I bet everything on a startup… and failed.
After disappearing off the internet for a few years, I’m finally ready to share the story of Doorknock, becoming “Temporarily Ethically Kate”, and how getting chewed up by entrepreneurship eventually pushed me toward a much more aligned and fulfilling chapter of life.
For the last few years, if you’d looked me up online, you probably would’ve assumed I disappeared into a half-built startup and never came back out.
Fair assumption…
My LinkedIn and answer machine still says I work full-time at Doorknock. I practically vanished off all social platforms (but especially LinkedIn) while life threw me a few curveballs… startup stress, panic attacks, isolation, fatherhood, reinvention, and eventually a completely different direction than the one I originally thought I was heading toward.
People still message me asking:
“Are you still doing Doorknock?”
“What happened to it?”
“What are you actually doing these days?”
So this update is quite overdue.
And just to jump to the end for a second… Doorknock isn’t dead. It’s strategically parked. Paused. On ice. Hibernating for a sunnier season.
I’ll explain.
But let’s rewind to the BurgerFuel years first.
Before Doorknock, I spent nearly a decade at BurgerFuel HQ working across marketing, events, activations, customer experience, leadership training and company culture.
I freaking loved it.
Running event activations like Friday Night Bites, Beach Hop, Northern Bass and Kumeū Hot Rod Show. Designing the full Staff Anniversary and Reward & Recognition programmes for over 1000 staff. Running workshops, seminars and conferences as part of BurgerFuel’s customer service and leadership systems. Travelling the country training franchisees and promo teams. Leading local store marketing campaigns across 62 stores nationwide.
It was fun, people-heavy, fast-moving work. Some days I got home exhausted… but buzzing because I’d spent all day building up and connecting with other humans.
Looking back now, it’s painfully obvious where my natural strengths lived - people, communication, energy, culture, leadership and finding creative solutions to tough problems.
At the same time, I’d been sitting on this real estate idea for years… burning away in my imagination.
Doorknock.
The Doorknock dream…
The concept itself was simple.
Help people proactively connect with off-market homeowners before properties officially hit the market.
At the beginning, this worked through personalised physical “Doorknocks” - beautifully designed letters delivered to homes on behalf of interested buyers. But the long-term vision was much bigger. I wanted to build a digital ecosystem where buyers could search for homes that matched exactly what they were looking for - even if those homes weren’t technically for sale yet - and either help stimulate an off-market sale, or position themselves first in line when the owners decided to sell.
The prototype exists. The UX exists. The industry relationships exist. The investor deck exists. The whole thing is currently wrapped in a nice little bow waiting for momentum and one more pivot.
I can now tell you clearly that… emotionally, Doorknock represented way more than a startup to me. It was freedom. Ownership. Legacy. The dream of building something meaningful from scratch. Contributing to the world – and making a positive change.
So I left BurgerFuel and went all in.
Kate and I rented our house out, reduced our costs through house-sitting, and gave ourselves a one-year runway to properly build the thing. 2024 was the year.
Which now feels slightly laughable in hindsight…
Thinking I could get a three-sided marketplace, revolutionary service, and entirely new consumer behaviour model up and running… and paying me a living wage… within 12 months. Ridiculous. Or, slightly less harshly… Wildly optimistic.
The garage years
The beginning had huge energy.
Mostly through Mission Ready and Magic Turtle, I built a team of around 14 people at any given time (26 amazing people worked with us in total through the years) across multiple intern cohorts - developers, UX designers, testers, marketers and project managers. Check them out here (Each one was a truly amazing human - who I will treasure forever! Thank you team - you have me more than you’ll ever realise xx)
Some of the highest highs of my professional life happened during that season. I loved mentoring people, articulating the vision, whiteboarding ideas and building team culture. I came alive in that environment. And the feedback from my team proved it.
That should have been my first big clue.
Because the further Doorknock progressed, the more isolated I became in all other areas.
I slowly drifted away from being “on the street” testing ideas, talking to users and building momentum… and deeper into “the garage” trying to architect the perfect system. I was blinded by chasing perfection and fleshing out a giant dream.
Refining endless features.
Perfecting UX… then making it better
Building beautiful and intuitive website infrastructure.
Trying to solve every bottleneck before fully validating the next stage.
Classic first time founder stuff really… But the painful part is I knew I was doing it while I was doing it... I just couldn’t stop.
I was deeply emotionally attached to the vision and probably overestimated how quickly the market would catch up to what I could see in my head. Some people loved it. Some people bought and sold through us, and some agents generated leads and sales from it too. We sent close to 1000 Doorknocks throughout the year and most were paid customer campaigns.
