Introduction
Discover how Luke Anear built SafetyCulture into one of Australia’s 12 unicorns, serving 75,000 companies globally with 750+ team members and no external sales team. In this insightful QnA, Luke shares his journey from a private investigator to founding a tech company that helps teams do their best work every day.
Founder Success Story QnA
What’s the context of your upbringing that created the entrepreneur you are today?
I think a lot of support from my mom, she was probably my number one fan. Growing up with no money helps, constraints and imperatives drive innovation. We had plenty of constraints and fair few imperatives, so that helped. When I was young, I thought if we could have some money then we would be happier, but by the time I was 17-18, I was earning 120 grand a year in my own place and was lonely. I thought money is not the answer, must be something else to this equation I’m missing. Once I figured out that it’s about doing something that makes a positive difference in the world and doing more for other people rather than trying to just serve yourself, that’s when things got much easier.
What is SafetyCulture and what positive impact are you creating?
I used to be a private investigator spying on people for insurance companies when they got injured at work. SafetyCulture was created to help people do their best work every day. We have a platform that started with a checklist app, which is the world’s most used checklist app. Whenever a plane takes off or a hotel room gets cleaned, there’s a good chance SafetyCulture was involved. Today we’re an operations platform which helps companies do what they do better with their teams – they train and report issues, get information to the right people at the right time, and take data off assets. Essentially, we just help teams improve what they do every day.
Can you share the story about the airline in South America?
We were still in the garage in Townsville when Al had put an update out. One of the things you could do with our app was take photos of aircraft, but the update had broken the report builder that takes all the photos and answers and turns it into a PDF. That was no longer working. By about 8 or 9 p.m. we had this email from an airline saying they love our app, they use it to inspect all their aircraft, but because they couldn’t get a report, they couldn’t pass that on to the regulators as part of their auditing. They said we could get grounded if someone comes to check on this. That was the moment where we went holy crap, this is real. People are actually relying on this thing we built.
What were some of the learning lessons as the business scaled?
Scaling is the key. Building an app for 100 people to use is pretty easy, but building an app for 100 million people is a whole other set of complexities. You need to build it so it’s not going to break, and as more people start using it, you have to make sure they still get an experience that’s going to allow them to want to come back. We had customers building checklists with up to 45,000 questions in a checklist, all logic driven. The memory management on the devices was insane. Those complexities come in when you start getting lots of people doing things that you never imagined with your products.
What is the scale of SafetyCulture today?
We serve about 75,000 companies around the world. We don’t have any external sales people, so that’s all inbound. Pretty much every company you could think of would probably use us in some way, but most of them don’t use us across the board because we’ve never gone and sold it to them. It’s frontline workers who have been picking it up and using it and driving it. They become our salespeople, which is kind of our secret sauce. Our team is about 750 odd people today, and we’re hiring 200 more at the moment. We serve everyone from the United Nations checking security points in Afghanistan to SpaceX, Tesla, Rolls-Royce building aircraft engines, or Mitsubishi doing airbag recalls.
How much of your current business vision was ingrained in you 12 years ago?
It evolves for sure. The opportunities got bigger for us over time, and our ability to build good products that customers want has improved. From the beginning, could I see it all as it is today? No. But our product roadmap is actually still pretty well the same as it was then, and we’re still building that out. The actual detail and how it would look and feel, we probably couldn’t see, but in terms of the overall value proposition, I had a fair sense of that from the beginning.
What’s your process for making strategic decisions about new verticals or business directions?
I think about whether it accelerates our roadmap. Is it going to help us get there quicker or is it a distraction? Being very focused around the outcome and what we’re going after. Intuition plays a big part. You got to say no to many, many good things so that you can say yes to the few great things. As you get further along, more good things get thrown your way, so the discipline and the focus required has to increase. I think about how far ahead does this take us. Your customer will tell you what’s wrong with your current product, but they won’t tell you the next product you should make. You have to be listening to customers and augment that with a different way of thinking about what the future looks like.
Can you share any big scale decisions that made a material negative impact?
