. The work continued.

Five years before the funding round

In June 2017, Vero raised A$4 million from Square Peg Capital. The company had spent its first five years bootstrapping. By the time of the announcement, its customer base included Canva, The Iconic and Airtasker. Around 70 percent of its approximately 250 clients were in the United States. Sydney was the base; the market had become international.

The capital had a job to do. Vero wanted to expand product and marketing teams and pursue a more systematic approach to growth. Hexton's account of the decision was measured: the product had matured, customers were collecting more data, and the business had ambitions it could now finance. Funding followed years of work, rather than supplying a substitute for it.

That distinction has remained relevant. In a later public conversation with Jodie Imam, Hexton described a funding path that moved from bootstrapping to one venture round and then back to organic growth, using venture debt for flexibility. He spoke positively about Square Peg while explaining why the company had not simply continued raising rounds. Different stages of the same business could call for different arrangements.

It is easy to give a funding strategy a personality: brave, cautious, ambitious, independent. Hexton's account is more useful when read as a sequence of operating choices. What is the market doing? How quickly is the company growing? What investment does the next stage require? The round is one event in a longer working life. It need not become the plot of every subsequent chapter.

Eighty conversations and a smaller promise

Years after the original launch, Vero returned to customer discovery. A February 2022 account described more than 80 interviews with customers and non-customers, alongside hundreds of hours of discussion. The questions concerned the company's next years: its ambitions, where it could make a distinctive contribution, and how it could give customers more value. An established product still required an argument for its future.

One finding concerned data customers already held. Businesses increasingly maintained their own internal data platforms. Paying a marketing tool to store a second copy added cost and complexity. Vero Connect addressed that problem by letting teams work from their existing warehouse. It was a change in what the company offered to take responsibility for, as well as a change in software.

Hexton explained the thinking further in 2023. The original product combined a customer database with a marketing interface. Connect separated those layers, leaving customers to bring their own data warehouse. He also described requests for saved audiences: data teams could prepare queries, and marketers could reuse them with confidence. The practical question was how colleagues could work together without each campaign becoming a new technical negotiation.

The idea has an appealing restraint. A software company can respond to growth by trying to own more of a customer's work. Hexton was willing to leave part of it with other specialists. That makes the boundary of the product a design decision. The ambition rests in doing a particular job well enough that customers will choose it, even when other parts of their system live elsewhere.

Back at the keyboard

Hexton's public writing supplies a glimpse of the person behind those choices. Older author biographies mention reading novels on a Kindle and playing guitar. The details are small, but welcome. A founder can become strangely two-dimensional when every paragraph concerns revenue. Here is someone whose reading has included fiction and whose hands have had something to do besides type.

In September 2025, he described returning to a weekly thought piece for Vero. As the team grew, writing had slipped behind tasks that felt more important. He found that teaching clarified his thinking and helped both customers and colleagues understand his point of view. The activity that had helped the early business reach readers had become useful again to the older business.

“You can't teach if you don't understand.”

Chris Hexton, on returning to writing

His position on AI has a similar practical bent. In a 2025 post, he said Vero's product and engineering teams were using it, while questioning confident predictions that agents would soon build complete software products on their own. He described the surrounding work: customer conversations, design, infrastructure, quality checks and the small details of an experience. Faster coding still leaves decisions about what deserves to be built.

An August 2026 interview described another response to demand: Vero's MCP interface, which allows customers to work with the platform through AI assistants. Hexton reported unusually strong requests for it. The team was also experimenting with AI coding tools and a repository of marketing material. The change reached both the product customers used and the way Vero did its own work.

There is a thread from the abandoned invoicing product to these newer experiments. Hexton keeps returning to the exchange between what a team assumes and what customers ask for. In 2012, that exchange cost him an idea. Later it helped reshape where Vero stored data and how people could use the software. Starting over turned out to be a skill with more than one application. The invoices, presumably, are now somebody else's problem.