FILE_001 / ORIGIN

I didn’t sit down one day and decide to start a digital business.

There was no grand business plan.

No whiteboard with COOPER DELIVERED DIGITAL written across the top.

No five-year strategy.

It was much less organised than that.

I just kept running into things that annoyed me.

Things I wished worked differently.

Things I wanted for my own businesses.

And eventually I got tired of saying:

“Someone should build that.”

So I started trying to build them myself.

And somehow, somewhere between shampoo bars, handmade marketplaces, gardening, WordPress, five acres of rural Australia and far too many browser tabs…

Cooper Delivered Digital appeared.

It actually starts with shampoo bars.

I’m a hairdresser by trade.

That part of my life eventually became Cooper Delivered, our Australian eco haircare business.

I wanted to stay connected to an industry I genuinely love, but I had started looking differently at the amount of waste surrounding everyday products.

Shampoo bars became part of that answer.

But when you run a business, you quickly discover that selling the product is only one tiny piece of it.

You need a website.

You need packaging.

You need marketing.

You need systems.

You need ways of tracking things.

You need to solve approximately 4,782 tiny problems nobody mentioned when you decided starting a business sounded like a good idea.

And every problem sends you looking for another tool.

Sometimes I found one.

Sometimes I didn’t.

Sometimes I found one and thought:

Why does it work like this?

That question became rather dangerous.

Then there was Nana.

My other business is Nana’s Quest, an online marketplace for handcrafted goods.

That started for an entirely different reason.

I wanted somewhere my Nana could sell the things she made.

But I didn’t want to build another marketplace that felt like an endless grid of products.

You know the sort.

Photo.

Price.

Photo.

Price.

Photo.

Price.

Keep scrolling.

I wanted something closer to wandering through a Sunday market.

You walk around.

You discover things.

You meet makers.

You stumble across something you weren’t actually looking for.

Because one day we get older.

Maybe driving to the Sunday market isn’t so easy anymore.

Maybe the market is hundreds of kilometres away.

Maybe life simply changes.

The internet can’t completely recreate being there.

But why shouldn’t we try to make it feel closer?

That idea changed the way I thought about websites.

A website didn’t have to be somewhere you simply looked.

It could be somewhere you entered.

Then gardening somehow became software.

We live off-grid on five acres in rural Australia.

Which means I garden.

A lot.

I tried gardening apps.

I didn’t particularly like them.

And, to be completely truthful, I didn’t particularly want another subscription either.

So naturally I had a completely reasonable thought:

Why don’t I just build my own gardening app?

That became Cooper Delivered Earth.

It was built around how I actually wanted to garden.

Our land.

Our plants.

Our planning.

The information I wanted when I was standing outside wondering what on Earth I was supposed to do next.

Then I showed it to someone.

They loved it.

So I thought:

Bugger it. Let’s put it on Google Play.

And we did.

That was probably one of the moments where something changed in my head.

Because suddenly it wasn’t:

Could I build this?

It was:

What else could I build?

Then technology failed me.

Which was actually quite useful.

Living off-grid gives you a slightly different relationship with technology.

Technology is incredible.

Until the power isn’t.

Or the internet isn’t.

Or Starlink doesn’t quite reach wherever you’ve wandered off to on five acres.

Earth has an offline mode.

But one day I started thinking about what a true offline mode would look like.

And then it became painfully obvious.

Paper.

Possibly humanity’s most reliable offline technology.

So the digital gardening world became physical too.

We created the Cooper Delivered Earth Garden Planner as a paper companion to the app.

Alongside that sits Soil to Roots, another Cooper Delivered book that has already made its way into bookstores.

And I loved what that taught me.

Digital doesn’t necessarily need to replace physical things.

Sometimes technology can make the physical experience better.

Sometimes the physical thing makes the digital experience better.

They can talk to each other.

Then I looked at the parcel.

Running an eco business creates another problem.

Once you start noticing waste, it’s rather difficult to stop noticing it.

We could spend all this time thinking about ingredients, plastic and sustainability…

then send the product into the world inside packaging designed to become rubbish.

That didn’t make much sense to me.

So we started working on the AllWays Bag.

The idea is ridiculously simple:

What if the packaging wasn’t rubbish when the parcel arrived?

Use it.

Reuse it.

Send it again.

Different problem.

Same pattern.

Something bothered me, so I started trying to build a different answer.

Marketing annoyed me next.

Running two businesses means marketing two businesses.

And marketing gets messy remarkably quickly.

Campaigns.

Content.

Research.

Competitors.

Ideas.

Notes.

Calendars.

More notes.

A note telling you where you put the other note.

I wanted something that worked more like my brain.

So I built The Board.

Campaigns became cases.

Competitors became suspects.

Research became evidence.

Marketing became an investigation.