There’d be lots of little ones, I don’t know about too many big ones that we got wrong. Prior to the checklist being released, I tried a bunch of stuff that didn’t work. I built a training platform that didn’t take off. I built a document management portal for companies to manage all their documents, and that didn’t go anywhere. There’s a litany of things that didn’t work. Now as the teams have grown, there are things we’ve built that probably haven’t got the traction that you would have hoped, and we come back and revisit them. We tried to build our own training platform the second time around and spent two years on that with a team, then ended up acquiring EdApp which became our training product.
How have you managed to stay ahead of the curve personally as the business scaled?
Sometimes I’m falling behind and playing catch up. Scott Farquhar said to me in the beginning that the hardest part of this whole thing will be for you to grow personally at the rate of the opportunity, and I can vouch for that being true. There are practical things I’ve had to learn how to do, but emotionally, being able to deal with the pressure, the expectation, the setbacks – all that takes its toll. There are skills like being able to switch context from one meeting to the other. In one moment you might be with a staff member that’s just had their parents die, then you go into another meeting with an investor, then another with a customer. You need to be able to be fully present and not carry the last one into the next one.
How do you support your team to do their best work?
Supporting people is about unlocking their own potential. Most people don’t realize what they’re capable of until they’re challenged in a really positive way. I’ll give you an example with Tom who works with me. He came from banking in New York, was a lawyer before that. He wanted to run our Global IoT business and gave a 20-minute pitch that wasn’t quite together. I drew seven columns on a whiteboard – strategy, vision, leadership, ability to confront difficult things, work ethic, EQ, IQ – and asked him to rate himself out of 10. He gave himself a nine for work ethic but a five on strategy. I offered him a 90-day challenge to sell $100,000 worth of our fridge sensors himself. He was stressed, but he got personally involved in every aspect, installed 200 sensors, and sold $340,000 worth in 10 weeks. Today he runs our IoT business with a completely different mindset and strategy.
What parallels do you notice between successful entrepreneurs?
I don’t think there are that many parallels because they’re all so different. Look at Mel at Canva or Katherine at Brighte or Fred Schebesta, these people are all very different, yet they share some common traits. They’ve dreamed big, they’ve taken steps to go after the dream, and they haven’t stopped when they’ve hit setbacks. I saw some research where founders’ backgrounds were looked at, and a lot of them had disrupted childhoods and upbringings – different schools, different countries, immigrants. They just got used to change. It wasn’t the Ivy League college graduates that were the most common pedigree; it was people who had really challenging upbringings and learned how to overcome adversity.
How do you create long tenure among team members?
Customer centricity has to be the key to what you do. If people are here every day thinking about the customers, they stay engaged. I push everyone in the company to visit customers. I took an engineer out to see a fire department recently, and when he suggested RFID would be helpful, I told him to build it. If you can get smart people in front of the problem and they understand it, particularly if it has a human impact, they feel they want to do something about this. We also bring in customers like Caleb Holloway who was on the Deepwater Horizon rig that caught fire in 2010. He was the only person who survived in the drill shack where 11 people died. People will remember that forever. It connects them to why this matters.
What are your thoughts on AI and how it’s evolving?
AI is not a new thing. There’s been forms of artificial intelligence for decades. The new take on it with language models is changing things faster than ever. In our business, we allow people to create an inspection checklist using AI. They can say I’m a restaurant in New York City and I want a daily opening checklist with sidewalk dining, and it’ll look at all local regulations. We have 3.5 petabytes of data, 2.5 billion images, and we’re starting to do more with that to help customers find relevant information. AI will continue to evolve. The automation of manual tasks is really what’s changing faster than ever. We need to become a robotics and AI business over the next decade. The jobs easiest to automate will be automated, freeing us up to solve problems we haven’t figured out yet.
What was your thinking behind creating such a special office space?
On each floor, there are themed meeting rooms around our customers’ businesses. People think we did that for our customers, but I did it for our teams to know who we’re doing this for every day. When someone joins a company, they may not have spent years in industry, so we need to remind them every day about why we’re here and who we’re doing it for. This building has been built around those experiences to connect people to the problem and create a multi-purpose space where people can socialize or be in fun meeting rooms. It comes back to emotionally connecting people to the why behind what you do.
What are you most proud of when you look back on the SafetyCulture journey?
