Daniel Hopper started LinkedIn Local Hamilton around 2016 while he was working as a real estate agent at Harcourts, just starting to post content on LinkedIn when almost nobody else in Hamilton was doing it. His angle was simple: find articles about what was happening in the Waikato and share them. People started paying attention, he reached out to a few of them for coffees, and one day he put a form on his website asking who was keen for a LinkedIn networking event. Within a couple of days he had 150 email signups. The first event was in the Harcourts auction rooms, about 80 people, free food, no business cards, no selling. The second was at the old RICO showroom on Anglesea Street. By the time he got to the Wintec atrium it was 300 people.

He talks about what he was trying to build with those events — specifically not the kind of networking night where people work the room handing out cards for five seconds each. Plenty of food, enough drinks to take the edge off, interesting speakers who talked about something worth hearing rather than how well their business was doing. He did one at FMG Stadium before a Chiefs game with Dwayne Monley as a speaker. One at the Hamilton Gardens in the Egyptian Garden. He has been running it for eight or nine years now and the next one is February 25th at the Airbit showroom at The Base, with a media theme. Philip Quay from the Waikato Times and Ash Pramar from EP12 are both speaking.

Before all of that, Daniel got a master's degree in management at Waikato, and his thesis was on rock concerts — specifically why people keep spending serious money to see the same bands live when they could just stream it at home. He got a scholarship for it, did participant observation at a bunch of concerts, interviewed people, and ended up landing on two frameworks: hedonic wellbeing (the pure pleasure of being in a crowd going off) and eudaimonic wellbeing (the deeper sense of meaning and identity that comes from being around your people). He first saw Metallica at the 2004 Big Day Out after losing all his mates because nobody had phone credit, sat down next to a Finnish guy who had never seen them, and they watched the whole set together. He has seen them four times since.

The backstory is worth hearing too. Born in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains to Kiwi parents, moved to New Zealand at three or four, grew up in Tikitiki, Cambridge, Hamilton, and Whanganui. Two primary schools, two intermediates, three high schools. His dad was a Presbyterian pastor. He dropped out with three months of high school left, spent a year working in a leather factory in Whanganui, found out his girlfriend was pregnant the day after that same Metallica Big Day Out, became a solo dad at 18, then went back to study at Wintec. There was a brief stint running an ice cream stand at The Base (opened in summer, discovered in winter that nobody wants premium ice cream in the rain) before he got into real estate.

He is now in a business development role at KP Group, which does industrial cleaning and line marking: car park sweeping, warehouse scrubs, the kind of work that needs doing but nobody thinks about until the floor is thirty years of grime thick.

Listen to the full episode on all major platforms

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6awtF3va9tg

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72KnBcFkM1r3xm2YyVujJR

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shedlifenz-podcast/id1857464528

iHeart Radio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-shedlife-nz-308999038/