But I was also trying to launch a new behavioural-change platform into a flat, post-Covid property market where everyone was cautious, uncertain and tired.. and not really willing to try the new untested thing.
Probably the fundamental flaw with Doorknock.
One of the biggest issues (now with hindsight) was the hand-delivery model itself. I loved the human element of real estate agents delivering Doorknocks on behalf of buyers. On paper it made perfect sense…
In reality, some agents were amazing… and others took six weeks to deliver letters or simply didn’t deliver them at all. Leaving me to manage my frustrated paying clients.
I realised I’d outsourced a critical part of my customer experience to people who didn’t actually own the outcome… or who meant well, but didn’t prioritise delivery.
That was brutal.
There were other hits too. My original business partner messily exited 3 weeks before I was due to quit my job. Printing costs went from $2.50 to $9.90 per Doorknock. My mentor network wasn’t the magical safety net I naively hoped it would be.
And then Kate got pregnant… Amazing news!! But life altering. Which really meant:
No option of extending the start-up runway.
No more room for another much needed “pivot”.
No “just another six months… I’m close”.
I needed reliable income and security.
Then… the wheels came off totally.
By late 2024, it became painfully obvious that my original timeline wasn’t going to work.
Part of the problem was that I’d spent the year flip-flopping between two competing strategies - bootstrapping the business slowly and sustainably… versus trying to build something big enough, fast enough, to attract outside investment.
In reality, I was caught awkwardly between the two.
That realisation also hit me mega hard.
The stress started manifesting physically - heart palpitations, panic attacks, sleeplessness, anxiety and low emotional states I’d never really experienced before.
Most days I barely left the property we were house-sitting in. I’d sit in the garage trying to force solutions into existence while feeling increasingly disconnected from the environments that actually gave me life - people, events, energy, community, momentum.
I cracked under pressure. I said things to my senior developer I wish I could take back. I became reactive. I felt so guilty and embarrassed that I had let people down.
Then enters my mum - wonderful Joanne. Ol’ Jo Jo.
Every Thursday afternoon she’d come over and help me untangle my thinking. Whiteboarding ideas, helping structure plans, helping me figure out what the next move even was. And in the end… how to pause and park Doorknock.
Looking back now, that support probably kept my head above water (thanks mum, I love you and am deeply thankful for your time and support there in particular).
Underneath all the startup language and strategy talk… I was just trying really hard to build a meaningful and succesful life. And it hurt me in a deep place thinking I had failed at that.
Tim’s Dark Ages… and the dawn of Ethically Kate
At some point I just went quiet.
I couldn’t face LinkedIn or social media.
Struggled to send emails.
It even pained me to look at the pink Doorknock hangers.
The year came to a close… and so did I. I melted into the darkness with my tail between my legs. Something I’d never experienced before.
Then came the Ethically Kate Bump Tour.
Each year Kate and I travel around New Zealand visiting businesses, filming content, running events and meeting Kate’s followers around the country. This particular road trip happened while Kate was pregnant with Orchard, so we called it the Bump Tour - or watch the epic highilight video here.
And frankly… it helped heal me.
As we drove away from Auckland, I could physically feel the stress lifting off my shoulders. Over those months, perspective slowly returned, and optimism came back.
Doorknock wasn’t necessarily a failure. It was more like an extremely costly education taught by the school of hard knocks.
Buried inside those years were lessons I now use almost every day – around client trust, customer hesitation, founder psychology, messaging clarity and how businesses often lose potential customers between “awareness” and “conversion”.
I also realised something much bigger.
I never really intended to be a fully isolated solo founder sitting behind a laptop trying to architect perfect systems… feeling alone… and eventually becoming overwhelmed.
I come alive in rooms.
I light up in conversations.
I love creating momentum.
I have skills in helping people learn, grow, and reach their potential.
Becoming “Temporarily Ethically Kate”
Kate and I had two options.
I either went back to a full-time external job… or I stepped fully into Ethically Kate while Kate focused on pregnancy and becoming a mum.
So I changed her email signature to “Tim - The Temporarily Ethically Kate”…and got to work.
That’s where I came alive again.
I began asking questions that turned into strategy sessions with founders, started building multi-touchpoint campaigns, mapping customer journeys and helping brands think more deeply about the marketing funnel (awareness, education and conversion).
And all the messy startup years suddenly started becoming highly useful.
I understood founder pain. I understood bottlenecks. I understood emotional attachment to ideas. I understood how businesses lose customers between “Oooh, I’m curiosity about this product” and “It’s time to take action”.