I’ll give you two examples. One is when I got a photo from one of our staff members hugging their family and children. They said we’re hugging them because we just told them that Mom and Dad have paid off their house thanks to their equity in SafetyCulture. They’ll never owe the bank any money again. The other example is a phone call from a customer in Canada who said his wife and two adult disabled children had a really rough ride for two decades, but for the last five years, he’d been the SafetyCulture champion in his workplace. He said this was the first time in 20-plus years that he’d felt he had any purpose, and it was thanks to what we’d done. We hear about people winning Innovation Awards because they rolled out SafetyCulture – these are everyday people, frontline workers responsible for small teams. That’s really rewarding.
Luke Anear Business Stats
Luke Anear has grown SafetyCulture from a garage startup in Townsville to one of Australia’s 12 unicorn companies with remarkable scale and impact across global industries. The company’s growth trajectory demonstrates how focusing on customer needs and empowering frontline workers can lead to extraordinary business success without traditional sales teams.
- Serves 75,000 companies worldwide with zero external sales team
- Employs 750+ team members with 200 additional hires currently underway
- Handles 2.5 petabytes of data and 2.5 billion images
- Launched in 2012 and achieved unicorn status within 10 years
- Expanded from checklist app to full operations platform with insurance and product offerings
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Companies Served | 75,000+ |
| Team Size | 750+ |
| Current Hiring | 200 positions |
| Products in Marketplace | 70,000 (expanding to 1M) |
| Year Founded | 2012 |
Luke Anear Method
Luke’s approach to building SafetyCulture centers on customer obsession, empowering frontline workers, and creating step-change innovations rather than incremental improvements. His method combines strategic focus with practical execution and resilience in the face of failure.
- Focus on step-change innovations rather than incremental improvements
- Turn frontline customers into salespeople by solving their real problems
- Make decisions quickly – making a decision is more important than making the right decision
- Embrace failure as the greatest learning opportunity
- Connect employees directly to customer problems for deeper engagement
Luke Anear Tools
SafetyCulture leverages technology not just as a product but as a means to create meaningful impact in workplace safety and operations. The platform has evolved from a simple checklist app to a comprehensive operations ecosystem that serves diverse industries.
- SafetyCulture Platform – Core operations platform for checklists, inspections, and reporting
- AI-powered checklist creation – Generates customized inspection templates based on industry and location
- IoT sensors – Hardware solutions for monitoring workplace conditions like refrigeration
- Marketplace integration – Connects to 70,000 workplace products with one-click ordering
- Data analytics – Processes 3.5 petabytes of data to deliver actionable insights
Key Notes
Luke Anear’s journey with SafetyCulture offers valuable insights for entrepreneurs looking to build unicorn startups. His approach combines customer obsession, resilience, and strategic focus to create a business that solves real problems while empowering frontline workers globally.
- Constraints in childhood can drive innovation and entrepreneurial mindset
- Customer problems, not technology, should drive product development
- Saying no to good opportunities allows focus on great ones
- Frontline workers can become your most effective sales team
- Connecting employees to customer impact creates lasting engagement
- Failure provides more learning opportunities than success
Get Started in Just 5 Steps
Based on Luke Anear’s experience building SafetyCulture into a unicorn, here are five key steps entrepreneurs can take to build their own successful startup focused on solving real customer problems.
- Start with a deep understanding of customer problems – Luke’s background as a private investigator gave him unique insights into workplace safety issues
- Build one thing exceptionally well before expanding – SafetyCulture mastered the checklist app before becoming a full operations platform
- Empower frontline users to drive adoption – SafetyCulture grew through frontline workers championing the product, not traditional sales
- Embrace failure as learning – Luke tried multiple failed products before finding success with the checklist app
- Connect your team directly to customer impact – SafetyCulture’s office design and customer visits keep employees focused on why their work matters
Conclusion
Luke Anear’s journey with SafetyCulture demonstrates how focusing on solving real customer problems can lead to extraordinary business success. From a garage startup in Townsville to one of Australia’s 12 unicorns, SafetyCulture’s growth story emphasizes the importance of customer obsession, empowering frontline workers, and creating step-change innovations. For entrepreneurs looking to build their own unicorn startups, Luke’s approach offers a blueprint that combines strategic focus with practical execution and resilience in the face of failure.