Again, it wasn’t born because somebody told me there was a lucrative software opportunity.

I needed it.

So I built it.

There seems to be a theme developing here.

And then WordPress started annoying me.

I actually love WordPress.

Partly because it gives people an extraordinary amount of freedom.

But running WooCommerce businesses also introduced another pile of little frustrations.

Why does an order simply say Processing when there might be six different things I still need to do?

How much money is actually sitting in my stock?

What did I make after the product itself cost me money?

Which customer issue am I still waiting to resolve?

Some of these aren’t enormous software problems.

They’re tiny annoyances.

And that’s important.

Because not every problem needs a gigantic $49-a-month platform.

Sometimes you just need a bloody button that does the thing.

So we started building WooCommerce plugins.

Small tools.

Small solutions.

Some inexpensive.

Some free.

And occasionally one of those little ideas turns into something considerably bigger.

That’s how the digital side stopped looking like a random collection of experiments.

It had become something.

Cooper Delivered Digital.

Looking backwards, it makes perfect sense.

Looking forwards while it was happening?

Not remotely.

And maybe that’s why I like it.

I’m sometimes called an overachiever.

I’ve never particularly related to that.

I’ll have a day off.

I’ll think of something.

I’ll wonder whether I could make it.

I’ll open WordPress.

Then I start.

Then I get excited.

And then suddenly it’s considerably later than it was when I began.

That’s basically the business model.

Yes, I use AI.

I want this written into the origin story because I don’t want Cooper Delivered Digital pretending otherwise.

AI is one of my tools.

So is WordPress.

PHP.

CSS.

JavaScript.

APIs.

Documentation.

Google.

Notebooks.

And an irresponsible number of browser tabs.

I use AI to help me research, project-manage ideas, challenge my thinking, troubleshoot problems and get from:

“Could we?”

to:

“Let’s try it.”

faster.

I don’t think using better tools diminishes creativity.

I think refusing to use a useful tool simply because it makes something faster would be rather strange.

But AI doesn’t decide that Nana’s Quest should feel like wandering through a Sunday market.

It doesn’t decide that a gardening app should become a book because sometimes the power goes out.

It doesn’t decide that marketing should feel like solving a murder.

And it doesn’t decide what something should mean.

AI is a tool.

The idea still needs a human.

Which brings us to websites.

This is probably where Cooper Delivered Digital becomes a little opinionated.

I don’t want to build boring websites.

That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with simple websites.

There are thousands of perfectly functional templates that will do exactly what thousands of businesses need them to do.

But that’s not the bit that excites me.

I want things to move.

I want the website to react.

I want someone to discover something.

I want a digital shop to feel like somewhere you’ve entered rather than a catalogue somebody uploaded.

We’re increasingly replacing physical shopping experiences with digital ones.

So why are we settling for digital spaces that all feel the same?

Businesses spend years trying to create products that don’t look like everybody else’s.

They develop branding so they don’t look like everybody else’s.

They worry about competitors copying them.

And then sometimes they build a website that looks remarkably similar to everybody else’s.

Why?

The internet doesn’t have to be a collection of identical rectangles.

That’s the kind of website I want to build →

I grew up hearing people say one sentence.

When somebody invented something clever:

“I thought of that years ago.”

Maybe they did.

But they didn’t build it.

I never wanted to spend my life doing that.

I’d rather try.

Maybe the idea works.

Maybe it fails spectacularly.

Maybe version one is terrible.

Maybe we discover version seventeen is what the idea was trying to become all along.

But at least we’ll know.

Because we built it.

So what exactly is Cooper Delivered Digital?

Right now?

It’s where all these strange little threads finally connect.

Cooper Delivered gave us eco haircare, sustainability, Earth, books and packaging.

Nana’s Quest gave us craft, marketplaces, storytelling and immersive digital commerce.

Running both businesses gave us problems.

Those problems gave us tools.

Those tools gave us plugins.

The ideas gave us apps.

And somewhere amongst all of it came a very simple philosophy:

Build what you need.
Share what works.
Keep asking what could be better.

We’re doing it off-grid on five acres in rural Australia.

I get to garden.

I get to craft.

I get to build technology.

What a strange combination.

And what a bloody wonderful one.

If we can dream it, we can build it.

That’s Cooper Delivered Digital.

Not a giant agency pretending to have all the answers.

Not another collection of templates.

It’s a place to experiment.

To build.

To learn.

To occasionally break something.

To fix it.

And then probably wonder:

What if we did this instead?

There are apps to build.

Plugins to create.

Websites to experiment with.

Businesses to grow.

And plenty of problems we haven’t even discovered yet.

Good.

Problems give us something to build.

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So… what should we build next?

EXPLORE WHAT WE’VE BUILT →

HAVE SOMETHING YOU WANT TO BUILD? →