That middle section became my obsession… and I dived into (nearly) countless hours of research.
To oversimplify things here for a moment…. The solution to this issue for eco founders was almost always “trust and education”… which happens to be the middle layer of the marketing funnel. The bridge between awareness and conversion.
I now call this “The lily pad” and have built my philosophy around it… but more on that in another article.
What my work looks like now
The work I do now looks very different from what I imagined a few years ago, but it uses far more of me. Most days, I feel like a round peg in a round hole again.
We’re building long-term partnerships with brands, creating strategy and conversion audits, building education funnels, recording podcasts, building bridge pages and multi-year collaborations through the wider Ethically Kate ecosystem.
We’ve also white-labelled incredible people into the mix across development, AI discoverability, SEO/AEO/GEO, paid media, design and website strategy. All targeted at founder lead, small to medium businesses.
And increasingly, this work is extending beyond just eco brands (though they will always be the core of who Ethically Kate serves). I’ve realised my skillset + Ethically Kate “framework” can also support:
Founder-led businesses (small to medium).
Service businesses.
Real estate-adjacent and financial services businesses.
All sorts of values-led or mission driven companies.
Businesses where trust matters, and where consumers need to be psychologically and factually satisfied before making the purchase (And surprise… that’s almost every business).
Businesses where people need help moving customers from awareness… through education… through to action.
That’s the thread tying all of this together. And over the last year in Ethically Kate, I’ve learnt it’s surprisingly overlooked.
So what should my LinkedIn blurb become now?
I’ve genuinely been thinking about this lately.
Because “former Doorknock guy” doesn’t really fit anymore. And I’m more than “Mr Ethically Kate”.
I think where I’m landing is something closer to:
Tim Hall
Founder
Strategist
Community builder
Funnel translator
Relationship-first growth thinker
Battle-tested operator
That feels closer to the real identity forming.
I help founder-led and values-driven businesses clarify what they’re trying to say, understand where people are dropping off, and build more human pathways between awareness, education, trust and action. That’s it. That’s me.
Sometimes that looks like a strategy session. Sometimes a brand audit. Sometimes a campaign, podcast idea, or carefully crafted bridging page. Sometimes it’s simply helping a founder untangle six years of mental knots into a clear next move.
If you just read that and thought, “Hallelujah, I need some of that,” then genuinely - reach out or DM me. We should probably have a video call.
I’ve had founders leave conversations saying things like:
“Talking with Tim felt like chatting with a friend who wanted to support our idea - but who also really understood marketing and small business.”
Or as Vanessa, founder of Staple Co, put it:
“This is the best business chat I’ve had in years. Probably the best conversation I’ve had with any professional since starting Staple Co.”
Feedback like that is incredibly humbling to receive.
But more than anything, it tells me I’m probably standing in the right sort of place… at least for this season.
So what am I actually doing now?
I’m still deeply plugged into the Ethically Kate machine (and building epic Funnel Health Check Tools and helping amazing sustainable brands be seen) - building community, growing partnerships, and helping expand the services and systems supporting eco businesses.
But personally, I’m also widening the aperture beyond it too.
I guess “consulting” is probably the right word for it… though it still feels slightly weird to type.
The work I’m drawn toward sits somewhere between strategy, marketing, founder psychology, customer journey thinking and helping businesses communicate themselves more clearly and more humanly.
And strangely, all the messy startup years ended up becoming incredibly useful for that.
If I had a magic wand, I’d probably also conjure up a 10-15 hour per week role somewhere too. Something to diversify our family income a little so all our eggs aren’t in one basket, and somewhere I can express even more of my skills, energy and interests.
So if you’re reading this thinking “Oh… Tim would actually be perfect for XYZ”… send me a message. We can book a call, grab a coffee, or even a cider.
Either way, I’m looking to support more founders, more industries, and a wider ecosystem of good people building meaningful things.
So to conclude this update…
If you’ve read this far, thank you.
It’s lovely to be back online.
Kate and I are now raising Orchard with another baby on the way. We’re building the next evolution of Ethically Kate, launching podcasts, growing partnerships, building The Suburban Homestead Project (something that deserves it’s own blog) and working with brands across New Zealand, Australia and increasingly the USA (oooh… I like that).
I’m slowly rebuilding my own public voice again too – Whatever that means.
Not as someone who has everything perfectly figured out. More as someone who’s been through a fairly wild few years, learned a lot, got knocked around a bit, found perspective, and finally feels like he’s standing in the right place again.
Tune in, follow along, enjoy the “bumpy” ride.
Tim xx
Send me a message here.
